Katrina: The Perfect Storm for Media Malpractice
Guest Column | By Larry Grooms | September 2, 2005
And then the water started to rise.
We are an impatient people. We get annoyed when the ATM machine doesn’t spit out $20 bills in under 20 seconds. We demand fast food, instant email replies, short lines and immediate solutions to all problems. And we get news delivered so hot, fast and fresh that it could be as toxic to our nation as the tainted meat in an undercooked hamburger. In the digitally-enabled rush to show and tell all there is, and then explain it all in nearly real time, we skip a vital but humanly slow need in the processing of news and information – serious thought and rational reflection. Hurricane Katrina was the perfect storm to lay bare the insidious and largely unintended consequences that can follow when the story races so far ahead of unfolding events that the storyteller becomes the story’s architect. The news media roller coaster started creakily on Friday when Katrina was thought to be a non-event; coasted through Saturday, and then took off like a rocket on Sunday as the storm bore down on New Orleans. Through Monday, the news media almost uniformly covered the hurricane in routine fashion, and seemed poised to downscale the story since the storm tracked eastward, apparently averting the previously expected direct hit on the Big Easy. And then the water started to rise. In the news frenzy that followed, we watched the world’s largest and best equipped news organizations conduct the greatest national disservice in history. Between Monday night and Thursday evening, news organizations – primarily of the electronic variety – turned a natural disaster into a divisive and politicized public referendum on whom to blame. Instead of helping to bring the nation together to support the victims of the hurricane scattered across 90,000 square miles of the Gulf Coast, the media used the plight of the victims to attack government at almost every level. With 20-20 hindsight and an attitude, the coverage served to reinforce the utterly unrealistic expectations so many of our fellow Americans have come to embrace. The notion that big federal and state government can solve all human problems with a sufficient application of taxpayer cash has been a major media mantra for decades. And between the calming of the winds and the rising of the waters, the media found its own perfect storm of national discontent. Oddly enough, the media missed one story completely: The media’s own failure to prepare for the hurricane and its aftermath – the same allegation with which it hammered government leaders and agencies. While reporters ran interview-after-interview with victims complaining of not having any direction or communication from government agencies, the reporters uniformly forget to mention that, ‘oh, yeah, that’s OUR job.’ In communities without electricity, television sets sat dark and silent. Local newspapers, even if they could be printed, could only be delivered by rowboat, and then read only by subscribers who happened to be on the rooftops. Internet? But that’s an electrical thing, isn’t it? Even commercial radio, typically the medium for emergency broadcasts, was largely off the air. If the government had information to convey to the people in the disaster area, the media basically couldn’t deliver. But that didn’t stop the carping and whining from the left flank of the Fourth Estate. It would seem that the media organizations themselves neglected disaster planning. Many news organizations, aware that you can’t very well cover a disaster locally if you lack the means to tell what you know, have very detailed disaster plans. But media managers might argue that this disaster was so unusual that no amount of planning could have helped. Please note that these would be the same folks who want to blame the state and federal governments for planning past imperfect. But somebody had to be the bad guy. Every story has to have a good guy and a bad guy, and many times liberally minded reporters are conflicted about which is which. The bad guys could have been the looters and the shooters. But the media has a problem trying to assign blame to evil, bloody-minded people who might also just happen to be poor. Easier to indict public officials and institutions with a bill of particulars citing woulda’s, coulda’s, shoulda’s and oughta’s that transcend human capacity and ignore the variables of nature. Interestingly in this event, the media did not much characterize Katrina as being “an act of God,” a phase common to casualty insurance documents. Perhaps the media was loath to mention God because they didn’t want to acknowledge his existence and influence in human affairs. There was likewise scant mention of flood insurance, a federally provided protection for financially responsible people who happen to live in a flood plain. As this is written, the story of Hurricane Katrina is still just 72 hours old. But we have endured a century’s worth of disconnected images and sound bites, drowning us in a miasma of emotional responses, without the human space for news consumers to process it all. Already the debate has been launched in the media as to the future of the City of New Orleans. The media has preordained that whatever happens will be the decision of really big government. How sad. New Orleans was not built by big government dictated to by news anchors with big hair. It was built, like every other American city, by hard-working people, courageous business owners and capitalists willing to invest in some dirt with the idea of making a profit and reinvesting that in something even better. Ronald Reagan’s shining city on the hill was constructed from the bottom upward, not from the top down. New Orleans will rise again…whether the media guys like it or not.
Larry Grooms is a retired newspaper editor with 33 years of experience in local and regional dailies.
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