Media on Fires??

Great dialog and LOTS of great points. Some points/questions I want to throw out there, for both fire and media:

  1. What’s the story?
  2. Who’s the audience?
  3. Safety?
  4. Social Media and our immediacy culture

What’s the story?
Whose story and/or agenda is being told? This is where the PIO needs to really try and hook some of these people to help make sure that at least the facts from the fire industry’s perspective are being told. The freedom of the press allows the press to present whatever story they feel needs to be said. The job of the fire industry is to make sure the narration is factual, and educational to the public. Any journalist worth their salt should pay attention to that and include it in their story.

I personally saw a huge gap between what the public perceives, and what’s really happening at a fire. So I became an LG dept photographer 18 years ago to see if I could help bridge that gap. When I go in, my story is twofold; one educate the public of what firefighters do, the dangers and obstacles they are presented and how that might be mitigated before a fire happens, and that not all fire is bad. The other side is simply department documentation and records and firefighter moral where they can have and share pictures of what they do daily. I’m not media, and if I respond outside the dept I am a citizen. I still tell the same story though. Haven’t sold a single photograph or video in those 18 years.

Who’s the audience?
The big TV camera crews have their audience, the fire-trained photographers have theirs, and the stringers have theirs. Some audience only sees a 30 second clip at 604pm in their living room. Some audience are firefighters in the bunkhouse wishing they were on the line, or retired firefighters getting a smile watching some good ol’ fire smackdown. Some audience is the community in the path of the fire, concerned for themselves, family and friends. And finally some audience are evacuated residents staring at the 5" screen in their hand all day, in shock, wanting closure on that last unknown question “do I have a home or do I need to start over?”

Safety?
There’s the 6pm reporter on the side of the road in a yellow jacket, N95, and goggles. There’s the stringers that access from the fire lines with live narration showing firefighting tactics, most of which have great situational awareness and positive comms with the fire and PIOs, and there’s the stringers that have nomex and go into evacuated areas, often while it’s still extremely hazardous (trees and lines down, active fire), to either sell their shots that are better than the 6pm reporter, and/or to try and support that last audience I mentioned above, is my home/store/community still there? I know some of all three of those facets, and I know what training (or none) they have. I get the heebee jeebees when I pop into a live stream and realize their location, and that it’s still a very hot location with zero mitigated hazards, that they are from 200 miles away and now in a foreign area on very rural narrow roads they’ve never seen in the day, with little to no cell access, little to no comms, and just a talking GPS. A type 3 engine, if it needs to, can barrel through some debris, out snag a downed wire, etc. They are also tooled up to work a downed tree blocking egress, and have communication and accountability on their side, along with water and 100% toe to ear PPE. What happens when the fire wraps around or a tree/power pole blocks the press egress? Who knows they are there? Do they respect/listen to the professionals when they professionally say it’s a bad spot to be in, or do they let their press badge talk back? Are their vehicles up for the environment and do they pose a threat to firefighter egress. A lot of the norcal roads are nearly 1.5 lanes when you are in a type 3 that’s pretending it’s a type 1 (hehe). These people are often swimming upstream the engines (who are following fire front). What does a disabled vehicle do to a rural 1.5lane road? What does an engine do that needs to turn a 180 to tactically engage and save a home, and the only turnout for 4 miles has a stringer’s vehicle in it? Sometimes you can’t scream situational awareness loud enough.

Social Media
A lot of this started with social media, which itself survives solely on (and further fuels) the addictive nature of our brains to want info now, this very second. The agency PIOs were stuck behind bureaucracy and rules. The only official fire info was the 7am and 6pm media updates and bullet points. Here’s acreage, here’s percent contained, here’s the general area of the fire, thanks see you in 12 hours. Thankfully we have more and more PIOs realizing that social media is beating them to the narration and story and pushing agencies to adapt or die. Now we have departments and PIOs on twitter making posts shortly after dispatch, IMT’s making 3-4 live streams a day on social media, PIOs live streaming from a dash cam while skirting fire perimeter etc. Agencies know to get teams in ASAP for damage assessment and get the word out. Huge progress in bridging that gap. Hopefully that grows and starts replacing some of the demand for stringers to be in the hotter zones.

:man_shrugging: just things to think about, on all sides.

