A television correspondent, still wearing a radiation detection badge on his lapel, had important news to convey to a worried woman in the United States. “This is Bill Weir with ABC News. I’m actually in northern Japan right now, and I just saw your sister Elsa and she’s O.K., and she wanted you to know that, and that she loves you.”

Ann Curry of NBC News was filmed anxiously showing quake survivors a picture of a missing American teacher, Canon Purdy. Later, Ms. Curry hit gold. “I found your sister,” she announced over a satellite phone in front of the rescue center where the teacher had sought refuge. “Here she is.” As she handed the phone to Ms. Purdy, the screen split between the teacher crying into the telephone and her equally weepy and joyful relatives who were being recorded by a camera crew in San Francisco.

Reunions orchestrated by correspondents have become a staple of disaster coverage, but it’s particularly noticeable in the television reporting now, at a time when the crisis in Japan is so acute and so many other trouble zones are competing for air time. Amid all those horrifying images from Japan of death and destruction and the ominous threat of a nuclear reactor meltdown, viewers hunger for a glimpse of hope and miraculous rescue. And networks and cable news channels are staging their own productions — corralling the families back in the United States, timing phone calls and framing the moments for maximum emotional impact. On “CBS Evening News” on Tuesday, the correspondent Lucy Craft was shown hugging her 17-year-old son, a boarding-school student in Sendai who had been out of touch for two days.

So far, most of the television coverage of the tsunami has been intense, thorough and far-reaching, with correspondents reporting around the clock from the worst-stricken areas. These reunion tableaus are touching and also a little troubling — another example of how entertainment values bleed into news coverage.