Media Struggle to Convey a Disaster

Amid banner headlines and hours of television coverage, reporters and anchors struggled to convey the enormousness of the devastation in Haiti on Thursday, as the world's news media directed their collective attention to the crippled country.

By Wednesday evening, about 24 hours after an earthquake estimated at a magnitude of 7.0, two of the nation's three network evening news anchors were live on television, albeit barely, in Port-au-Prince. Reporters and photographers for major newspapers had also reached the city. By Thursday, larger contingents of reporters had arrived. "Outside of a military conflict, this is the biggest international deployment since the tsunami" in 2004, said Tony Maddox, the managing director of CNN International.

In some cases, reporters and anchors were arriving well ahead of international relief organizations. In other cases, they were hitching rides with them.