Disastrous Communication Gaps

Just back from a few days in Jamaica with Caribbean media colleagues, disaster response agencies, and associated institutions discussing relationships to be forged and/or strengthened as our region addresses a multiplicity of hazards and threats of both human and natural origins.

This was particularly significant in the face of the “Tobago oil spill” story and the extent to which the flow of information on the subject has been open to speculation, conspiracy theories, and mischief of various, cynical varieties.

The ease with which elaborate, obviously malicious narratives based on the slenderest threads of proof dominated the public space is instructive. Among other things, though, it points to signal failures along the information spectrum – both official and informal. In such an environment, innocent misinformation transitions easily to serious disinformation.

It is not advisable to regurgitate unverifiable or maliciously seeded speculation, and I won’t do so here, but people have appeared overly willing to assume the very worst even in the absence of basic truths.

So, back to the hybrid event in Jamaica, which followed a similar programme two weeks before, also coordinated by the Media Institute of the Caribbean (MIC).

There have been efforts by the Caribbean Broadcasting Union (CBU) – a partner in the Jamaican workshop – and the Association of Caribbean Media Workers (ACM) on this matter over the years.

In fact, in 2018 when the ACM convened its Biennial Congress in Barbados, it was tied to the hosting of an intense examination of ways media professionals and communicators could have improved their coverage of a variety of crises, emergencies, and threats – not the least being hazards associated with extreme weather events, earthquakes and volcanic eruptions.

But what was different about the Jamaica workshop was its deeper elaboration of the multi-faceted nature of these challenges when placed alongside numerous chronic socio-cultural-political phenomena.

I paid particularly close attention to the illustrious Haitian/Canadian journalist, Nancy Roc, who spent considerable time identifying some key issues that affected proactive measures and responses to Haiti’s tragic earthquake of 2010 which claimed over 200,000 lives.

There are key social, political, and historical antecedents that are not common to our experience in the English-speaking Caribbean, but our more durable systems of governance and the survivability of our countries are not entirely immunised by such key differences. There are basic principles of disaster response and recovery to which the Haitian experience should have alerted us in 2010 and following.

For one, stakeholder recognition needs to be more deeply entrenched. This is expressed, in some instances, in the degree to which local authorities, communities, and civil society organisations, including media, have roles in response and recovery processes.

This does not require the elimination of creative tensions between the state and institutions such as the media and should not signal the end of journalistic scepticism and rigorous reporting.

Both journalists and emergency response agencies at the MIC event were however clear on stronger lines of communication based on trust, and on the basis of a clearer understanding of our respective mandates and roles.

This is too often not the case. In 2018, for instance, the ACM had proposed the elevation of journalists somewhere near the status of “first responders” - assisted at times of crisis by official agencies with reach and access to the epicenter of emergency events. This was with specific reference to regional journalists assigned to cover Caribbean crises. Sadly, nothing happened.

At that time, we had only recently been through Category 5 hurricanes Irma and Maria in 2017 which caused death and major destruction in several Caribbean countries under the watch of the Caribbean Disaster Emergency Management Agency (CDEMA).

The point in all this is that in every instance – whether we speak about successive hurricane seasons, volcanic eruptions (as with St Vincent in 2021), earthquakes, and other hazards (such as the Tobago episode) there is a need for more intense, honest, and timely information sharing.

In countries such as ours that place so little emphasis on the discipline of crisis communication, we have witnessed how things go terribly wrong within a short space of time.

Journalists are a major, but not exclusive, group of stakeholders to address such a shortcoming. Sadly, too few expert analyses of what happened in our territorial waters three weeks ago have addressed this deficiency. But it remains an important and urgent issue, the relevance of which is surely to unfold as the seasons change over the coming months.