From Tim Porter: Mary Curtis, executive features editor and features columnist at The Charlotte (N.C.) Observer and a member of the current crop of Nieman fellows, joined IJJ’s racial justice fellows for their opening dinner Monday night at the and talked with some of us about how the news coverage of Hurricane Katrina affected her.
The emergence of poverty and race as a central element in the story, she said, made her realize how disconnected most journalists – well-educated, middle class – are from the world of the flood victims whose anguished faces, most of them African American, filled the newscasts and news pages for weeks after the storm.
Curtis elaborated in an article she wrote for Nieman Watchdog (my emphasis):
“I was riveted as television and newspapers recorded the escalating disaster of Hurricane Katrina. I was stunned as the storm’s aftermath grew more disastrous.
“I am a journalist. I am an American. I am an African American.
“The people on the rooftops of a drowning New Orleans are me and yet they are not.
“Not many journalists live in the projects or a trailer. Most I know own a car. Their bank accounts may not be fat, but they usually contain more than $8. That might be why one television reporter seemed so shocked when an evacuee gave her bank balance as exactly that.
“How can someone live like that?”
Curtis raises questions that deserve consideration and answers. Among them one that addresses the short attention span of modern news media. She wrote:
“For today’s reporters, understanding they don’t know much about poor people is the starting point. Will they stay with the story long enough to get up to speed?”
Poverty is out of fashion, a victim of issue fatigue. The lack of interest by government of all partisan stripes is understandable in a media and political environment where argument generates more public attention play than analysis.
In my own blog, First Draft, I echoed Curtis’ questions:
“When the Gulf of Mexico spilled through the sodden dikes of New Orleans and inundated the city’s economic ghettos, the flooding, ironically, uncovered a journalistic outrage that had lain submerged in mainstream news media for several decades. As journalists, we need to ask ourselves, as others are now doing, where was that fury in the years before the flood? Where was the passion to protect against the abuses of power – or, in this case, the absence of protective power – those in society cannot speak for themselves or whose unfashionable pleadings fall on indifferent ears? We like to say part of our journalistic mission, part of our constitutionally-protected role in a civil society, is to speak truth to power. Did we do that? Did we do it loudly enough? Often enough? Long enough?”
Read the rest here.
A number of civic institutions let the poor people of New Orleans down. Was journalism one of them?
Tim Porter is an editor and writer.
