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This article examines the impact of TV disaster coverage on viewers' temporal perception and sense of reality, through the lens of Dany Laferrière's Tout bouge autour de moi (2011) and Ryoko Sekiguchi's Ce n'est pas un hasard: Chronique japonaise (2011). The first book, written in the form of a journal, covers the devastating magnitude 7.0 earthquake that struck Haiti on January 12, 2010, and its aftermath. The second book, also written as a journal, deals with the triple disaster—earthquake, tsunami, nuclear meltdown (Fukushima)—that occurred in Japan on March 11, 2011. Both authors suggest that the media, and images, more broadly, play a crucial role in fashioning viewers' perceptions of disaster by constructing an artificial reality that draws on the real, yet at the same time imposes its own temporality, chronological sequence, and logic. In addition, Laferrière's and Sekiguchi's reflections on the circulation and constant replay of images of disaster raise ethical questions about the media's appropriation and commodification of suffering, the traumatic impact of images of atrocity, as well as our widespread addiction to watching disasters unfold in real time on television. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article describes the television coverage of the 2004 presidential campaign in the U.S. One indication that the volume of coverage would hit a new high was the crowd on the campaign trail. In addition to the networks, cable channels and local stations covering candidate appearances, other television outlets tagged along from time to time, taking their own cut at the story. Hence, the size of the media pack ultimately had an effect on the coverage. As the saying goes, an experiment watched is an experiment changed.