Media Requiem For Katrina: Back To Square One

Two years after the catastrophe known as Katrina shocked the nation, many Americans are looking back with sadness at the grief that could have been prevented — and, perhaps, also looking back with disappointment at promises broken and hopes dashed.

The lit-up prime-time TV appearance from New Orleans by President Bush, in the wake of the Katrina disaster, was a classic damage-control effort by a politician who tried to recoup lost credibility by making outsized promises. To hear Bush tell it that night, no expense would be spared to swiftly and constructively meet the human needs of those displaced by Hurricane Katrina.

Based on the administration's track record of duplicity and egregious reliance on spin, few observers were astonished when the Bush team reneged on its pledges to give top priority to the recovery of the Gulf Coast. But there was more hope in the air two autumns ago that the general political environment — and the news media — would at last come to terms with basic realities of poverty in this country.

At one level, it was odd to hear so many politicians and pundits say that Katrina had brought the grim existence of poverty out of the nation's shadow and into the harsh glare of national attention. Only the most isolated or willfully evasive could be truly surprised to learn that vast numbers of Americans were mired in dire poverty. Yet many media observers seemed nearly astonished at the specter of destitute people on TV screens.

But there was a certain logic to the national shock. Of course extensive poverty is a constant of American life — but ordinarily you could watch television for dozens of hours and scarcely have a clue that tens of millions of very poor people live in the United States. Their existence became incontrovertible with TV coverage of the deadly Katrina debacle and its chilling aftermath.

It says a lot that it was so extraordinary for the national news media to actually portray realities of poverty in a concerted way. The shock of the spectacles led many to publicly speculate that Katrina and its media impacts had wrought an irreversible change in American public life.

Politicians and news outlets, we were often told in the early autumn of 2005, would not be able to go back to evasive business-as-usual as far as poverty was concerned.

But 24 months later, the ill winds of Katrina have brought no good. Expectations of a sea change in the political and media stance toward poverty have largely collapsed. Although some tough reporting has illuminated the duplicity, callous disregard and utter contempt for human well-being that continues to animate top echelons of federal policy-makers, the baseline of media coverage on issues of poverty is now scarcely different nationwide than it was in summer 2005.

When candid journalistic accounts of basic realities are seen as extraordinary and notably commendable, we should take note. Why all the praise for news outlets finally doing a decent job of reporting on poverty? Shouldn't we expect such coverage as a matter of course rather than as a once-in-a-great-while media spectacle?

Poverty remains a sparsely covered elephant in the national media living room. Levees shouldn't need to break and people shouldn't need to drown before the human realities — and the implications of government policies — hit home across the nation.

There are many journalists who want to do a better job of reporting on issues of economic class — with all the disparities between the privileges of wealth and the deficiencies of impoverishment. The constraints on coverage do not preclude the emergence of excellent reporting, time and again; but such reporting amounts to a small island in a sea of superficiality, easy avoidance and concentration on more pleasant topics related to investment, entrepreneurial successes and commerce.

Two years after Katrina, the news media are providing a range of retrospective stories. But the proof in the journalistic pudding is not what happens once a year, but what happens every day.

The new documentary film "War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death," based on Norman Solomon's book of the same title, will be released directly to DVD in June. For information about the full-length movie, narrated by Sean Penn, go to: www.WarMadeEasyTheMovie.org. To find out more about Norman Solomon and read his past columns, visit the Creators Syndicate Web page at www.creators.com.

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