reed magazine logowinter2006

Covering Katrina

On Taking It Personally...

As Katrina took aim at New Orleans, I assumed I would remain cool and professional whatever the toll. After all, I was hurricane-hardened. I had chased several, including Andrew when it slammed Franklin, Louisiana, in 1992. But as Katrina’s epic tragedy unfolded, I was gradually overwhelmed by my city’s descent into apocalypse: the freight-train roar of the wind; the insidious and unstoppable rising water; the haze of unchecked fires, widespread looting, and lawlessness; the masses of desperate evacuees; and, finally, death, depopulation, and military takeover.

Instinct and journalistic experience carried me for that harrowing, exhausting, but intensely wired first week, when it actually seemed plausible that my home for the past 20 years would become the next Atlantis.

Months later, my role in chronicling the city’s uphill struggle to recover was a bit more deliberate, but one thing hadn’t changed: There was no way to separate personal feelings from professional responsibilities. Our house had a blue tarp instead of a roof. I still drove past massive debris piles on my way to work. There were rank refrigerators littering our block. Entire neighborhoods were dark and empty. Most schools were closed, many of our favorite stores and restaurants were shuttered, tens of thousands of families—including some of our friends and most of our neighbors—were still scattered around the country.

Those of us who remain are forced to witness a once-great, but always fragile city slowly strangled by government foot-dragging.

If any story exposed the myth that journalism is supposed to be objective, this was it. In my side gig as an instructor at Tulane University, I always tell students that for all of journalism’s lofty aspirations, objectivity is humanly impossible. A noble goal, perhaps, but a goal that can never be attained. Journalists can and should achieve fairness, balance, and accuracy in every story. But a reporter cannot block out his or her biases, experiences, and gut-level emotions.

The devastating one-two punch of Katrina and Rita hammered that lesson home for me, and it posed a new question: what’s wrong with subjectivity in journalism anyway? It works in other Western democracies, where most newspapers openly stake out some wavelength along the political spectrum. It’s intellectually honest. And it harkens to the best traditions of advocacy journalism.

If any place needed an advocate after August 29, it was New Orleans.

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