No shelter from the storm

South Atlantic Quarterly

Volumn 106, Issue 4, 2007, Pages 683-708

  Stabile, Carol A ^a  

^a NONE

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 60950566224     PISSN: 00382876     EISSN: 15278026     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1215/00382876-2007-041     Document Type: Review

References (74)

1. Brian Williams, NBC Nightly News, September 1, 2005, and September 2, 2005. Subsequent references to NBC Nightly News will be shortened to NBC NN.
2. See Douglas Brinkley, The Great Deluge: Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans, and the Mississippi Gulf Coast (New York: William Morrow, 2006), 509. Hereafter cited parenthetically as Deluge.
3. and David Mattingly to Aaron Brown, CNN Evening News, September 1, 2005.
4. "State and County QuickFacts," U.S. Census Bureau, http://quickfacts.census.gov/qfd/ states/22/2255000.html (accessed March 31, 2007).
5. The issue of interoperability of communications was a key concern of the 9/11 Commission as well, which concluded that "the lack of communication and coordination," particularly systemic problems with radio communication, among the FDNY, the NYPD, and the PAPD, cost lives. The 9/11 Commission Report: Final Report of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks upon the United States, Washington, DC, www.gpoaccess.gov/911/ pdf/fullreport.pdf (accessed March 31, 2007).
6. "Reports of Missing and Deceased," Louisiana Department of Health and Hospitals, August 2, 2006, www.dhh.louisiana.gov/offices/page.asp?ID= 192&Detail=5348 (accessed March 31, 2007).
7. For a range of perspectives on poverty, women, race, and the welfare state, see Mimi Abramovitz, Regulating the Lives of Women: Social Welfare Policy from Colonial Times to the Present, rev. ed. (Boston: South End Press, 1996);
8. Linda Gordon, Pitied hut Not Entitled: Single Mothers and the History of Welfare (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995);
9. Michael B. Katz, ed., The "Underclass" Debate: Views from History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993);
10. Gwendolyn Mink, The Wages of Motherhood: Inequality in the Welfare State, 1917-1942 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996);
11. Jill Quadagno, The Color of Welfare: How Racism Undermined the War on Poverty (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994);
12. Dorothy Roberts, Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty (New York: Vintage, 1998);
13. and Rickie Solinger, Beggars and Choosers: How the Politics of Choice Shapes Adoption, Abortion, and Welfare in the United States (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2001).
14. For work that speaks directly to the demonization of black urban poor people, see Robin D. G. Kelley, Yo' Mama's Disfunktional! Fighting the Culture Wars in Urban America (Boston: Beacon Press, 1997).
15. For scholarship on the myriad links between crime news and African Americans, see David C. Anderson, Crime and the Politics of Hysteria: How the Willie Horton Story Changed American Justice (New York: Random House, 1995);
16. Travis L. Dixon, "Racialized Portrayals of Reporters and Criminals on Local Television News," in Race/Gender/Media: Considering Diversity across Audiences, Content, and Producers, ed. Rebecca Ann Lind (Boston: Pearson Education, 2003), 132-39;
17. Travis L. Dixon and Daniel Linz, "Overrepresentation and Underrepresentation of African Americans and Latinos as Lawbreakers on Television News," Journal of Communication 50.2 (2000): 131-54;
18. Travis L. Dixon and Daniel Linz, "Race and the Misrepresentation of Victimization on Local Television News," Communication Research 27 (2000): 547-73;
19. Robert M. Entman, "Modern Racism and the Images of Blacks in Local Television News," Critical Studies in Mass Communication 7.4 (December 1990): 332-45;
20. Robert M. Entman and Andrew Rojecki, The Black Image in the White Mind: Media and Race in America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001);
21. Stuart C. Hall et al., Policing the Crisis: Mugging, the State, and Law and Order (New York: Holmes and Meier Publishers, 1978);
22. Mary Beth Oliver, "Caucasian Viewers' Memory of Black and White Criminal Suspects in the News," Journal of Communication 49.3 (1999): 46-60;
23. Mary Beth Oliver et al., "The Face of Crime: Viewers' Memory of Race-Related Facial Features of Individuals Pictured in the News," Journal of Communication 54. 1 (2004): 88-104;
24. Jimmie L. Reeves and Richard Campbell, Cracked Coverage: Television News, the Anti-Cocaine Crusade, and the Reagan Legacy (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1994);
25. Dennis Rome, Black Demons: The Media's Depiction of the African American Male Criminal Stereotype (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2004);