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Well done sir. That pretty much puts it all out there. Hopefully I have seen your work somewhere along the line. I certainly do not want to promote that all Media or Photographers are irresponsible or that we do not have a viable need to know. The pictures did give the rest of the world an idea of what happened here. Hopefully it will spur action in others to due what is necessary in the future . People like Ron Howard came to tell some of our stories to the rest of the world . We appreciated him for that and the others that tried to do the same.
The only point I can talk to with some authority is closure. The landscape here was so changed by the fire you could not tell where you were when you were standing there . The pictures in the media could have been any street and mostly just added to the confusion. The media experts said the water would be a toxic sludge and that the debris fields would make it impossible to live here for years. That every time the wind blew the toxic ash would be spread everywhere. None of which turned out to be true. Where the Calfire damage assessment maps told us if our house was here or gone it just added to the incredible stress of not knowing what your future held .And for those of us who still had a place it gave the criminal element a road map to our homes. I can promise you none of this gave us closure .Just added sorrow to the stress and confusion and ended all hope you were of the 1300 structures that survived
Closure comes slowly and is hard to achieve. No picture does that . We were among the first handful of people to try to come up here again . Without water or utilities we came back to force the issue of rebuilding town. We got together and decided to start a community dinner where we could all meet and share what we knew. Thanks to the Aaron Rodgers funded NVCF we were able to invite all residents living there or not to gather. We shared our plights , told our stories and knew that we were not alone. We have severed thousands dinner and a place to meet.2 years later it still happens every Thursday, tho now it is a drive thru thanks to covid. Closure comes from knowing answers and realizing you are not alone and have help. I have sat and listened to hundreds of people tell there story and shared their worries… No picture,article or utube video can do that
this is a tough topic to get a single view or answer for. So many angles to consider. Thank you for getting most of it out there in words. Perfectly said . I just very respectfully disagree on this one point.

I must expose my ignorance what is an LG dept?

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Local Government…IE City fire department

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Muchos gracias Sir

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LG… County or Special Fire District. Rural 1 horse town Fire Dept.

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I agree with everything you said, media confusion/clarity, closure and lack of it, community loss, no single view or answer to any of this, etc. A humbling reminder of just how human we humans are (or should be?) and how important it is to be one team.

I think when I said in a nutshell that knowing your house or business is there or not brings closure, a better statement would be, “just one more step to a resemblance of closure.” As you said, and what I’ve witnessed with family and friends, closure on something of this magnitude may never be complete.

For what its worth I’ve met with some of the stringers that popularized the narrated drive-throughs and have asked what pushed them down that route. A lot of it was born out of the 2017 Atlas/Tubbs fires and one was sort of local to that area and when covering the fires as a local photojournalist and trying out some fancy “new” thing called Facebook Live, locals realized he had the access, and kept asking him to check on addresses etc. It snowballed from there, and now is a huge national following on social media, with footage sold to national 3 letter news outlets on a nightly basis. Good? Bad? That’s why we’re on this thread I guess. But what also grew out of the devastation of the 2017 fires were the agency observations for the need of rapid damage assessment at a community-level. Thankfully technology and GIS were in parallel development and public mapping is happening faster each season.

One big picture I was trying to make in my earlier thread, regarding the 6pm news vs the live-stream stringers, is there is no room in the 6pm news for what the live-streamer is providing. Ironically, the 30 second video clip the 6pm news shows is probably from the live streamer zoomed in on a tree torching. The producers in the big cities who don’t know what trees are think that’s big. The audience will tune in to whatever satisfies their need of info. 6pm news clips? 90min live streams? or the 10min bursts of intensity from the fire line on Periscope and other social media.

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My only problem with the PIO’s and I have known several over the yrs and I know they have to sing the company song is, the story they paint is that without them the known world would have burned to the ground, They saved you all. They never mention that on the Carr and Camp fires, 58% of the responding equipment and personnel were from LG agencies. Big cities, Small cities, Small towns and Rural Departments. Once in a while it would be nice if they mentioned that. When the film at 11 shows only Calfire engines and the news media is only taken to areas where those engines are working it paints a picture that Calfire and only Calfire saved the day. Please don’t take this as a Calfire bashing statement. I have a ton of respect for Calfire. They employ the PIO’s on most incidents and they are promoting what they do. Most small Dept’s don’t have the funding to do that. So it seems we get left out of the picture. Once in a while it would be more accurate to mention the little guys that left their home, families and regular jobs to go out and try to help strangers. 58%… that # is per OES.

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It is amazing the changes in GIS mapping.What took weeks in the Camp Fire took 2 days in the north complex to start showing results. I will agree with your thoughts on closure.It did end this sort of limbo we were experiencing and pushed you on to the next stage .
today’s technology is much different than the lensactic compasses and topo maps we used. I can remember being stationed at the airport more than once waiting for the photos to arrive of the fire so we could take them to command as we dispatched to the next blaze. Cameras on towers and online mapping are something we would have dreamed of back in the day . The internet is good for that to be sure.
I do understand your bigger picture point. It does seem like the news uses the same pictures over and over. Just changes the story. Not sure at my advanced age I really think much of the unsocial network, I am far from technology challenged but I just think most of it is cra# . Most of what you see on Network news is just incomplete and seems to be matched to a agenda or a show on later that night… a lead in. Sort of disappointing given today’s abilities and technologies .

