How the media shaped Katrina

Last week saw the fifth anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, the most destructive storm in U.S. history. It hit the gulf coast Aug. 29, 2005, leaving more than 1,800 dead and $81 billion in property damage.

Katrina the disaster was also Katrina the media story - a silver lining with a storm cloud attached. "It brought all the technology of live coverage to bear," says Richard J. Goedkoop, associate professor of communication at La Salle University. Journalists did some heroic things on behalf of victims.

But it was also a study in the pitfalls of herd reporting. "Disaster myth ran amok," says Kathleen Tierney, professor of sociology at the University of Colorado in Boulder. Coverage missed glaring truths and may have perpetuated stereotypes that hurt victims. It was, she says, a crisis of "framing" the disaster through ready-made cliches.

High-tech pyrotechnics. Since 1980, when CNN, the first all-news-all-the-time channel, went live, many wars and disasters have challenged the 24/7 media, from Operation Desert Storm in 1991 to the Indian Ocean earthquake and tsunami of 2004.

Katrina was different. It was right here at home. And we could see it coming across the gulf, hanging fire, then wheeling its malevolent eye northward to New Orleans. Mapped and measured in a wealth of satellite photos and weather stories, Katrina was a media star long before it made landfall.

When it did, we saw long shots of burst levees, shots from helicopter, boat, handheld cameras, aerial shots panning miles of devastated coast, exhausted reporters surrounded by refugees. In the sky, on the water, in the Superdome, the TV eye followed the story from New Orleans to Biloxi, Miss., to Houston to Washington and back.

Goedkoop says, "It was instantaneous, because it had to be, unedited because events were happening so fast."

Advocacy and helping. The extremities of Katrina flushed reporters out of their comfort zones. Many arrived well ahead of relief efforts. Outraged at the slow governmental response, some became advocates for the victims.

CNN's Anderson Cooper, reporting from devastated Bay St. Louis, Miss., cried out, "People, it is desperate here," and demanded of U.S. Sen. Mary Landrieu (D., La.), "Do you get the anger that's out here?" National Public Radio's Robert Siegel challenged then-Department of Homeland Security head Michael Chertoff, who was downplaying bad news: "But, Mr. Secretary . . . these aren't rumors."