Hurricane season officially starts tomorrow. Finally, the great culmination of CNN’s Hurricane 101 Factoids. The 24-hour news channels of the country will deploy their most adventurous reporters and production teams to brave the storms and give us the news against a backdrop of wind, rain and nearly horizontal palm trees.
What will be the angle this year? Perhaps it will be like the 2004 season, where storm after storm pummeled Florida. The talking heads empathetically wondering aloud how many hurricanes the state could take, while barely concealing their glee that another one was coming. The hurricanes, giant swirling natural phenomena, invoke feelings of real shock and awe. Did God send the hurricanes to punish the gay-friendly culture in Key West? Or is God a Democrat, sending the hurricanes during a presidential race as punishment for Florida ruining the 2000 election? Or did we bring these hurricanes upon ourselves? Maybe we polluted and heated our climate so much that the hurricanes are getting stronger, more frequent and more destructive.
The 24-hour news channels love these storms. They get great storm footage, talk to kooky experts, interview displaced residents, and they don’t have to worry about being fair and balanced, because it’s hard to get the storm’s side of the story. Their giddy enthusiasm for nature’s death and destruction often makes me sick. But I always watch, just like the rest of our nation of gawkers.
For a while it was California weather that made all the headlines: mudslides, fires, sometimes earthquakes. The constant updates and volatile situations are perfect for the 24-hour news cycle. The past few hurricane seasons have proved the perfect long-term stories for this format. So by the time Hurricane Katrina was about to hit, the media was ready. They may be scared to ask the president the tough questions, but they’ll risk their lives in a hurricane zone any day.
But something different happened during Katrina, instead of the usual wash rinse repeat cycle (storm comes through, does damage, dissipates, city cleans up, new hurricane develops). The aftermath of Katrina turned into the ultimate bloody car wreck, and everyone stopped to watch.
Suddenly the summer sensational news format was completely changed. The villain here wasn’t Mother Nature, it was Man. Katrina coverage showed that it was the man-made levees that broke and flooded the city. It was men like Michael Brown who were to blame for the atrocities we all saw on television. And our president, the man supposed to be in charge of it all, didn’t seem to care one bit.
Our government was failing, and our media were at their best. That fourth branch, the nation’s watchdogs, who for a long time had simply repeated the talking points of an
administration that had perfected spin, were finally doing their job. The American media could tell the American people what was really going on, simply because they were there and the government wasn’t.
But as the new hurricane season looms closer, I wonder if the lessons learned from Katrina will be forgotten. The devastation of New Orleans dropped out of the news cycle when hurricane season ended, as if the storm had passed.
The storm hasn’t passed. I went to New Orleans over the weekend, and windows are still missing, stores are still closed. The streetcars aren’t running, but luckily the busses are free. There is no recycling; the city can’t afford it. Fast-food restaurants are paying $10/hour because the people who normally work those jobs have been displaced. The lower ninth ward looks like a ghost town. FEMA trailers sit in front of gutted houses, or in makeshift trailer parks on street corners.
Abandoned houses are still filled with the rotting, molding possessions of families who fled for their lives. Charity workers clean out these houses in gas masks and leave 10 foot piles of a life’s worth of belongings in the front yard for FEMA to pick up a week later. The smell can be unbearable. A parking lot full of dusty, flood-damaged cars sits under the I-10. And another hurricane could hit this summer.
Hurricane Katrina was a turning point in our country. We saw our fellow people stranded, screaming and dying. The federal government that had appeared so strong for so long was suddenly revealed to be an ineffective collection of politicians, more concerned with their portrayal in the media than media reports that noted people were dying in the streets. We realized that the “father knows best” president was really more of a deadbeat dad when we really needed him. Kanye West said George Bush doesn’t care about black people. I think he just doesn’t care about poor people. Until Katrina, Bush probably didn’t even know where they were. He didn’t spend that much time on them.
We hear a few Katrina stories every now and then. Money for the reconstruction of the Gulf Coast has been wasted and corrupted. The president knew ahead of time that the levees could break. Ray Nagin was re-elected mayor. But we don’t know what is really going on there. If it’s not on television, it didn’t happen.
So even though it wouldn’t be the best for ratings, this is what I hope this year’s hurricane season is like: The storms are small or weak enough by the time they make landfall not to cause very much damage. With a lack of sensational weather footage, reporters are forced to go back to the Gulf Coast and report on the aftermath of last year’s season. Katrina is back in the news. The long-term story of the great deluge gets the staying power it needs, and the informed citizenry of America takes its new knowledge to heart and insist upon a real plan of action for the area, not just for reconstruction, but for future storms.
And the news will go back to being a public service instead of a political tool – all 24 hours of it.