by Linda Beale
Katrina is a natural disaster turned into a man-made one because of the failure of officials at all levels, but particularly because of the failure of the federal government to provide the essential coordinating and preparedness function. The vengeful storm has done immeasurable harm to our society, as the failure of the federal government to marshall resources before the storm revealed how little this Congress and this President have learned about disaster preparedness needs after 9/11.
The little bit of good that comes from this tragic storm may be its washing away the media's rosy glasses, provided in bulk by the Bush Administration and Republican Congress. Embedded journalists allowed to see only what the military condoned tended to mimic the White House propaganda machine with barely concealed excitement about "smart" weapons and exulting America-First statements when Bush appeared against his "Mission Accomplished" banner at the start of the second, bloody stage of this war and occupation. Media generally asked few tough questions about the uniformly scripted presidential appearances with "ordinary Americans" who are always--even in Mr. Bush's first visit to the Katrina-ravaged areas-- pre-selected and pre-trained to provide Mr. Bush with laudatory responses. The media fell right in with making sure that the American people generally got no chance to see the depth of reasonable dissent from Mr. Bush's "I-say-so I'm Doing Good" policies of tax cuts for the wealthy and benefit cuts (or long term debt, amounting to the same) for the rest of us.
On one issue in particular the media has generally given this regime a free ride--repeating its claims of attention to national security and emergency protection preparedness like a mantra without inspecting further. Joe Albaugh, with no expertise other than being a crony and campaign manager for Mr. Bush, replaced James Witt, the head of FEMA who was acknowledged as an experienced and able manager. Good ol' Joe brought in his college roommate Michael Brown, a commissioner for a horseowners association with absolutely no emergency preparedness qualifications, as his deputy. When Joe Albaugh quit to turn his FEMA resume line into a lucrative consulting business, crony politics continued with the elevation of Michael Brown to head of FEMA. Did the media do their work on either of these appointments? Apparently not. Now that Katrina has hit and the incompetence of Michael Brown's leadership has become apparent to all, the media finally delved into his resume. That job as "assistant city manager" with responsibility for emergency preparedness? Not quite--the city says it was really an "assistant to" position that was not much more than an internship, a job taken by recent college graduates as a line on their resume with no authority over any personnel. That job as a faculty member at Central State? Not quite--the college has no record of him as a faculty member, though it says it is possible he may have taught some kind of course as an adjunct. Brown has been taken off the Katrina disaster, but he has not been removed from his lucrative sinecure as head of FEMA. False resume, incompetence, focus on PR rather than rescue--Mr. Bush clearly doesn't think these flaws are sufficient to remove a buddy from office. And Mr. Brown doesn't appear to have any ethical qualms about remaining on the federal payroll without having to do the job that is the most important one that the payroll position exists to accomplish! He should resign immediately, with a full apology to the American people for the lives lost on his watch. Instead, he claims "I'm not the story" and says he is going home to walk his dog. The irony of that comment seems also to have escaped him. The Katrina victims have no home to go to, and most of them don't have their dogs any more either, as the rescue effort's inadequate preparedness required them to abandon beloved companions to the mercy of the streets, which has turned out to be the guns of the military. So the question remains--WHY did the media give Bush appointees like Brown a pass when it really counted two years ago when he was appointed to the position?
And WHY hasn't the media done a better job of looking behind the neat PR covers of this regime's most favored person status for resource extractive industries and their owners and related groups, from Exxon to Halliburton? We give the oil and gas extracive industries tax incentives galore, and we open precious national wildlands to their environmental degradation--even, if this Congress has its wayward way, the pristine Artic National Wildlife Refuge. One of the Bush White House's first moves after Katrina was to waive an environmental regulation intended to prevent use of especially harmful oil products--even though this release has nothing to do with getting products through the refinery system, which is the bottleneck on distribution. (Of course, the White House also waived federal prevailing wage requirements for companies like Halliburty and Shaw, both linked to Bush cronies, that got no-bid contracts in the rush for corporate spoils of the disaster in the Gulf.) The media should have been critically assessing those energy policies of depending on carbon products, and giving huge breaks at enormous federal cost to energy companies, rather than developing sustainable energy resources and conservationist energy policies. Just think what it would have meant if we had developed superior public transit in New Orleans so that rich and poor primarily depended on an interlocking city, county, and state network of fast rail lines. With appropriate planning, those rail lines could have been built to ensure the greatest ability to evacuate residents from New Orleans when flooding threatened.
