PressEthic

While trolling the many, many articles about Katrina, I noticed something: more than a few reporters have described it as a storm of “biblical proportions”; of “biblical scope”; as a “biblical tragedy”. The NY Times, in fact, mentioned “biblical” in eight articles between August 27 and September 14. The Washington Post mentioned it in six articles. Here are few snippets:

From the Post: “As a good American, you no doubt have been worried sick for years about the levees around New Orleans. Or you've been worried at least since you read that official report back in August 2001 -- the one that ranked a biblical flood of the Big Easy as one of our top three potential national emergencies.”

From the Times: “In its place was a partly submerged city of abandoned homes and ruined businesses, of bodies in attics or floating in deserted streets, of misery that had driven most of its nearly 500,000 residents into a diaspora of biblical proportions.”

Ironically, the Times-Picayune hasn’t mentioned “biblical” once—at least in the 18 articles it ran about Katrina between August 27 and August 29, after which point it presumably lost contact with LexisNexis (a Google search and a search of the Picayune’s website didn’t turn anything up either).

Perhaps it isn’t so easy to say when you’re up to your ears in “biblical” waters.