Haiti and Pakistan: why such different responses to natural disasters?

As our screens fill with pictures of flooding in Australia, we approach the grim anniversary of another natural disaster. January 12 will mark a year since the Haiti earthquake killed more than 200,000 people and left over a million homeless. Alerted by some cracking television reporting, the UK public opened their wallets and in a short time the Disasters Emergency Committee (DEC) raised £100 million for earthquake relief.

Six months later, the Pakistan floods affected many more and a much bigger area. Yet the DEC struggled to raise half that amount. Pakistan was also saturated in TV news coverage. Why the shortfall? What difference does journalism make in the unleashing (or not) of compassion?

Haiti was a dream story - about a nightmare. Already one of the poorest countries in the world, it was hit by a huge earthquake - the biggest there for two centuries. Lives, homes and families were destroyed. The stories were literally out on the street for all to see. British TV news sent its brightest and best. Fortunately, Port au Prince is a short plane hop from Miami. 

They excelled. I have just reviewed much of the output of British television news on both Haiti and Pakistan. In Haiti, the story-finding was superb - the husband seeking and finding his wife in the rubble, then driving her away in their car; the sick old people whose hospital was now a street; the women forced to give birth as and when - and where. 

The story-telling was personal and close-up: real people in a very unreal situation and - usually - it was well-packaged and put together. Some of the stories had a 'happy' ending; most did not. 

The big names were sent: Snow, Neely, Crawford, Ramsay, Guerin, Irvine - and more. They by and large delivered, and they were rewarded with a huge public outpouring of sympathy and money for Haiti through the DEC.

Pakistan turned into a nightmare story about a nightmare. The floods, which started in late July, went on for more than a month. Thousands were killed, many left stranded - literally - on an island in the sea of floods that covered their country. Seventeen million acres of arable land was under water. The misery seemed endless. The Pakistan government, by design or accident, was hapless. 

British TV news coverage was again blanket. Some of the same correspondents who had covered Haiti - Stuart Ramsay and Orla Guerin - were back on home territory. But the product and the resulting compassion was very different. 

Much of the reporting was, by necessity, not on the ground but from the air - courtesy of the Pakistan army and other rescue forces. It literally looked down on the victims. It rarely got up close and told their tales of woe. Some of this may have been time constraints in and out of helicopters; some the result ofa much more closed and patriarchal society than Haiti. 

Good stories of individuals were not followed up. Reporters also tried to contextualise, and maybe a bit too much. The President of Pakistan, Asif Ali Zardari, was seemingly making whoopee in Europe whilst his people went under. 

That became a trope of the flood story. As did the ongoing AfPak War and its relationship to the floods. Journos strained to show how the previously Taliban-controlled Swat valley would be affected by the floods. They usually failed.

The result was that the doors of Western compassion did not open up to the Pakistani flood victims. Western agencies were having to use crowbars to open up wallets. There were no PakAid singles and few school concerts and collections. The Pakistan Flood appeal may have failed for any number of reasons: racism; the 'image deficit' of Pakistan in the rest of the world, including Western fears of Pakistan and Afghan jihadists; 'compassion fatigue' after Haiti.

But could one of the most cogent reasons have been simply that the television reporting was not as good - not as direct and personal as it had been in Haiti? It was 'out there' rather than 'in here' - in the heart - for many viewers. Do reporters and cracking journalism make a difference to perceptions of a natural disaster, and to the public response?

The 2010 Haiti and Pakistan stories and the arithmetic of compassion would seem to show that.

John Mair is a senior lecturer in broadcasting at Coventry University. He invented and runs the Coventry Conversations. He was a producer at the BBC, ITV and Channel 4, and is an RTS Journalism Award winner.