LONDON (AlertNet) - The timing, scale and location of the tsunami crisis made this emergency of possibly unique media appeal. It filled the Christmas news void and caught the public and news executives at their most charitable.

Its focus -- a tidal wave of epic proportions -- and its location -- not some unfamiliar African state but the beaches of south-eastern Asia known to millions of holiday-makers – helped catch the public imagination.

But there’s a further factor that marks this crisis out as unique, and one that is particularly crucial to the quality of coverage – the slow-motion manner in which the sheer scale of its destructiveness was unveiled.

This was in marked contrast to most other rapid onset disasters in which initial estimates of the number of victims regularly prove far too high and interest in the story tails off with the death toll.

In adding momentum to an already appalling story, this factor created the time and energy to do something unparalleled in natural disaster reporting.

Sheer resources allowed the press to escape a tendency towards superficial coverage of such crises.

Right from the start British media played a key role in highlighting the bafflingly small sums initially committed by western governments – typical for sudden onset emergencies but rarely questioned.

CRITICAL APPROACH

And no one was spared from this more critical approach. Even the Disasters Emergency Committee, an umbrella group that channels funding from the British public to the top dozen charities and which emerged as the pre-eminent vehicle for British donations, was criticised for its slow response in setting up a public appeal.

The media reporting of the contrast between apparent official stinginess and an unprecedented wave of public donations in part explains the drastic increases in pledges by official donors.

All of which meant that, unlike the previous Boxing Day’s Iranian earthquake, in which media interest was waning by the turn of the year, this time journalists have had the time to think harder about what they write and to go beyond the clichés of humanitarian crisis reporting.

Aid workers tell me it’s the best reporting of an emergency they’ve ever seen.

The traditional traps into which journalists summoned to cover unfamiliar situations in faraway countries have been, for the most part, avoided.

An initial obsession with the death toll yielded reasonably quickly to an assessment of how many people had been displaced and, in the second week of the crisis, to the threat to families’ livelihoods.

BEYOND THE DEATH TOLL

There’s been much discussion of the challenge of reconstruction: a subject that rarely gets coverage before interest in most natural disasters has been lost.

And journalists have also largely sidestepped the tendency to focus on home-country nationals caught up in a foreign crisis rather than on the local population has, particularly after the first week of the disaster.

Even the traditional phase in which the aid world comes under fire for not delivering faster, has been treated with more balance. For every righteously indignant correspondent who got to a trouble spot before the food parcels, there was another’s account of the logistical nightmares involved in aid flows.

The secondary wave of public donations added momentum to the coverage triggering an unheralded questioning of how aid delivery really works and why it takes so long to get to affected populations.

Particularly notable was Andrew Gilligan’s honest account in the Evening Standard of how shocked he was to realise that the majority of aid doesn’t arrive via huge military cargo planes on flights from western nations, as he’d thought from previous coverage of crises, but is actually bought from local suppliers using the charity’s credit card.

What was equally impressive was a critical approach to reporting what have previously seemed humanitarian crisis myths.

British journalists questioned the need for rapid, undignified mass burials on disease-prevention grounds. Several cited little-aired U.N. World Health Organisation guidelines stressing that corpses pose minimal health risks and that the bigger threat is to the psychological well-being of relatives unable to identify their loved ones.

CASH NOT CLOTHING

And, as an unprecedented wave of private donation took hold, there was an unsentimental willingness to pass on calls from affected countries that what they needed was money rather than well-intentioned donations of culturally inappropriate clothing or food.

Similarly clear-headed has been the reporting of warnings by officials from affected countries and western nations that families hoping to help out by adopting orphaned children should be patient -- it will be weeks if not months before many children know whether they have lost their parents or not.

Even then, foreign adoption may not be appropriate.

With the luxury of time and resources, a sense of history in the making, and the oxygen of sustained public interest in their lungs, journalists dug much deeper than is traditional in humanitarian crisis reporting.

The hope now is that the more open, questioning approach will in future crises lead to less of the clichéd reporting which creates friction between the aid world and the media.

A version of this story first appeared in the "Press Gazette"