Saturday, September 3, 2005

Anger, eloquence mark TV coverage of hurricane Katrina's aftermath

By David Kronke / Los Angeles Daily News

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While watching hours upon hours of TV coverage of the tragedy left in Hurricane Katrina's wake, it was nearly impossible not to feel despair for those stranded anywhere in the Gulf Coast, where food, water, supplies and transportation to safe areas were distressingly slow in coming.

Unless, apparently, you were CNN's Larry King.

Kicking his program to Aaron Brown on Wednesday night, King said, "It don't get any better."

Brown, correcting both King's enthusiasm and grammar, responded, "Or, it doesn't get any worse." But worse it got as the week wore on, particularly in New Orleans, where chaos disintegrated into anarchy. At night, when it got too dangerous for reporters to venture into the streets, interviews with correspondents in New Orleans could frequently only be conducted by phone, a chilling reminder of just how disconnected from the rest of the country the city truly was.

And frustration was visible, even on the faces of the reporters covering the disaster.

Katrina's devastation proved vexingly resistant to the narratives that news organizations like to present during disasters, where misery is supplanted by a slow if certain return to something resembling normalcy. Not only did the situation continue to deteriorate, but also the bedlam was erupting in a major American city and affecting ordinary Americans, compounding the reporters' incredulity.

"This is not the America I grew up in," said CNN's David Mattingly on Thursday, at a point where such a statement was what passed for equanimity by a field journalist.

Fox News Channel's Shepard Smith, on an overpass near the Superdome, also voiced his irritation with rescue operations. Noting that he was surrounded by an estimated thousand or so refugees amassed in a fruitless search for instruction, food and water, as well as mentioning a nearby corpse, Smith pleaded with everyone he interviewed -- from local officials to a doctor in another state -- to intervene on behalf of those around him.

CNN's Anderson Cooper, clearly distressed by the death and suffering he had witnessed in Mississippi and exasperated with public officials, dressed down Louisiana Sen. Mary Landrieu in an extraordinary display on Thursday.

"Listening to politicians compliment each other -- cuts (refugees) the wrong way right now," Cooper scolded. "There was a body on the street being eaten by rats. Do you get the anger that is out here?"

He added that people should be "ashamed of what is happening in this country. No one seems to be taking responsibility."

MSNBC presented chilling footage of refugees stranded at New Orleans' Convention Center chanting, "Help! Help! Help!" They had been told to go there for assistance, only to discover no aid or officials forthcoming; two lifeless bodies lay outside the building and lawlessness reigned inside. The cameraman who shot the footage called the area "worse than a Third World country."

Their frustration was not unreasonable. Reporters, without armor or protection or helicopters, had managed to reach these areas the day after the hurricane, but government rescue workers were still slow in coming.

Still, as the week progressed, the news networks might have avoided some of their staff's more emotional outbursts by having field reporters stick to describing what they were seeing rather than giving them the added burden of anchoring coverage. Anchors probably should have remained in studios to oversee, evenhandedly, the wrenching reports, as Keith Olbermann did on MSNBC. The hours he hosted were understated and eloquent and came the closest to the resolute calm that the late ABC anchor Peter Jennings reliably brought to any catastrophe.

On Tuesday, Olbermann presented a staggering, 10-minute report from a local journalist familiar with the Mississippi coastline who, as he flew in a chopper over the wreckage, explained what the remnants of buildings had once been, as well as what simply had disappeared.

Other anchors left one missing Jennings' approach all the more. CNN's blustery Wolf Blitzer, coming out of one of the dozens of heartbreaking stories of survivors dealing with tragedy, tried to assume a sensitive tone. He insisted he hoped for the best for those suffering, as if there were anyone watching who wasn't. Jennings would have come out of such a report allowing that poignant silence he so brilliantly employed to speak volumes.

CNN's Brown, anchoring two prime-time hours nightly, was a mixed bag. His scripted stories were eloquent and comprehensive; his extemporaneous reporting and interviewing were simply maddening. Brown fretted over phrasing his thoughts like a dog circling endlessly to find a spot to leave its scent. When he said, "It's hard to get a handle on some of this," he simply stated the obvious as far as he was concerned.

One wondered if there was a hidden message to Brown when he interviewed a young refugee wearing a T-shirt reading "You Talk Too Much."

All of the networks began to question the Bush administration in ways they had not in the past. Thursday night on ABC's "Nightline," Ted Koppel grilled Michael Brown, director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, over why the federal government hadn't provided buses for evacuation before the storm hit and why the subsequent response had been so fatally slow. (The fact that that was perhaps the 10th interview Brown gave that day suggested one of the reasons, that he was spending more time appearing before cameras than drawing up rescue scenarios.)

On CNN's "The Situation Room," commentator Jack Cafferty snorted derisively when Blitzer announced on Tuesday that Bush was cutting his vacation short by a couple of days. On Thursday, Cafferty went even further, noting that Bush had returned to Washington in the spring to sign a bill reinstating Terry Schiavo's feeding tube but didn't approach Katrina with the same urgency. "It's all about what's important to you, isn't it," Cafferty said.

On Wednesday, Cafferty intimated that the slow response had something to do with the fact that most of those stranded in New Orleans were poor and black. (The city is 67 percent black, with 30 percent living beneath the poverty level.) "No one says the federal government is doing a good job," he said on Thursday. "It's a disgrace."

Even on the Fox News Channel, pundit Charles Krauthammer conceded that Bush should have returned to Washington at least a day sooner to head up rescue efforts. After he did so, anchor Brit Hume changed the subject.

MSNBC's Rita Crosby took even longer to get into position than rescue workers, lounging improbably in Aruba to report on Katrina's aftermath for most of the week until decamping to Houston on Thursday.

Fox's Bill O'Reilly demonstrated on Thursday that he, as he always says, is "looking out for you," suggesting that the oil companies reduce their profits -- not their prices -- by 20 percent during the fuel crisis the hurricane had exacerbated. He then provided a distressingly limited view of whom he considered "you," stating he fully expected New Orleans residents to behave just as badly as they have been.

Given the amount of time the cable news networks expended on the story, there were some glaring omissions in the reportage. The notion that no one could have foreseen such a scenario was allowed to linger until Thursday evening, when CNN's Brown presented a report acknowledging that in 2002, The New Orleans Times-Picayune ran a series of articles predicting the precise situation now playing out in the city.

CNN added that the Bush administration diverted millions of dollars to the Iraq war from a project to shore up the city's levee system, the failure of which resulted in the disaster. To be fair, even if the project had continued, there's no guarantee the tragedy could have been averted.

But the most glaring omissions came from the broadcast networks, who provided round-the-clock coverage of 9/11 but were missing-in-action in New Orleans, where the disaster has had far more immediate effects on a larger number of Americans. Not until Wednesday evening did ABC, NBC and CBS cut into their prime-time lineups of repeats and reality programs to focus on the story. The news specials were the most-watched programs of the night.

Early Friday, a predawn series of explosions rocked New Orleans' railroad yard. While attempting to describe the scene, a policeman still on the beat was asked by CNN's Carol Costello about his thoughts on the city. He simply, sadly said, "I think it's gone.