The more we find out about what happened during Katrina and its immediate aftermath, the less the journalism of the moment holds up. Rapes, murders, chaos – not so much. People helping people, more than we ever heard about, or will hear about. You’d have been better informed to have just read these four words — storm, flooding, mass evacuation — than all the miles of column inches of rumor passed off as fact in the newspapers, and days of non-stop fear mongering on the TV.
I remember back in the floods of ’93 the same talk about how the floodwaters are toxic as we heard about Katrina. I also remember how a few days after the levees broke in New Orleans, a reporter interviewed a Doctor and the reporter was so disapointed when the Doctor pretty much downplayed the toxic angle of the floodwater, and how the danger was limited pretty much to minor skin infections from direct contact because of the extra sewage in the water. The interview came to a quick end when no spectre of mass casualties was raised. So it’s official now – at least for the press – the toxic floodwaters of Katrina aren’t so toxic after all.
Hopefully the new media will throw out some of these old media story templates and frames because no matter how many times they are shown to be inaccurate after an event, they still get used the next time a similar event occurs. The institutional memory of journalism is always the sizzle, never the steak.
