Why is it so hard to get news on NOLa??
Aug. 31st, 2005 11:15 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dreamsharkA friend called me late last night, distraught, because she'd heard that the levees were breaking and New Orleans was almost entirely under water. I turned on the tv and skimmed through all the broadcast stations (I don't have cable) and there was no indication that ANYTHING was happening anywhere. Sitcom reruns on the commercial channels, something intensely boring and vaguely nature-related on public television. No news crawl, nothing. I went to the CNN website and they had pretty much the same news and pictures they'd been showing all day - outlying areas flooded, long shots of the Superdome with the outer skin flaking off by no water nearby, etc. Nothing about levees breaking. So I talked my friend into believing that nothing had changed and went to bed.
The morning paper confirmed that she was essentially right. 80% of the city was now submerged. Canal Street was, well, a canal. Severe damage in the French Quarter, giant trees torn out by the roots in Jackson Square. Oh my God!! I turned on the radio on my way to work, and again, NOTHING. The only station that even acknowledged that one of our great cities was being devastated was MPR, and they just had an interview with some jackass who was intoning about disaster relief and risk management in the abstract with barely an acknowledgement of the fact that a disaster was currently unfolding.
What is going on here? I realize that we're all suffering from hurricane numbness after what happened to Florida last year, but the magnitude of this is beyond any of those storms. Katrina was 200 miles wide. Hundreds of thousands of American citizens are homeless, hundreds dead (at the least). And the levees are crumbling around one of our most beloved historic cities, with 10,000 refugees huddled in an unreachable and leaky shelter in the middle of rising waters. And the same tv stations that will run a 2-hour continuous-loop screen inset about a thunderstorm in Mower County don't even turn on a news crawl?
Is it because these people are... Southernors?
The morning paper confirmed that she was essentially right. 80% of the city was now submerged. Canal Street was, well, a canal. Severe damage in the French Quarter, giant trees torn out by the roots in Jackson Square. Oh my God!! I turned on the radio on my way to work, and again, NOTHING. The only station that even acknowledged that one of our great cities was being devastated was MPR, and they just had an interview with some jackass who was intoning about disaster relief and risk management in the abstract with barely an acknowledgement of the fact that a disaster was currently unfolding.
What is going on here? I realize that we're all suffering from hurricane numbness after what happened to Florida last year, but the magnitude of this is beyond any of those storms. Katrina was 200 miles wide. Hundreds of thousands of American citizens are homeless, hundreds dead (at the least). And the levees are crumbling around one of our most beloved historic cities, with 10,000 refugees huddled in an unreachable and leaky shelter in the middle of rising waters. And the same tv stations that will run a 2-hour continuous-loop screen inset about a thunderstorm in Mower County don't even turn on a news crawl?
Is it because these people are... Southernors?
