Reporting on Katrina’s horrors changes TV journalists
The horror of Hurricane Katrina will stay with the television journalists who covered it long after the story moves on, and some say it will profoundly influence how they work in the future.
“I’ll never forget those mothers and daughters, the elderly, who swam out of their neighborhoods looking for life’s basic necessities of food and water, hoping to walk on the road to somewhere and find it and couldn’t for days,” said Fox News Channel’s Smith. “It was the most helpless feeling I’ve ever encountered.”
Smith, Fox’s chief anchor, reported on the plight of people stuck on the highway seeking help that took days to come. As their anger increased, so did his.
It was that emotion, and the angry confrontations with public officials by familiar faces like ABC’s Ted Koppel, NBC’s Tim Russert and CNN’s Anderson Cooper, that made clear to viewers how desperate things had become in New Orleans.
So did Meserve’s halting voice when she described a late-night boat ride through flooded neighborhoods to CNN’s Aaron Brown. She told of the cries from people who couldn’t be rescued.
“People have made a lot of the emotion that was in my voice that night,” she said. “It was totally spontaneous, it was totally unrehearsed. It was simply a human reaction to what I was hearing and what I had seen.”
Besides those voices, Meserve won’t forget the woman she saw pleading with a police officer to help her mother who was overdue for dialysis. The officer said he couldn’t take her anywhere, and his radio was broken. There was nothing he could do.
The elderly woman Roberts saw stranded on a road, trying to flag a police officer as her husband suffered a seizure, similarly couldn’t find anyone who would stop in time to save him. A day later, she was still there with her husband’s body, he said.
Two days later she was gone, but the body remained.
“We always think that this is the privileged country and we go to all these hellholes around the world and find situations that human beings shouldn’t be allowed to live in,” the CBS newsman said. “And then we find one right at home. To me, it was really disappointing to see that while we can do so much good work overseas, when it comes to looking after our own people, we just fell down so horribly.”
Nine-year-old Charles Evans took NBC’s Brown by the hand for a tour of the New Orleans convention center, pointing to the body of a woman in a wheelchair and to a man he had befriended who died the day before.
He had no parents, only some cousins and a grandmother in her 80s, and he was trying to keep her alive.
“He has stayed with me,” Brown said. “I haven’t been able to stop thinking about this child.”
She tracked him down at a relative’s home in Dallas and flew there to find him last week.
“I’m in shock at how all levels of government failed these people,” the weekend “Today” host said. “I’m struggling to define my role as a journalist in the midst of all this. I have lost my objectivity. I am emotionally involved. I can’t pretend that I’m not.”
Brown grew up in Louisiana and her father still lives in Baton Rouge; she was bombarded with messages from friends who wanted her to check on their homes or help find missing relatives. Smith is from Mississippi and knows New Orleans well.
The journalists helped where they could. Roberts passed out any water or snacks his crew had and gave rides in boats and cars.
“You can’t pass people by in a situation like that,” he said. “You have to help out. You have to put aside your role as a journalist to just observe the situation and you have to get involved. You have to become a human being in those cases.”
Roberts tried to let people describe what they were going through. But this story opens the door for journalists to share their own thoughts more frequently, he said. Roberts remembered when CBS anchor Walter Cronkite visited Vietnam in 1968 and concluded the war couldn’t be won.
“Journalists today, would they make that sort of judgment?” he said. “I don’t know if they would. But I think that after what we saw the last few weeks that it’s all right to make judgments based on our observations.”
For days, Smith heard government officials say help was on the way when it wasn’t. He heard stories about what went on at the convention center and Superdome dismissed as rumors when he saw it himself.
“You can’t let the facts as you see them with your own eyes get distorted by what you’re told by those in charge,” he said. “I think I will forever have a greater degree of skepticism of people who are in the business of public service, and I think that’s a good thing for me, it’s a good thing for my colleagues and it’s a good thing for our viewers.”
Meserve doesn’t know whether this experience has changed the business, or her as a reporter.
“Our role is a little different because the reporters who have been on the scene realize that what they’ve seen transcends politics,” she said. “It’s elemental.
“I think most of us have this feeling that this country is good, and that we’re capable and competent and responsive. We saw that it wasn’t in this instance. Because of what we’ve seen and because it isn’t about political shading, people are asking tougher questions. But it’s far too early to know whether this will last or not.”
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