Though many feel that Hurricane Katrina has brought humanity back into journalism there are still a lot of writers out there who are quick to point fingers and joyfully play the blame game.
New York Times columnists such as Maureen Dowd, Bob Herbert, and Paul Krugman seemed positively elated to pin the Bush administration for the number of floating corpses even before half of them had actually stopped breathing. What was the hurry?
Howard Kurtz writes - “Good God, what is wrong with these people? Will they ever learn to see somebody else's misfortune as something more than their political opportunity?†- and I couldn’t agree more.
On one hand you have environmentalists screaming global warming!
And on the other hand people blaming the Iraq war.
Is it too much to ask these writers to worry about the struggling survivors before sending the guilty party to court?
The fact remains that New Orleans was a mess even before Katrina hit. Nicholas Lemann writes in the September 12th issue of the New Yorker that:
“New Orleans is, and for a long time as been, the opposite of a city that works. It perennially ranks near the bottom on practically every basic measure of civic health….. after the levees broke, we watched every single system associated with the life of a city fail: the electric grid, the water system, the sewer system, the transportation system, the telephone system, the police force, the fire department, the hospitals, even the system for disposing of corpses.â€
Lemann goes on to say that even FEMA was “positively helpful next to Louisiana’s governor, who cried and said that we should all pray, and New Orleans’ mayor, who told citizens they should evacuate but didn’t say how, predicted a second major flood, which didn’t materialize, sniped at the federal authorities, and kept reminding everyone that the situation was desperate.â€
Whose fault is it that the officials elected into office in Louisiana weren’t prepared for the pressure? Who put these people into office? What one person can be blamed that the chain of command from local government to federal government was a communication failure at best? The ball was dropped - but not by one person alone.
Claims have been made that hurricane Katrina has brought the emotions and humanity back into journalism, but there are always those writers out there who’d rather place blame first and worry about the victims and facts later.
Christie Rizk @ September 11, 2005 - 7:42pm
I agree with you that New Orleans certainly had myriad problems before Hurricane Katrina hit. Time magazine featured an article in their September 12 issue by Sonja Steptoe in which she says,
And though the victims need to be looked after before anything else is done, I feel that even the writers who are placing blame first are at least shedding light on problems that have gone too long ignored.
»