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Posted by Kate Butler Nov 22, 2006 |
On Thursday, the largest urban advisory ever made in Canada told Greater Vancouver residents to boil all tap water that they would be using for ingestion, cleaning, or any type of use. Health and water officials told nearly 2 million people that the water they believed to be so safe was potentially contaminated. As of Wednesday morning, there were no reports of illness. How did an entire city learn about the water issue so quickly that no one got sick? The mass media spread the word of the possibly contaminated water so quickly that most people were very aware of the issue hours after the advisory was made.
In the developed world, one of the great responsibilities of the media is to let individuals know about potential problems, issues, and events as they are happening. When the brown-out happened in Ontario and parts of the U.S. in August of 2003, the first thing most people did was dig out their battery-powered radio to get news of what was happening. When looking at the tsunami in south-east Asia on Dec. 26, 2004, some pundits argue that lives could have been saved had more mass media outlets in the area been able to reach a greater number of people.
Whether the water in Vancouver was actually contaminated is still up for debate. Early samples show that some of the officials’ fears might not have been realized; however, the fact that the media was able to let residents know about this possible issue is very important. The pervasive element of the media so often gets criticized for encouraging a culture of consumerism, but this function of the media also allows natural or human-made disasters to be lessened due to the media’s extensive reach.