I spent a good part of this past Sunday watching coverage of hurricane Katrina. In the early part of the week, I had been avoiding it, largely because I can't stand the way CNN becomes 'Hurricane Headquarters' during hurricane season. It's yet another example of how the news turns dramatic events into huge marketing campaigns, hyping their own name and waiting with baited breath for something horrible to happen. I hate it. But as the reports came in on Tuesday, and I realized how bad things really were, that it wasn't all hype, I couldn't help but watch and, like the rest of the world, feel terrible for all those people who have been displaced, hurt, or killed by this.

The weird thing about all this, to me, is that before the hurricane struck, I had read some really scary articles describing how the levees in New Orleans could break or be overrun in a category 5 hurricane and how, if this happened, the city could basically be destroyed. Unfortunately, with the way the news media likes to over-dramatize every. single. thing. that happens these days, I was left with the not-uncommon feeling I get after watching or reading the news that this is probably something that theoretically could happen, and therefore the news had latched on to it, in the absense of an actual story, and made a story out of that possibility. Here is a blurb from one CNN article on Sunday, August 28th:

In worst-case scenarios, most of New Orleans would end up under 15 feet of water, without electricity, clean water and sewage for as long as six months. Even pumping the water out could take as long as four months to get started because the massive pumps that would do the job would be underwater.

And here's another one from Monday morning:

Flooding from Hurricane Katrina's Monday landfall could wreak catastrophe on New Orleans, overwhelming the city's water and sewage systems and leaving survivors in a bowl of toxic soup, a top hurricane expert said.

Now I read these things, along with thousands of other people I bet, and thought, "Man, that would be horrible. But could this really happen, or is that the media overhyping a situation again?" I think it's hyperbolic phrases like 'toxic soup' that immediately set off alarms in my head and make me 'tune out.' But if we had all read, Drowning New Orleans, by Mark Fischetti in 2001, we might have said, "Hell yes, that could happen!" Likewise, if we had been a part of Coast 2050, we might have said, "You're not kiddin' toxic soup!" But a good many of us did not read or take part in those things, including probably a good majority of our existing government. (By the way, there's a good NY Times article about the history of this issue, also by Mark Fishetti. Also, Google found a site called 'coast2050.gov,' but it won't seem to come up for me today.)

So I think on Monday as the hurricane made landfall many of us began to anticipate the headlines: "New Orleans Dodges Bullet." I think even the media half expected to run that headline. And perhaps there was a collective, National pause as we all waited for it. Only that's not what happened. This time, the worst DID happen, and I think everybody, including the news media took a moment before realizing that was the case. This might partially explain the delayed response by the federal government, but certainly doesn't excuse it. All I can say is I know I've been much more suspicious of the news media in the past several years, waiting for the next cry of 'wolf!' and the whole hurricane Katrina coverage was no exception.

Don't get me wrong - I'm not trying to be an apologist for the federal government here by calling attention to our chicken-little news culture. I definitely think people in our government fucked up. Many people. And that does make me a bit aggravated. But the fact is that it's not just the response to the actual disaster that was botched. This entire situation has been botched at least as far back as 1998 and probably further. So before people go pointing fingers here and there we should all do a 360-degree turn and realize just how many directions we could point.

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