Katrina, US and us

New Orleans -- A long caravan of white vans led by an Army humvee rolled Monday through New Orleans' Bywater district, a poor, mostly black neighborhood, northeast of the French Quarter. Recovery team members wearing white protective suits and black boots stopped at houses with spray painted markings on the doors designating there were dead bodies inside. Outside one house on Kentucky Street, a...

On Sunday, Sept. 4, Tim Russert of NBC's "Meet the Press" asked Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff to explain President Bush's statement that the government couldn't have anticipated breaches in levees in New Orleans. Mr. Chertoff talked about news coverage. "Well, I think if you look at what actually happened, I remember on Tuesday morning picking up newspapers, and I saw headlines,...

Newspapers and television stations, as many people know, have been losing readers and viewers for years. But in New Orleans over the last two weeks, when news was precious, the local media's customer base - and its advertisers - literally vanished, exiled from home in a vast diaspora beyond the reach of telemarketers and ad salesmen. New Orleans media outlets, including The Times-Picayune and...

hirty years after the Internet was created as a communications system of last resort, the network fulfilled its mission during the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina – but in ways more sweeping than its founders could have imagined. It reunited families and connected them with shelter. It turned amateur photographers into chroniclers of history and ordinary people into pundits. It allowed television...

These days, the Bush administration doesn't seem well enough organized to have an enemies list, but if it did, it's clear that some of the upper rungs would be reserved for photojournalists. First, the administration prohibited the press from taking pictures of the flag-draped coffins of U.S. servicemen and women killed in the Iraq war. The ban's ostensible purpose was to protect the privacy of...

BILOXI, Miss. - The Sun Herald on the Mississippi Gulf Coast printed 80,000 newspapers for Sunday, its largest press run ever, and distributed the issue free at shelters and to relief workers helping with the recovery from Hurricane Katrina. "We believe the information that our reporters, photographers and editors are supplying is essential to the success of our overall recovery during this...

NEW YORK: Public Editor Byron Calame of The New York Times explored the newspaper’s past coverage of New Orleans on Sunday in a column that slammed the paper for failing to report on the hurricane-ravaged city’s potential for disaster and growing poverty population. In his seventh column since assuming the ombudsman-like role last spring, Calame said the Times should have done more in recent years...

HOUSTON, Texas (CNN) -- Rather than fight a lawsuit by CNN, the federal government abandoned its effort Saturday to prevent the media from reporting on the recovery of the dead in New Orleans. Joint Task Force Katrina "has no plans to bar, impede or prevent news media from their news gathering and reporting activities in connection with the deceased Hurricane Katrina victim recovery efforts," said...

US authorities have backed off a proposed ban by the US military on journalists and photographers documenting the recovery of bodies in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. CNN yesterday filed a suit in the US District Court in Houston to halt government efforts to exclude the media, rejecting the official argument that the television images would not respect the privacy of the dead. A judge...

The most traumatizing images are yet to come. As the fetid water recedes in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, decomposing bodies will turn up in the streets and homes. They will appear on our screens, pushing a nation beyond what once was considered appropriate news coverage. Last week, viewers were shocked to see an elderly woman dead in a wheelchair, a blanket draped over her, pushed against the...