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let me begin with a confession. after watching television coverage of katrina for nearly every wakeful moment over the first few dramatic days, i quit. cold turkey. tv news had morphed into a mutant reality show: “survivor” gone berserk. even the weather channel seemed to be anchored by chicken little. so i turned it off. an odd reaction, i know, for someone who spent nearly 40 years as a reporter and visited his share of catastrophes. but i was suffering sensory overload and found my spirits in free fall, because my home is in new orleans.
long ago, i had given up on radio, the happy medium of my childhood, as a news source. with the exception of national public radio, the airwaves seem to have been taken over by talk shows promulgating nonsense, rumors and invective or music stations carrying the sameness of clear channel play lists. i’m not adept at the internet, the latest means to obtain information—as well as all sorts of misinformation. i am—another admission—wedded to print journalism. so i began to rely entirely on newspapers as i followed events from oxford, mississippi, where i teach and have a second home. and as the disaster played out for weeks, i felt satisfied i was getting a clearer and more detailed picture from the written words than from the frantic scenes on tv.
television had the advantage of immediacy and the ability to transmit visual images. but so much of what i saw and heard in those early days was unfiltered, not always factual, and too often failed to provide any context.
while brian williams of nbc news provided strong first-hand reporting from the superdome within hours after the storm hit, others relied on hearsay and repeated it in apocalyptic voices. i heard one correspondent reporting “from the heart of the french quarter,” yet saw in the background that he was actually speaking from a part of the city we know as the cbd (central business district).
not everyone was as careful as jeanne meserve of cnn. during a live telecast, she was asked by her anchor to describe conditions in one neighborhood. she simply said she did not know, that she had not yet been able to reach that part of the city. others seemed reluctant to acknowledge that they did not know. instead, they spoke, in authoritative terms, of that which they knew little.
when the city began to flood, we were told that the waters were drowning “the lower ninth ward.” it begged the question: where is the ninth ward? new orleanians knew, but many of them were scrambling for their lives. those in the rest of the country were deep into crisis coverage before finally learning its location—after someone thought to cut through the clutter of graphics and crawls to display an old-fashioned device: a map.
another kvetch: television played repeated loops of video shot from helicopter fly-bys, grim sights of shattered buildings or families stranded on rooftops or frightened people wading through foul waters, without any explanation of where the pictures had been taken. some of the scenes, it turns out, were coming from the mississippi gulf coast. katrina’s devastation was terrible there, too. but that part of the story was given short shrift during the first days of coverage.
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