Media Alliance: Katrina Media Coverage: Race and Class

September 06, 2005

Katrina Media Coverage: Race and Class

By Danny Schechter

The Katrina media coverage started out the way the Iraq war coverage did
with reports from government agencies---The official Hurricane Center was
the major source. But once the crisis surfaced, the press was there well before
the government. And reporters began to tell it like the saw it with spin and
network control at a minimum.

The result: something we’ve become unaccustomed to on the airwaves. At
times, truth reared an unexpected face like it did in some of the reporting
from Vietnam when correspondents showed the war’s horrors. In this
“conflict,” some dead bodies were shown but not across the board. As the
Poynter Institute noted: ‘Many newsrooms' policies prevent displaying
pictures of dead bodies. Yet the bodies are a big part of this story. Telling the
truth about the bodies may be the hardest challenge editors will face.” Again,
it sounds like Iraq, dejavu all over again.

Some Brave Media Surfaces

Yet, as Jack Shafer of SLATE noted many TV journalists were more outspoken
than usual, ‘In the last couple of days, many of the broadcasters reporting
from the bowl-shaped toxic waste dump that was once the city of New
Orleans have stopped playing the role of wind-swept wet men facing down a
big storm to become public advocates for the poor, the displaced, the
starving, the dying, and the dead.”

With the non-surprising exception of Fox News, race and class issues finally
surfaced on television. The fact that these stories was there at all was unusual
although the statisticians at the Center for American Progress reported this
type of coverage was not that extensive:

“1.6%: Proportion of all segments on all three networks over the full seven
day period that focused on race or class issues (of approximately 1,300 total
segments).
3.8%: Proportion of all segments on all three networks over the final three
days, 9/1-9/3, that focused on race or class issues.
6: Number of segments in which race and class were discussed outside an
interview with an African American. Five of those segments were packages by
network anchors; one was an interview with former Sen. John Edwards. The
remaining 16 segments were interviews with African American government
officials and religious, civil rights, or education figures.”

At the same time, well-known TV journalists were not shy about grilling
public officials and challenging the incompetence of the relief effort. In this
regard CNN’s Anderson Cooper, ABC’s Ted Koppel and NBC’s Brian Williams
and Tim Russert distinguished themselves in ways we have yet to see in the
Iraq war coverage.

What You Can’t Say

The media companies were less brave. NBC censored comments by rap star
Kayne West on a live telethon when it was rebroadcast on the West Coast. He
had said, "George Bush doesn't care about black people," and also criticized
the coverage, "I hate the way they portray us in the media, if you see a black
family, it says they're looting. See a white family, it says they're looking for
food." The east coast heard his anger; the west coast couldn’t. Marginalizing
dissenters is common in all wars.

What goes around comes around. Wars in foreign lands always rebound or
“blow back” into the countries that start them. The disastrous failures in Iraq
and earlier in Vietnam are mirrored by the colossal ineptitude we have been
watching day after day in a new disaster that is not over yet. More hurricanes
are expected along with a public health breakdown.

Isn’t it time for our media and all of us to start discussing these parallels. And
then, do something about them.

News Dissector Danny Schechter is the “blogger-in-chief’ of
Mediachannel.org and the director of WMD (Weapons of Mass Deception), a
film on the media coverage of the Iraq War.

Posted by jeff at September 6, 2005 09:00 AM | TrackBack

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