I was a volunteer before and after my years as a fire fighter. We are the forgotten ones. My son now is an engineer with a city dept and spends big parts of his summers chasing fires for the last 10 years . Never see them in the news shots. I think The PIO’s put a happy face on everything… I have learned that the word challenged means they have problems. All the folks who work unnoticed like dozer operators,water tenders operators, volunteers,mutual aid trucks are what make the operation successful and never get the accolades they deserve . As I was leaving Paradise I was amazed at where the trucks that were rushing in came from. Most were not Cal Fire but small depts all over California. thank goodness for them.

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Funny that you bring this topic up as a CAL FIRE issue. Actually most CAL FIRE PIO shops are a very good mix of CAL FIRE and LG PIO’s. Most fires I have been on over the past several years lean heavily to the LG side as CAL FIRE never have enough available PIO’s. I know that several are very good at recognizing other departments but on a large type 1 incident there is no way possible to mention every organization. Not to mention if it is a CAL FIRE incident management team and the PIO says he is part of that team, the media will almost always refer to CAL FIRE no different than they would with the USFS or a local agency in that situation. Heck, the media still cannot figure out that CAL FIRE is not the Forestry Service.

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Some wonderful comments on this thread. There may be hope for the internet after all.
My recent media outrage is a little different. I live where I can get two of the local
Medford, Oregon TV stations on an antenna. I never watch regular TV but the night that Talent and Phoenix burned I was watching the live coverage of the disaster a little after 1900. All of a sudden, in the midst of the biggest local news story of the last two centuries, with their community literally going up in flames, it was time to switch to ‘our regularly scheduled broadcasting’. I do not know what it says
about our society when Wheel of Fortune and Family Feud are more important
than disaster coverage. When I was done screaming at the TV I went back to the internet, which had it’s usual mix of quality and quantity coverage. The TV station I cannot get off the air had a live feed of the fire from the highest point in town all night on their website, pretty sure they didn’t do that on their regular TV.
It is funny, all throughout my time working for the USFS in California we always had what I call ‘CDF Media Envy’. It always seemed that no matter what the firestory, it was always gonna be a red truck that got in the picture. So LG folks are not alone. Not throwing shade.

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Not wanting to start a fight but go back and read some of the comments in this thread. Restricting media by Federal fire agencies is kinda what started this and why we should embrace the media instead of repelling them.
Do you think the media envy you mention is because the agncy in the spotlight is the one who spent the time with them and helped them get their story?

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Sorry. So much for hope for the internet. Fighting is the furthest thing from my mind. I was just speaking to the way I, a firefighter felt about it, not what started it. I almost put ‘well deserved’ as describing CDF’s winning the media.

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I am with you. Switched of the tube and live by the internet now…

USFS works farther away from town usually, Seems like we were always deep in the forest while CDF was in the foothills… CDF got the close stuff. :sunglasses:

There is hope for the internet… we are all here… this thread has been awesome to be a part of…even if we all do not agree we do it with style and class… rest of the world should take notice

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I do not think I meant to bring anything up as a cal fire issue. Just recognizing others are involved along the way that get forgotten. And the amazing number of departments that rushed to save Paradise. Something for which we will always be grateful is not an issue. No one cared who ran what that day… they just all came… from everywhere to help without reservation. Heroes all.
I have worked for both CDF and USFS back in the stone age so I get to poke fun at both . All years before much of anyone showed up to report on a fire at all Before management teams or PIO’s so I have little experience in how they are made up . I had to ask today what a LG was. What I hear on these pages from all sides is politics hamstring PIO’s from saying what they may want , truly think or believe . I guess you need to be so careful in these times of how much you say and to whom and when . Every little thing is scrutinized and interpreted . They are the standard bearer for everyone involved on most fires and have the need to act responsibly … I doubt I would have been any good at it… As a viewer of nightly updates you realize they are talking around points we bring up here. Not wanting to alarm the general public or cause Chaos I suppose… this is where I picked up on the use of the word Challenges… USFS nightly updates on the North complex did the same. I think on the North Complex fire I really liked the section commander that did the twice a day video updates. Jack Cagle… Just one guy in front of a map for a couple of minutes Easy for an old Firefighter to understand… Probably speaks more to my love of simple than anything. No intended reflection on PIO’s or Cal Fire…

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but they pass some to locals by contract

ABC News committed a number of big no no’s. Like taking a civilian past a road block and worse things.

Edit: no need to continue sharing that video.

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