US: What's the best medium for hurricane reporting?

Posted by Anna-Maria Mende on September 28, 2005 at 12:41 PM

In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina and Rita much has been written about the quality of media covering these events. David Carr argues in The New York Times that the hurricane story is "a story better told in print". He states, "By their disposition, hurricanes are a television story: great pictures, an informational crawl at the bottom, and a wind-swept, rain-soaked anchor. But big papers ... all dug in, sending dispatches out of New Orleans that shed light where there had been only heat. What exactly happened at the convention center? Is Mayor Ray Nagin a saint or a kook? Were the levees overtopped or undermined? Will New Orleans be a real city again, or just Disneyland with Jell-O shots? Those are not questions that get asked or answered much on television. The New Orleans story needed the big muscles of print journalism to gain custody of facts that seemed beyond comprehension."

Mark Glaser points to the advantages local news organizations have when covering Hurricane Rita. In his opinion the reporting of mainstream broadcast media lacks depth also because they do not know the local layout very well. He sees online reporting as a chance, "When we see the suffering of the on-air personality, it's supposed to make us feel bad for them, even if they didn't really need to be there at all. But slowly the dynamic is changing. The rise of Internet news and blogs gives TV and print journalists a way to get more personal and tell their own stories. At the same time, the voices of locals who know the terrain are being showcased." His article lists 6 lessons drawn from the online coverage on Hurricane Rita. According to the article, one lesson is "Your local bloggers know more than you do". The Houston Chronicle, for example, recruited local bloggers for its Stormwatchers blog (see former posting). Another lesson is that mainstream media got more personal this time.

Meanwhile some articles suggest that reports about Hurricane Katrina have been exaggerated in some cases, raising questions of truth in media and news accuracy. As Los Angeles Times reports, "Rumors supplanted accurate information and media magnified the problem. Rapes, violence and estimates of the dead were wrong" (see also this article on The Times-Picayune's blog). Commenting on these revelations Edward B. Colby states on Columbia Journalism Review, "Disasters spawn rumors; that's a truth as old as weather itself. Overwhelmed public officials are as susceptible as any of us to passing on the inflated tales of horrific crimes that they hear. But it's important to remember that in those first few days after Katrina, while the media did let itself be used as a conduit for wild rumor and fevered speculation, the vast bulk of its reporting was based on what it saw on the ground in New Orleans."

Sources: The New York Times, Los Angeles Times through Mediachannel, Columbia Journalism Review, Online Journalism Review