The New Orleans Times-Picayune’s coverage of Hurricane Katrina from August to December 2005 has been named one of the top ten works of journalism of the decade in the United States.
With less than two months until the start of this year’s tropical storm season in the Atlantic, the honor is also a timely reminder of the paper’s ongoing coverage of efforts to shore up the system of levees meant to protect New Orleans from storm surges and floods.
The faculty of New York University’s Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute, together with a group of distinguished outside judges, ranked the Times-Picayune eighth on the list, which is topped by The New York Times’s coverage of the September 11 terrorist attacks in the fall of 2001 and otherwise dominated by war and economics reporting.
It’s not the first commendation that the Times-Picayune has received for this particular body of work. In 2006, the paper won the Pulitzer Prize for Breaking News Reporting and for Public Service, “for its heroic, multi-faceted coverage of Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath, making exceptional use of the newspaper’s resources to serve an inundated city even after evacuation of the newspaper plant.” In 2005, it won the George Polk Award for Metropolitan Reporting. In its announcement of the prize, the Polk committee noted that:
With only a skeleton staff whose members themselves were displaced from their homes, the paper persevered, covering the disaster and serving as a critical and accurate source of information for the battered New Orleans community and the world. Although the paper’s offices were forced to move from its headquarters in the flooded city, its reporters remained on the streets working. Without access to its printing presses, the nearly 170-year-old paper stepped up its online editions and blogs, generating more than 30 million hits a day. When operations resumed four days after the storm, the paper’s first headline read: “Help Us, Please”.
Dan Fagin, the director of NYU’s Science, Health, and Environmental Reporting Program (SHERP), was “proud to say” that the Times-Picayune’s work had made the university’s top-ten-of-the-decade list, which he helped judge.
“The Times-Picayune’s coverage was heroic in every sense. The content was fearless, and the fact that there was any coverage at all in those initial days borders on the miraculous,” Fagin wrote in an e-mail. “All the prep work that Mark Schleifstein had done beforehand in exposing the vulnerabilities of the levee system and the likelihood of a major strike meant that the newspaper was a trusted source — really, THE trusted source — for the entire region when The Big One finally came. Mark’s work also helped ensure that the subsequent coverage was rigorous and science-based, as well as compassionate.”
Schleifstein, the Times-Picayune’s environment reporter, who has been the point-man for much of the paper’s hurricane coverage, was credited in a 2008 New York Times article as “the man who predicted the flood”:
In 2002, Mr. Schleifstein and his colleagues published “Washing Away,” a five-day report about the vulnerabilities Louisiana would face if a major hurricane hit. “It’s only a matter of time,” the report declared. And three years later, the time came.
In an interview, Schleifstein said that now, almost five years after Katrina, being included on NYU’s Top Ten list reassures him that there is still broad concern for the residents of New Orleans.
“I see that as a positive sign—not necessarily for the newspaper, but for the community itself—that we haven’t left the page yet despite everything else that’s happened since,” he said. “One of the crazy things about Katrina—well, the frustration there is that you really do want to win prizes, but at the same time, to win recognition for your coverage of a disaster of this type is problematic, obviously. We see our role as being part of the community, so we did what needed to be done, and it’s nice to be honored for that, but it’s more important that the community be honored for everything that it’s done in the past five years to move forward from that disaster.”
This is an amazing tribute for a paper of its size. The reporters put their lives on the line to try and keep us informed.
But until the outside media spends at least 10% of the time it spent right after Katrina, correcting the misinformation it put out then, NOLA will continue to struggle. Some of the major areas it has to make amends for so that mainstream America stops perpetuating myths and demonizing parts of New Orleans include the following:
Reports of murders and rapes at the Superdome, and helicopter shootings were grossly exaggerated. We inside believed those rumors as well. In fact there are no positive confirmations of any of these according to authorities later on. While there was some illegal activity and some bad apples, most people were helping one another and concerned about survival, but fear is a powerful emotion in controlling behavior and spreading rumors.
Most of the deaths and destruction in NOLA was caused by improperly built and improperly maintained levees. Katrina hit landfall as a Category 3 hurricane and untopped levees simply gave way. A Federal judge as well as an independent engineering study has placed the blame on the Army Corps of Engineers.
New Orleans citizens may have had more to fear from the local Police and Blackwater guards than their fellow citizens. The FBI and Justice Dept. continue to investigate cases in which there either have been confirmed coverups or potential coverups in the shootings of unarmed civilians.
80-90% of citizens did evacuate, which is considered a very high percentage by emergency evacuation/disaster experts. This was in spite of the Airport, Greyhound, and Amtrak stations all being closed a day prior to the evacuation order and 2 days prior to the storm. Why these premature closings even occurred has not been satisfactorily answered.
The risks associated with living in many other areas of the U.S. is greater than in New Orleans. Many other cities have a higher percentage of their townships below sea level. Many others are more vulnerable to flooding, fires, earthquakes, and other potential disasters.
Finally, very few Americans are aware that a video and transcripts were uncovered 6 months after Katrina that clearly show President Bush being forewarned by Gov. Blanco, the Head of the Hurricane Center, and the Head of FEMA that the levees might be breached and that this storm was very likely to be devastating. Bush seemed indifferent and days after Katrina stated that "no one could have foreseen the breach of the levees." This video showed him caught in a lie and fully warned.
Paul Harris
Author, "Diary From the Dome, Reflections on Fear and Privilege During Katrina"
#1 Posted by Paul Harris, CJR on Wed 7 Apr 2010 at 07:36 PM