Katrina's Media Babel?

So, six weeks on (more or less), how do things stand with the media coverage of Hurricane Katrina?

The dominant discourse remains that of a media success story, with combative journalists going after the story aggressively (though sometimes too aggressively, some wonder?). Marc Fisher, a Washington Post columnist, argues in the latest American Journalism Review ("Essential Again") that Katrina reminded us just how crucial the MSM are at times of national crisis, illumating the scale of the tragedy, bringing government officials to book, and all that. He writes:

So as the summer of 2005 came to a violent end, journalism journeyed back, setting aside for a few days the allure of the Internet and the promise of a nation of citizen reporters. Once again, we understood the power of mass media, the shared experience of a nation gathering in its living rooms to see momentous events on television, to feel the satisfaction of reading a newspaper's first shot at making sense of difficult and complex times.

(This, btw, could be read an example of what prominent media scholar and Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism professor James Carey would describe as the news media's centripetal "ritual" function, bringing people together in the national conversation surrounding the "drama" that was and is Hurricane Katrina.)

Anyway, Fisher certainly makes a powerful argument for a news media thumbs up - and much of it I agree with. But against this there is also a current of criticism against the MSM that has to be taken into consideration. Of course, at one level, we have to recognize that the more recent coverage has lost some of the edge that was so clear in the immediate aftermath of Katrina. All the networks are trying to figure out how to use the tragedy to boost their ratings. President Bush's photo-op at the NBC "Today"/Habitat for Humanity house build invited some easy (yet valid) criticism against that show as well as the president. But one strain of criticism goes deeper - and charges the media with making the rescue effort more difficult.

The basic argument is actually a familiar one to students of the media: It is that the news media, in reporting relentlessly, around the clock on a major issue, also ended up magnifying what USA Today describes as a "a plague of misinformation".

Robert E. Pierre and Ann Gerhart of the Washington Post, writing on Oct. 5 ("News of Pandemonium May Have Slowed Aid") summed their perspective up this way:

Behold the power of the media. Five weeks after Hurricane Katrina laid waste to New Orleans, some local, state and federal officials have come to believe that exaggerations of mayhem by officials and rumors repeated uncritically in the news media helped slow the response to the disaster and tarnish the image of many of its victims. With nearly all communications systems with people on the ground crippled, live television became a primary information source. "The television stations were reporting that people were literally stepping over bodies and violence was out of control," said Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Babineaux Blanco's press secretary Denise Bottcher, who was at the governor's side. "But the National Guardsmen were saying that what we were seeing on CNN was contradictory to what they were seeing. It didn't match up." "Rumor control was a beast for us," said Maj. Ed Bush of the Louisiana National Guard, who was stationed at the Superdome. "People would hear something on the radio and come and say that people were getting raped in the bathroom or someone had been murdered. I would say, 'Ma'am, where?' I would tell them if there were bodies, my guys would find it. Everybody heard, nobody saw. Logic was out the window because the situation was illogical."

USA Today focuses on the news media's strong tendency to report uncritically - at least initially - on comments made by government officials. With most other communication networks not functioning, most people - including rescue workers - were getting their news from CNN and Fox. And much of that news was just plain wrong. As USA Today 's Mark Memmott points out: "Much of what was reported as fact by government officials and the media during the chaotic first week after Hurricane Katrina turned out to be fiction." The paper goes on to quote John Hinderaker, "co-author of the widely read conservative weblog Power Line, who argues along with others that "the media need to take a hard look at their behavior." Notes Memmott:

“When the mayor said there might be 10,000 bodies, he was distraught, he was in the midst of a crisis,” says Hinderaker. “What was shocking was that news organizations would just pick it up and keep repeating it when there'd really been no basis for it.”

So there we have it: The downside of the media's megaphone (or the media's spotlight, if you prefer the metaphor first used by Walter Lippmann). Once again, we have to recognize how the news media can use its communicative power for ill as well as for good. It can draw attention to misinformation just as easily - at times, more easily - as "good" information.