Hurricane Katrina at 10: The Media Coverage
Much was made of the Hurricane Katrina coverage by the media. As I pointed out in this blog, social media didn't really exist at the time, and it's hard to say if it would have helped or hurt the media coverage. I'd like to think it would have helped. But for the most part, we had to depend on the cable news anchors to enlighten us on exactly where Katrina would hit, and where it did damage.
Above is a 2-hour compilation of various coverage from my personal VHS archives, mostly before and during the storm, on FOX, CNN and MSNBC. If you weren't alive during the storm and you'd like to get a flavor for the news coverage, this is a good tool. It includes early reports that New Orleans had gone "unscathed" -- based on the fact that the storm was far enough east that downtown NOLA only took on minor wind damage. This, of course, was true before the levees broke and flooded most of the city.
After the storm, news anchors got frustrated with the lack of government response. Here are two examples of that frustration (The Situation Room with Jack Cafferty & Anderson Cooper with Louisiana Senator, Mary Landrieu). Sorry for the poor quality, I found these in my Hurricane Katrina archive as low-res video files:
You can find a lot more videos of news coverage and special reports on the storm, on YouTube.
Of course, here at AccuWeather, we're a media company, so we were called on as experts to help out the cable news folks, especially during the approach of the storm. Here's a sampling of AccuWeather's "network hits" for Katrina:
And of course, we also covered it with live reporters on the scene, but that's another entire blog entry.
The other way we got our news in 2005 (believe it or not) was newspapers and magazines. This was the biggest U.S. disaster since 9/11, and the paper media did it in style. Here are a couple of featured article spreads by Newsweek and Time Magazine:
Framed TIME Magazine covers about the storm can also be ordered from their website.
You can download worldwide post-Katrina hurricane papers like those below from the Newseum archive or see on Flickr here.
All My Hurricane Katrina at 10 Blogs:
