Katrina Rant

I wrote this for an independent study I'm doing with Bob Thompson. It's not great, being my first one, but it was more an exercise in just venting against the vast wasteland on paper. Why can't television news be all that it can be?

A round of applause, please, for the broadcast journalists of CNN, MSNBC and Fox News Channel. In the wake of Hurricane Katrina, not only did they do their jobs, they did it well. It was exhilarating to watch Anderson Cooper refuse to take prefabricated public relations baloney from Louisiana senator Mary Landrieu. Damn straight Americans shouldn’t feel grateful to the federal government for simply doing their jobs. Oh wait, following that logic, maybe Americans shouldn’t be so grateful to the media for doing theirs.

Perhaps I’m old-fashioned in what I expect from news reports: For them to actually be fair and balanced. Show me both sides of the story without bias. Stay neutral. Keep yourself out of the story. The press has a duty to represent the public, ask the questions we don’t have the opportunity to ask ourselves. Get us answers to the questions we want answered and then trust that we’re smart enough to form an opinion on our own.

That is why watching the media, which has become the Bush administration’s lapdog, finally ask tough questions and not cower was so thrilling. The fourth estate was in full swing. But the brief remembrance of what journalism should be was soon forgotten. Like a petulant child, the media itself needed to be the center of attention and made sure it was by becoming the story.

I was actually OK at first with reporters crossing the line of neutral observer. With no rescue workers coming to the Gulf, the journalists and their production teams at times became the first line of relief. They distributed water, helped reunite families, and even rescued stranded people. They took off their reporter hats and became humans first. A respectable decision considering the situation.

But did they need to broadcast these acts of humanity? Isn’t charity a selfless act? Did they do these things because they really were concerned about these people or because a suit back in New York thought it would test well with a focus group?

The tide quickly turned (I know it’s a cliché but I have that kind of sense of humor) as the news media began exploiting the victims suffering for their own gain. One particular glaring incident happened in a taped segment with Cooper. He was walking around a small town in Mississippi that had been decimated by the Katrina’s winds and ocean swells. He happened upon a woman who was trying to salvage mementos from the rubble where her house once stood. Cooper helped the woman dig through the remains. He walked away to do an aside to the camera and became so emotional, so choked up with tears, he needed to ask the cameraman to stop filming him.

While I’m willing to bet there is some an emotional toll on the reporters in these disaster situations, I also don’t want to see the reporter crying. Especially crocodile tears that make Cooper appear like an actor playing a reporter at the scene of a tragedy. If the woman who lost her house wasn’t crying on camera, why was he?

That was just the beginning of making the reporters the center of the story. Reporters were soon talking about how hard their lives have been, how terrible the conditions they’ve been living and working in are, the lack of sleep and decent food. Keep in mind that they get paid a ridiculously large amount of money to go to these places and report these stories. And unlike the people they were reporting on, they actually had jobs and homes at the end of the day.

In the days following the Hurricane, television critic Alessandra Stanley wrote a complimentary column in the New York Times about the outrage the media felt. In the article she wrote the following about Geraldo Rivera:

''Some reporters helped stranded victims because no police officers or rescue workers were around. (Fox's Geraldo Rivera did his rivals one better: yesterday, he nudged an Air Force rescue worker out of the way so his camera crew could tape him as he helped lift an older woman in a wheelchair to safety.)''

Rivera took offense to the comment and demanded a correction be run. The Times contends that while there is no physical evidence of a nudge in the videotape, Stanley’s comment was symbolic of how pushy the media was acting. Never one to back away from the spotlight (although I’ve never seen photographic proof of him refusing to back away from the spotlight – I’m speaking metaphorically, Mr. Rivera), he has publicly threatened Stanley by saying if her name were Alexander instead of Alessandra he would fight her on 43rd Street.

He has also called her Jayson Blair in a cocktail dress. Is an off-handed comment in a critical opinion piece really akin to fabricating and plagiarizing entire stories? Are sexist remarks from established news reporter Rivera, who has won a Peabody, really tolerable? If so, the media has much bigger problems than we think.

Rivera is doing exactly what Stanley alluded to in her story. By grandstanding and making himself the story, he has detracted attention away from the real victims in the Hurricane, the people of Louisiana.

So congratulations to all the broadcast news reporters braving helicopter shootings, toxic sludge and wild roving dogs in Louisiana. You did your job well. The American public was aware of the situation as it was and rightly outraged thanks to your camerawork and on-the-scene reports. You helped reunite families and saved family pets. But perhaps when you do the inevitable story about the universities in New Orleans reopening, you can audit a journalism class. If you can walk away from Hurricane Katrina learning one thing, let it be that journalists should not report in the first person.