News Orgs Reflect on Lessons from Katrina

Five years on, the media's ability to beat rescue operations to disaster zones has only grown

By Marisa Guthrie -- Broadcasting & Cable, 8/26/2010 2:44:48 PM

News organizations are returning to New Orleans for a progress report on a city that was forsaken by government officials five years ago this week when Hurricane Katrina floodwaters ravaged the city. While the devastation from the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico is still very palpable, the fifth anniversary of Katrina offers a picture of recovery and hope.
"New Orleanians will very proudly tell you that as of today there are 1,111 restaurants in the city and there were just over 800 pre-Katrina," says NBC's Brian Williams, who arrived in New Orleans Wednesday (Aug. 25). He'll anchor Nightly News from the region including an on-location interview with President Obama on Sunday's broadcast.

"The city has come back in different ways," he adds. "And there's real optimism."

CNN's Anderson Cooper, who all told spent about two months in the region covering the BP oil spill, will anchor Anderson Cooper 360 from New Orleans through Friday. He'll have a report on the city's resurgent education system that now includes a burgeoning network of charter schools.

"They're finally starting to see changes in a way that you weren't able to see before," says Cooper.  The five year mark, he adds, is "an opportunity for the city to highlight some of the changes that have been taking place over the course of several years. It's certainly a milestone for the city."

Katrina is also a grim milestone for reporters who channeled the desperation of the city's residents for a horrified viewing audience. If those early reports had the tinge of advocacy journalism, it was only because the circumstances in an American city in the 21^st Century were so appallingly shocking.  

"Many of us covering [Katrina] had covered some piece of the Iraq war," says Williams. "Some of us had just returned from [tsunami ravaged] Banda Aceh, Indonesia. I think it just turned us into witnesses. And it might have sounded like advocacy because of the passion in our voices, but we were seeing Americans dead and dying in the streets of this spectacular city. We were reporting what we saw and, where the government response was concerned, what we didn't see."

Technology has altered newsgathering in many ways. And the media's ability to beam live pictures from disaster zones so quickly after impact has at times made it a more robust watch dog. The earthquake in Haiti is only the latest example of the nimbleness of digital news operations.

"It puts you in a place where you're able to see very clearly what previously had just been described to you by politicians or by people who were running [recovery] operations," says Cooper. In the days after Katrina made landfall, he adds, "There was a very clear difference between and the way things were being described by politicians who I would have on my air talking about the relief operation and the way I and other people were seeing it every single day all around us. I think technology is allowing us to be in those situations more and more."