Anyone who has spent much time watching hurricanes knows that the only predictable thing about the storms is how unpredictable they'll be. Witness
Ernesto and his meandering path, threatening a
U.S. landfall first at
New Orleans, then
Tampa, then somewhere in the
Florida Keys.
But Hurricane Katrina dredged up some perennial problems with covering disasters, things that journalists can now predict and ought to remember the next time.
They are lessons rooted in accuracy and precision; some are touched by race and class. All are likely to present themselves again the next time a disaster strikes. If journalists can learn those lessons now, we'll see fewer of the mea culpa pieces that have become part of the typical post-disaster cleanup. There are probably millions of lessons to be learned from Katrina. Here are five.
Lesson One:
QUESTION EVERYTHING.
The mayor of New Orleans said more than 10,000 people were dead. The police chief said he saw muzzle flashes in the chaotic Superdome. A National Guardsman said there were dozens of bodies stacked up in the Convention Center. People were telling reporters -- and reporters were telling the world -- that any manner of mayhem was unfolding in the drowned city in the days before federal help finally arrived to relieve the misery.
Hardly any of it, of course, was true. It became the biggest reporting lesson to emerge from Katrina. Robbed of any semblance of institutional backup and left at the mercy of once-reliable officials and the larger public -- all equally scared, stressed and desperate -- journalists got some things profoundly wrong. Aaron Kinney of Salon.com wrote that the city was "hit with a perfect storm of conditions in which fear, despair and wild rumors, like a contagious disease, can thrive."
That perfect storm isn't unique to New Orleans or the Gulf Coast. Four years earlier, the mayor of New York told audiences that some 5,000 people had died in the ruins of the World Trade Center, when in fact, the number was fewer than 3,000. And in January, the governor of West Virginia got it wrong when he told the media that 12 men had survived in the Sago mine disaster. What journalists can learn is that, in times of crisis, every fact not witnessed first-hand is suspect.
When circumstances make independent verification hard or impossible, one question, asked on behalf of the public, can help us all sort out fact from embellishment. The question: How do you know that? Ask it of the president or the police chief or the parish priest. Ask it of yourself. Then tell the public the answer and let the people decide what to believe.
Lesson Two:
REMEMBER THOSE YOU'VE FORGOTTEN.
Whenever a catastrophe strikes and brings with it massive media coverage, you can predict that the first wave of stories will be followed by the tales of the forgotten, the overlooked, the unseen. It's often poor communities; often communities of color. It's a story often of the media's making; an angle born of journalistic oversight, ignorance and neglect.
Katrina proved predictable in the forgetting, if not always in the forgotten.
People all along the Mississippi Gulf felt -- nay, feel -- overlooked and overshadowed by the story unfolding in New Orleans. The people who lived in Louisiana's lower Plaquemines Parish, which was obliterated by Katrina before she got to Mississippi or blew the levee in the Lower Ninth Ward, were hardly mentioned by the national media in the first week of storm coverage.
Also missing: the Vietnamese residents of Eastern New Orleans, many with ties to the ravaged fishing towns of Buras, Venice and Port Sulphur. Also, the city's Central American population, some of whom would see the slight compounded in October 2005 when U.S. journalists barely covered Hurricane Stan's devastation of Guatemala and eastern Mexico. Statistically, New Orleans' pre-Katrina demographic profile was largely black and white. But there were other stories to be told on Aug. 29.
Who in your city, state, or region is least likely to get the media’s attention in a crisis? Remember them now so you won’t forget them when it counts.
Lesson Three:
WORDS MATTER.
Refugee or evacuee? Words make a difference. As too often happens in battles over language in our national discourse, particularly when race is at the center, one side -- the media, in this case -- answers the other side's complaints by flinging dictionaries at them, a strategy Chicago Tribune columnist/blogger Eric Zorn found inadequate in his own search for the right word.
In an objective world -- that is to say, in a make-believe world -- one can argue that the word refugee is a dispassionate way of describing the status of those forced to flee their homes and seek shelter somewhere else. Read down to the last definition of refugee in the dictionary and you might find a way to justify that choice.
Why, then, did the word twist so many journalists into knots? The universal lesson here is that meanings morph depending upon who's speaking, who's listening and what context surrounds the words. Many black New Orleanians, ever worried that their country hasn't shaken its racist roots, ever-suspicious of the white-dominated media's motives where black people are concerned, aware that Americans typically reserve the word refugee for foreigners, heard themselves referred to that way at precisely the moment they most felt abandoned by their homeland. Thus, refugee morphs into slur.
Journalists sometimes forget that the goal here is communication. If the people think you mean one thing when you mean another, it doesn't matter what Merriam-Webster's says; you've failed at that most fundamental mission.
Our need to group and label will rise again with the next disaster. Whether it's the poorest white people in Pass Christian, Miss.; the racial rainbow of humanity residing in fields of white FEMA trailers from Punta Gorda, Fla. to Gulfport, Miss.; or some yet-undefined class of victim, remember that what you call them will be defined not just by what you mean, but by what they think you mean. Choose thoughtfully.
Lesson Four:
PUT RACE IN ITS PLACE.
Just because most of the people affected by a disaster are black does not mean that their race is part of the story.
It's a simple notion that bears speaking. Depending upon the day, there might have been a place in much of the Katrina coverage to explore the full spectrum of suspicion, animosity, doubt, fear and horrible history that inform and undermine race relations in America.
But many more stories were just about people and communities. Before adding the race of a source or a community to a story, be sure you know why you're doing it and be sure your reason is clear to the reader, listener or viewer. When we casually toss in "this predominantly black city" or "poor black people in the Lower Ninth Ward," phrases common in coverage of New Orleans, the implication is that racial tension (racism?) is an element of the story.
Explore that angle and the reference is justified. Drop it in without explanation, and it falsely frames the story in racial terms, implying things it never proves, opening the door for wildly divergent interpretations by the public. Imagine, for contrast, dropping in the casual phrase "this predominantly white city" or "poor white people of Biloxi" every time you reference that city. Race sticks out like a headlight in a tunnel, doesn't it?
Use race where it matters. Be explicit and transparent when explaining its relevance. That's solid journalism, even when there's no flood.
Lesson Five:
JOURNALISM CAN RISE HIGHER THAN WATER.
You've held the powerful accountable. You've given voice to the voiceless. You've waded and climbed and crawled into places the rest of us couldn't go to bring back stories no one else could tell. Don't forget the courage, selflessness, heroism, passion, perseverence, creativity and resourcefulness under fire.
Don't forget how it felt -- nay, feels -- to be driven toward excellence by outrage, indignation, love, humanity and the unblinking clarity that every word, every phrase, every image, every second can change -- even save -- a life.
Journalism's perpetual, often unforgiving post-mortems border sometimes on self-mutilation, even cannibalism. It is a useful exercise to look back and figure out what went wrong and why. That is how you get better.
It is at least as important (and in this era of media-bashing-as-sport, maybe more important) to retell the stories of journalism's finest hours. That is how you keep going. Let those tales of endurance and bravery be the inspiration that carries you through the more mundane days. Let them be the fount of strength that gets you out of bed when just doing your job hurts.
Tell and retell those stories of how journalism rediscovered its soul during Katrina so that the best of who we can be outlives the next anniversary and transcends the next disaster.
