I don't think it's possible for journalism to be objective. We all come to the field with a different background and a different set of biases. Then there's the fact that reporting on an event changes the event itself. When you pull out a camera everyone starts posing. Katrina made New Orleans an excellent foil to highlight the active role of journalists in the event being reported.

I met a man last weekend who said he had been kicked out of the room Lagorio (a journalist for the New York Press) stayed in when she visited New Orleans. The landlord wanted to make more rent money during Mardi Gras. Lagorio is not to blame for this, but her presence nonetheless changed her surroundings. (I felt no pity for the guy; he was an annual tourist himself who told me New Orleans feels a lot “safer” now). By coming to New Orleans, she is distorting the story she will be reporting on.

Sometimes the distortion has a positive effect. Charity Hospital employees tried unsuccessfully for hours to evacuate critically ill patients from the rooftop of Tulane University Hospital until Dr. Sanjay Guptra of CNN News showed up. According to Charity employees who were on the rooftop, as soon as they saw news cameras Tulane officials let the Charity patients onto the helicopters.

When reporters came into Charity hospital to interview people waiting anxiously to be evacuated, nurses told the cameras that they were running out of food. While it is true that the food was being rationed and the nurses were giving each other IV's because of dehydration, they were not running out of food. But they thought they were running out of food. When their perceptions were reported they seemed like truths.

When scientists conduct experiments they allow for error in their observations with a standard deviation that is calculated into their results. Journalists have to do the same thing. We have to be conscious of our own presence and the role we’re playing in the story, which is why it’s often a good idea to write in the first person. It’s also necessary to interview as many people as possible and avoid using only the catchy quotes. Ultimately, everywhere in life, we need to be aware and respectful of our surroundings.

That said, I am including a bonus report dated February 21 from by Kerry Lee Mansell, a fiction writer, bartender, and costume genius who has lived in New Orleans for seven years. She’s not a journalist, has no pretensions of objectivity, and never intended to publish this email beyond her circle of friends, yet she’s captured the new New Orleans better than anyone else I’ve read.

“Mardi Gras is upon us and will be celebrated despite those who find it galling that we dance in the midst of tragedy. (One of my friends here wondered yesterday whether we shouldn’t cancel Lent instead.) This year I will be painted gold head to toe, dressed as Diana the Huntress in honor of my mother Diane, firing gold glitter into the air with my bow and arrow. Sunday saw the Krewe of Nemesis parading through the destroyed St. Bernard parish so the displaced residents from there could come and celebrate their way of life if only for a day. Last Saturday was the Krewe de Vieux parade, the most satirical of them all, mocking FEMA with signs reading ‘FEMA SAYS BEADS ARE ON THE WAY’. It was wonderful.

I finally have a telephone working at my house almost six months after the event. Magnificent. The Red Cross and the National Guard no longer patrol our neighborhood though there is a large police presence.

For a while I had nothing more to tell the folk outside about what it meant to live here, no words to describe what it felt like, no energy to repeat that we all live here without something. And I didn’t want to share any more of the stories that humble me day in and day out as I talk to those that lost so much. It was simply too sad.

An ex-Army Ranger friend of mine, Kevin, arrived from Colorado yesterday, having lived here in the past and seeing it for the first time. He said that it reminded him mostly of Somalia, the endless broken houses and silt-covered neighborhoods, the trash piled high. He spent the night railing at us all with his anger that in America, this mighty homeland, so little had been done to help. He was already furious at the scurrilous corruption, money being sucked away by those in the know. He was already disappointed in the built-in inefficiency of federal help. We are all too tired to keep up vehemence at the overwhelming neglect, the press having exhausted our outside supporters, most people figuring that the storm is over when it won’t be for a decade.

It isn’t the lack of stores (from the lack of employees, the lack of employees due to the lack of housing, the lack of housing caused by the lack consensus leadership and dispersement of federal funds.) And we are used to power cuts and going twenty miles for groceries.

The silt that chokes us now is emotional. The only time in my life that I can effectively compare it to is 9/11 when for a few days an entire nation walked around in a daze, uncertain of what would happen next if the unbelievable had already occurred. Here that lasted a few weeks at most but it was the only time that I had seen a whole society affected so deeply by a singular event.

The storm has become it’s own mental illness and though we go on making those small decisions about which shirt to wear and life has it’s repetitive normalcy, there is a pall over our town. Everyone is sick. Depression is not a passing state of sadness here, not the usual grief stage of one way of being passing into another. It is epidemic. The storm has broken something in us all.

I have never seen so many versions of depression – the heavy substance abuse, the irrational arguments, the insomnia, the apathy, the paranoia… it has settled on the city like a fog. I don’t expect that ever again in my lifetime that I will live in a place where people are so uniformly hurt to their core. ‘Shell-shocked’ is my Army friend’s word. Surrounded by sadness you don’t realize the delay on your own operating speed until you sit with folk from out of town and they are regular – their minds firing at normal speed.

So my report to you, to spread amongst your friends, is not the heartbreaking losses of life and homes but rather the sanity, the certainty of an entire people. We are the weakest link; we are the ailing member of a pack, the one most likely to be picked off. As such our needs have changed. Whereas before we needed food and toothbrushes and blankets and coffee cups, whereas before it was the screaming shock of a lifestyle wiped away, now the water mark sits high in us all, choking our understanding of ourselves, wiping away the memory of ourselves as the nation’s joy bringers.

I have been blessed. I lost one job and my cat of 12 years. (Heroically ‘saved’ and lost by animal rescuers.) Some of my friends have moved. All the kids are gone as if the storm were a Pied Piper. I have known one suicide, two overdoses and the early deaths of three old-timers unable to sustain the blow. I’m lucky.

My parents have been fantastic; supporting my decision to stay and doing what they can to help me, to remind me that I am loved and okay in spite of storms. My friends from out of town have sent me great provisions and baubles to make me smile, to get me through. (You know who you are!) A few have been to visit which has been heartening. Complete strangers (some Aussies in New York) sent me some money so I had one less concern at a critical time when my head was full and my job was gone. I feel surrounded spiritually and safe in that – my pleas are not for myself, I have everything I need.

My plea for those of you out of town now is that you send what love and prayers you can. That you make sure that you have given what emotional support you can to those you know, and prayers for those you don’t. (Call the ones you know and just say hello.) Spread the word that it is love and hope that we need down here, that what we lack is faith.

We also need people to come and visit, not only to soak up some of the emotional information, but to spread cash around, help kick start our economy. (Ironically the areas that tourists enjoy the most are virtually untouched so for them the change is simply that the crowds are not so dense.)

The older folk here used to say ‘I lived through Hurricane Betsy’ which hit New Orleans in 1965. And I thought that they were talking about staying through the flood waters that sat for ten days, not the shock and grief of the rebuilding. I have new appreciation for what my friends in New York went through once the towers were down and cleared away.

Now we are waiting for time to pass in this city where time has traditionally stood still…

Send us your prayers, come for Jazz Fest, remind your friends of the special soul that New Orleans has, the beating heart of music and European living right here on American soil. Home of jazz and second-lines, birthplace of beignets and sultry summer evenings. Come and dance.

Count your blessings then send us some.

Love Kerry x”