Framing the disaster response: some thoughts

Yesterday--Friday--was the day where the crazy morass of reports and impressions about the Gulf Coast disaster, and the government's response to it, finally began to coalesce into a dominant construct, and the result was not pleasing to the federal government. CNN placed a piece on its web site yesterday morning, the question being "The disaster response: 'Magnificent' or 'embarrassment'?". It was clear from the report that the writer was tending toward the latter.

As the day progressed, and the news became more and more awful, most news organizations seemed to be turning--at least for the moment--toward an initial "national embarrassment" frame for the tragedy. That was the opinion on Fox News (and on Friday morning the web site's home page was headlined 'This Is a National Disgrace'). The same was true of the New York Times and numerous other major papers (and a Times editorial was typical of many that excoriated the slow response while we saw constant TV pictures of the breakdown of law and order in New Orleans.) The Washington Post's page one story on Friday was describing New Orleans as "A City of Despair and Lawlessness". Two BBC headlines say it all: "Rescue effort falls short" and "New Orleans crisis shames Americans".

At times like this, when our thoughts and impressions about something as "big" as this are unformed and malleable, Friday's news can be particularly important because Friday is a key "News Round-up" day, when many broadcast media organizations have special shows devoted to journalists getting together and talking about the week's events and trying to make sense of what's been happening over the past few days. Shows such as PBS's Washington Week in Review and Diane Rehm on NPR provide a forum for journos to interact--and often come to some sort of consensus over interpreting the news. (As with the Sunday morning talk shows, relatively few people actually watch or listen to these shows, but the people who do watch/listen to it tend to be important opinion leaders--so such shows are important.)

This Friday--yesterday--the news was mostly bad--and certainly bad for the Bush administration. Whereas on previous days the news media had been focusing on the scale of the tragedy and the devastation, by Thursday more and more time was being spent on the horrible scenes at the Superdome and the Convention Center. Awful TV pictures merged with more and more reports of lawlessness, shootings, rapes throughout the city--including even at these aforementioned shelters (supposedly "refuges"). The U.S. media began using the new and loaded term "refugee" (a term normally limited to people in the "third world", and one I first heard applied to these Americans on the BBC on Tuesday night) to describe the displaced people of the region. And more and more voices by Thursday were raised with the question "Where is the federal government"? More and more people on all sides of the national debate were expressing their revulsion at what they were seeing. And President Bush's interview with Diane Sawyer on ABC's "Good Morning America" had not gone down well with anyone, it seems.

After another horrific night, by Friday the "rescue" story had shifted emphatically from being "magnificent" to being a "national embarrassment". And that was the day--the last day of the working week--that most journalists on all these round-up shows crystalized their opinions about what was happening and presented their theses to the viewing/listening public. A dominant frame for the events was solidifying--and the frame was defined by the failure of President Bush and the government to act quickly and decisively enough. What's more, this frame, or media construct, was being joined by commentators on the right as well as the left. Influential conservatives such as Tony Blankley of the Washington Times and David Brooks of the New York Times joined their liberal-progressive counterparts to use their news round-up soap-boxes to excoriate the federal response. Brooks, for example, was extraopolating his Thursday Times column ("The Storm After the Storm") to argue for a sea change in our national conversation following this latest disaster. And when I saw the normally amiable Brooks on Friday's News Hour with Jim Lehrer, he was clearly seething mad about the lacklustre response of the Bush administration, which he saw as emblematic of many deep failings in our system of government (and remember, he's a conservative.)

By late Friday and Saturday the news from the Gulf region was starting to improve--marginally--as arriving federal relief finally started to make itself felt. But in a serious and enduring way, it was already too late for the Bush administration. The damage has been done (and not just on the Gulf Coast). The media have made at least a preliminary decision that what has happened in the past 3-5 days has been a "national disgrace", and something really fundamental about the way we as a society do business must change. The Bush administartion, usually so adept at managing the news media, has been overwhelmed by events as surely as have the people of the region. There are many, many reasons for this, most of them bad for the administration's public image (and not much better for the image of the Democrats, it must be said).

All the same, the buck must stop at the Oval Office. This is going to be a very difficult piece for the administration to "manage". The disaster is an event that brings into excrutiatingly sharp focus America's positions on race, class, the economy, Iraq, the environment, the role of government . . . everything is up for grabs in the ongoing national debate. There is a good chance that the massive scale of this event and its consequences will change the very ground under which everyone in America--conservatives, liberals, and everyone else--stands. This "frame" which began to crystyalize yesterday could, just possibly, become as important as the "war on terror" frame that followed 9/11--a frame through which every other piece of major domestic news is refracted. It could be that important.

Now we have to watch carefully.