26. and Katheryn K. Russell, The Color of Crime: Racial Hoaxes, White Fear, Black Protectionism, Police Harassment, and Other Macroaggressions (New York: New York University Press, 1998).
27. For just a few elaborations of this point, see Gerald J. Baldasty, The Commercialization of News in the Nineteenth Century (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1992);
28. Gerald J. Baldasty, "The Rise of the News as a Commodity: Business Imperatives and the Press in the Nineteenth Century," in Ruthless Criticism: New Perspectives in U.S. Communication History, ed. William S. Solomon and Robert W. McChesney (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 98-121;
29. Gerald J. Baldasty and Jeffrey B. Rutenbeck, "Money, Politics, and Newspapers: The Business Environment of Press Partisanship in the Late 19th Century," Journalism History 15.2-3 (Summer/Autumn 1988): 60-68;
30. John C. Nerone, "The Mythology of the Penny Press," Critical Studies in Mass Communication 4 (1987): 376-404;
31. Michael Schudson, Discovering the News (New York: Basic Books, 1978);
32. and Andie Tucher, Froth and Scum: Truth, Beauty, Goodness, and the Ax Murder in America's First Mass Medium (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994). 10
33. David T. Z. Mindich, Just the Facts: How "Objectivity" Came to Define American Journalism (New York: New York University Press, 1998).
34. The points I make about conflicts with the national news media over whether this was a disaster story or a crime story are based on my analysis of news broadcasts obtained from the Vanderbilt Television News Archives (Heard Libraries, Nashville, TN, http://tvnews.vanderbilt.edu) from August 29 through September 2, 2005, both on CNN and on NBC News, although the trends that I observe on these networks are nearly identical to those on Fox News and ABC News, and on CBS News, respectively. The decision to focus on CNN in particular resulted from the fact that Fox News is widely recognized as being ideological, while CNN has the reputation (within the television news industry, at least) of being more "objective." Moreover, CNN's coverage of Hurricane Katrina earned it a George Foster Peabody Award in April 2006. The tensions between anchors and reporters noted in my analysis of CNN are virtually identical to the tensions that led to the much-publicized arguments between reporters and anchors on Fox News.
35. One of the Museum of Television & Radio's University Seminar Series, which followed the making of one evening's CBS News broadcast, offered an excellent case study of the drive for narrative coherence that goes into the making of a national network news broadcast. Dan Rather et al., moderated by Robert M. Batscha, "CBS Evening News with Dan Rather," University Seminar Series, Museum of Television & Radio, November 18, 1997.
36. Mike Davis, Late Victorian Holocausts: El Nino Famines and the Making of the Third World (New York: Verso, 2002);
37. Jared Diamond, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed (New York: Viking, 2004);
38. and Vandana Shiva, "Terre Madré: Women and the Environment," keynote address, National Women's Studies Association Conference, Orlando, Florida, June 2005.
39. Shiva, "Terre Madré."
40. Eric Klinenberg, Heat Wave: A Social Autopsy of Disaster in Chicago (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 18, 11.
41. Carl Quintanilla, NBC NN, August 29, 2005.
42. Michael Parenti, "How the Free Market Killed New Orleans," Humanist (November/ December 2005), www.findarticles.com/articles/mi-m1374/is-6- 65/ai-n15893097 (accessed June 6, 2006).
43. The plight of incarcerated women, juveniles, and men in Orleans Parish has received scant attention from the mainstream media. Before Katrina, Orleans Parish Prison was considered one of the most poorly managed prisons in the country. It had no plans for evacuation of prisoners, who were left locked in cells for days, without food or water. See "ACLU Report Details Horrors Suffered by Orleans Parish Prisoners in Wake of Hurricane Katrina," American Civil Liberties Union, 2006, www.aclu.org/prison/conditions/ 26421prs20060810.html (accessed August 28, 2006).
44. Williams, NBC NN, August 29, 2005;
45. and Aaron Brown, NewsNight with Aaron Brown, CNN, August 29-September 2, 2005 (subsequent references to NewsNight with Aaron Brown will be shortened to NNAB).
46. Brown, who had had "ratings woes" on NNAB for months before Hurricane Katrina, was dismissed by CNN in November 2005. See Peter Johnson, "Cooper to Replace Brown on CNN's 'NewsNight,'" USA Today, November 2, 2005, www.usatoday.com/life/columnist/ mediarnix/2005-II-02-media-mix-x.htm.
47. Brown, NNAB, August 30, 2005.
