Katrina, US and us

BATON ROUGE, La. – Maj. Ed Bush recalled how he stood in the bed of a pickup truck in the days after Hurricane Katrina, struggling to help the crowd outside the Louisiana Superdome separate fact from fiction. Armed only with a megaphone and scant information, he might have been shouting into, well, a hurricane. The National Guard spokesman's accounts about rescue efforts, water supplies and first...

LAST week at the Sheraton Hotel in downtown New Orleans, a mix of contractors, journalists and security people sat in the bar, reminiscing about Katrina and speculating about Rita, the storm of the moment. Hurricane coverage, for all of its discomforts, is a bit of a caper with beaucoup fringes. Reporters get to take over hotels, spend like pirates, drink like sailors and eat like truck drivers...

Rita was no Katrina, to the relief of an entire nation. But in the aftermath of the first hurricane, which ravaged New Orleans and large parts of the Gulf Coast, broadcast and cable TV took no chances. From networks calling in their weekday morning-show anchors for weekend Rita duty (ABC's Good Morning America ran five hours Saturday) to wall-to-wall coverage on Fox News, CNN and MSNBC and prime...

Hundreds of thousands of people looking for the latest news on Hurricane Katrina went to New Orleans' local media last month to get the latest on the storm's devastation, a web metrics firm said Monday. Nola.com, the web home of the New Orleans Times-Picayune newspaper owned by Advance Publications, saw its traffic soar 277 percent from July to 1.7 million visitors in August, ComScore Networks...

Hearst-Argyle Television senior vp for news Fred Young has a message for the rising chorus of officials telling TV broadcasters to move, and soon, off the spectrum they’ve used for decades: Look at the example of WDSU in New Orleans, and think about whether it’s smart to take away TV signals that are a lifeline for many people. Beginning two days before Hurricane Katrina laid waste to the city...

NEW YORK: A fund set up to raise money for staffers at The Times-Picayune in New Orleans has brought in $22,000 in donations in just two weeks, according to organizers. The effort, aimed at raising money for employees of the paper who have been severely impacted by Hurricane Katrina, is being run by a group of former Times-Picayune employees. "I would guess that it is close to 40 different...

DISASTER has a way of bringing out the best and the worst instincts in the news media. It is a grand thing that during the most terrible days of Hurricane Katrina, many reporters found their gag reflex and stopped swallowing pat excuses from public officials. But the media's willingness to report thinly attributed rumors may also have contributed to a kind of cultural wreckage that will not clean...

The fact that most of those left behind in the New Orleans flood were poor and black is being treated by the press as a stunning revelation -- "A National Shame," as Newsweek's cover put it. But not exactly a national secret. "Apparently none of these ace reporters has ever set foot in Washington's Anacostia district, or South Central Los Angeles, or the trailer parks of rural Arkansas," writes...

NEW YORK – NBC anchor Brian Williams, who returned to storm-ravaged New Orleans on Thursday for his third trip in as many weeks, said he couldn't bring himself to stay away from the region for very long. The experience has also moved him to consider other areas of coverage that he says need to be addressed. "I will be asking my network to lead a discussion on the issues of class, race, energy, the...

In our time, journalism's credibility has taken some big hits, most notably from criticism and attacks arising out of fabricated stories, exemplified by two notorious malefactors - Janet Cooke of The Washington Post in the early '80s and more recently, Jayson Blair of The New York Times. But the cycle of deception wasn't confined to two of the nation's most important newspapers. It entangled...