In the year since Hurricane Katrina ravaged New Orleans, the blame game for the pathetic government response has been played repeatedly. Kanye West blamed President Bush. Many blamed Mayor Ray Nagin. Gulf Coast residents blamed the Federal Government. And members of Congress blamed local and state officials.
Now more and more people are blaming the media. They blame the media for not reporting about Katrina's continued devastation of New Orleans and the neighboring areas. This criticism is misguided. If anything deserves blame, it's the attention span and interests of the American people.
Baton Rouge Advocate columnist Danny Heitman wrote one of the most critical columns about the media's disregard for the recovery last week in The Christian Science Monitor. Heitman accused the national media of losing interest in covering the rebuilding in the Gulf Coast, writing, "It is perhaps because journalism, by its nature, sees the world as a series of dramatically packaged episodes rather than the dry continuum that a recovery from disaster can be."
Heitman is wrong. The problem isn't with journalism or journalists. Journalism is a competitive business and many decisions in television news are made based on ratings. Simply put, the American people don't want to hear about New Orleans and its recovery on a daily basis.
CNN's Anderson Cooper has visited the Gulf Coast several times in the past year, even broadcasting his nightly show, "Anderson Cooper 360," from New Orleans. His ratings, however, have not been demonstratively higher when he broadcasts from the Gulf Coast. In fact, he still finishes second in the ratings to New York-based Fox News.
Americans would rather hear Nancy Grace or Greta Van Susteren go on about the latest blond teenage girl kidnapped. Both Grace and Van Susteren got some of their best ratings when covering the Natalee Holloway case - ratings that surpassed Cooper's.
Americans are captivated by crime and kidnapping. The wall-to-wall media coverage of the arrest of John Karr in the JonBenét Ramsey case two weeks ago is a perfect example. Ratings were up for most newscasts when they talked about the Ramsey case, and a media circus flocked to Boulder, Colo., to find out that Karr was just a deranged individual, not a murderer.
Critics like Heitman may argue it's the media's responsibility to show the American people images they'd prefer not to see. But it's not the media that's bored with the recovery; it's the American people.
Benjamin van der Horst is a College sophomore from Cincinnati.
This column ran in the Emory Wheel on 9/5/06. For more go to www.emorywheel.com
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