Katrina has been "the perfect storm" in other ways, washing away the layers obscuring much about America's seamy underside. It has revealed the result of the decades of neglect and artificial focus on "free markets" as the solution to all ills--the mostly black, mostly poor, inadequately educated, inadequately jobbed and inadequately cared for ordinary Americans living in New Orleans without the safety nets that many Americans take for granted. To this, too, the angy journalists witnessing the American tragedy on the Gulf Coast are finally awakening. News reports actually reported, although sparingly, on the underlying racism of rescue and evacuation decisions, such as the priority given evacuating mostly white, mostly wealthy tourists from the Hyatt Hotel over evacuating the mostly black, mostly poor (and already worse off from the ravages of the storm) residents of the Convention Center in New Orleans. And in the September 11, 2005 edition of The New York Times, the public editor, Byron Calame, finally says it plainly in his op ed: in spite of the importance of poverty and the link of poverty to race in New Orleans, The Times simply didn't cover that story.
"As a national newspaper with high aspirations, the New York Times assumes a responsibility to alert its readers to significant problems as they emerge in major cities such as New Orleans. Poverty so pervasive that it hampered evacuation would seem to have been worthy of The Time's attention before it emerged as a pivotal challenge two weeks ago. ...[Yet] A search of substantive Times new articles about New Orleans since September 1994 ... found none that focused on the city's poor and the racial dimension of poverty. And there were only two articles about the city--both feature stories--that contained a few paragraphs on poverty and race."
Similarly, studies of the levees have long shown that they were inadequate to withstand a category 4 hurricane and that even less powerful hurricanes might well cause a breach because of long term neglect of needed maintenance. Scientists have been warning FEMA and all of the relevant federal agencies for years that the flood control projects on the Mississippi have been short-sighted and that costly but doable projects could release silt-laden waters to help restore the life-giving, hurricane protecting marshes in the lower Mississippi delta. The Bush White House has been cutting back on the few projects actually protecting the delta when it should have been calling for necessary construction as well as sustained discussion and action on the polycentric question of a city's survival in the midst of dying wetlands. That project should have included a national discussion about regulating development of homes on valuable wetlands and coastal beaches, leading to predictable need for federal assistance when storms' winds and waters wipe them out. But The Times, along with most other media in the country, didn't cover that story well at all.
"What had The Times's news columns provided over the past decade to help its readers understand the New Orleans levee system? One major article that focused on levees. The 2,100 word article on the front of the Science section in 2002 made clear that a Category 4 or 5 hurricane would send water over the top of the levees. ... neither the news article nor the editorial commentary prepared readers for the possibility of breaches in the levees or canal walls."
The Times's public observer offers a notewothy admission of inadequate media coverage of these important national problems.
"Given the dimensions of poverty in New Orleans and the city's dependence on a levee system, the Times's news coverage of these problems over the past decade falls far short of what its readers have a right to expect of a national newspaper."
It's important that this lesson not be lost. The anger journalists feel now at city, state and federal governmental betrayal of the basic responsibility to protect citizens from harm should be turned into a renewed commitment to fair coverage of news events and long term problems of importance to the country. That commitment won't make up for the past neglect, but it will mean that in the future America will be better prepared to make policy decisions that have direct bearing on the lives of individual citizens in this vast country. A democracy cannot work when its citizens are not informed about the ugly truths of their society and the predictable future harms that have been swept under the rug. Tax cuts for the wealthy, at the expense of benefits for the poor, would be harder to pass (one hopes) without an outcry of outrage, when people realize that it means that those without any means to help themselves will receive no help from the government either.