48. Jennifer Myerle, NNAB, September 30, 2005. Tonette Jackson had indeed died during the storm. Hardy Jackson's story received wide media coverage, and as a result of this, an anonymous benefactor bought a house in Atlanta for Jackson and his children.
49. Adaora Udoji, NNAB, August 30, 2005;
50. Fort Apache, the Bronx, dir. Daniel Pétrie, 1981;
51. Chris Lawrence, NNAB, September 1, 2005;
52. A total of six people died in the Superdome: four from natural causes, one from an overdose, and the sixth a suicide. Four bodies were recovered from the convention center, only one the victim of an apparent murder. See Brian Thevenot and Gordon Russell, "Reports of Anarchy at the Superdome Overstated," Seattle Times, September 26, 2005, http://seattletimes. nwsource.com/html/nationworld/2002520986-katmyth26.html.
53. Lawrence, NNAB, August 31, 2005.
54. Koinange and Brown, NNAB, September 2, 2005.
55. Mary Landrieu, interviewed by Anderson Cooper, Anderson Cooper 360, CNN, September 1, 2005. Some give this moment the credit for Cooper's promotion as anchor of his own news show on CNN, Anderson Cooper 360, which replaced NNAB.
56. Sean Hannity and Shepard Smith, Hannity & Colmes, Fox, September 1, 2005.
57. Don Teague, NBC NN, September 1, 2005.
58. Udoji and Brown, NNAB, August 30, 2005.
59. and Coleman Warner and Robert Travis Scott, "Where They Died," Times Picayune, October 23, 2005, www.nola.com/frontpage/t-p/index.ssf?/base/ news-4/113005097377980.xml. Defenses of the government's refusal to act also contained racist overtones. When asked if, with the benefit of hindsight, the government should have assumed responsibility for the evacuation effort, Admiral James Loy (ret.), deputy secretary of the Department of Homeland Security from 2003 to 2005, told Frontline correspondent and producer Martin Smith that it would have been "Orwellian" to have the federal government assume responsibility for evacuation, echoing the calls for states' rights that accompanied segregationists' battles with the civil rights movement in the 1960s. "The Storm," Frontline, PBS, written by Martin Smith, directed by Tim Mangini, November 22, 2005.
60. Michael Lewis, "Wading Toward Home," New York Times Magazine, October 9, 2005, 49.
61. On the privatization of security forces in New Orleans, see Jeremy Scahill, "Blackwater Down," Nation, October 10, 2005, www.thenation.com/doc/20051010/scahill.
62. Ida B. Wells, Southern Horrors and Other Writings: The Anti-Lynching Campaign of Ida B. Wells, 1892-1900 (Boston: Bedford Press, 1997), 52.
63. Geraldo Rivera, Hannity & Colmes, Fox, September 2, 2005;
64. Alan Gould, interviewed by Brown, NNAB, September 2, 2005;
65. Eddie Compass, interviewed by Oprah Winfrey, Oprah Winfrey Show, September 6, 2005;
66. and John Burnett, "More Stories Emerge of Rapes in Post-Katrina Chaos," Morning Edition, NPR, December 21, 2005, www.npr.org/templates/ story/story .php?storyld=5063796. Some later argued that Compass had repeated these rumors in a desperate attempt to secure aid for the victims. Compass, an African American man, insisted that he believed these rumors, testifying to the power an institutional position can exercise over individuals.
67. Michael Eric Dyson, Come Hell or High Water: Hurricane Katrina and the Color of Disaster (New York: Basic Books, 2006), 172.
68. Kanye West, A Concert for Hurricane Relief, NBC, September 2, 2005.
69. Pierre Bourdieu et al., The Weight of the World: Social Suffering in Contemporary Society, trans. Priscilla Parkhurst Ferguson et al. (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999), 2.
70. Howard Kurtz, "At Last, Reporters' Feelings Rise to the Surface," Washington Post, September 4, 2005.
71. "Rice: Race Not an Issue in Efforts," CBS News, September 2, 2005, www.cbsnews.com/ Stories/2005/09/04/katrina/main815171.shtml.
72. Unlike television news, other audiences proved capable of expressing their rage and disgust at Bush administration officials who callously continued their vacations while ignoring the suffering of New Orleanians. Audiences booed Rice at a Broadway performance of Spamalot, and while she was shopping at Ferragamo's, an unidentified shopper was said to have shouted at her, "How dare you shop for shoes while thousands are dying and homeless!" Whether or not this last item is true, its popularity on the Internet and in popular culture illustrates its resonance for many Americans. See George Rush and Joanna Molloy, "As South Drowns, Rice Soaks in N.Y.," New York Daily News, September 2, 2005.
73. See also Duncan Campbell and Gary Younge, "Empty, Ruined, and Desperate: Military Takes Over as Ghost City Faces New Horrors," Guardian, September 5, 2005.
74. In addition to Rice's escapades, Vice President Dick Cheney did not interrupt his fly-fishing trip to deal with the disaster. During a photo op in Gulfport, Mississippi, one resident expressed his outrage by telling the vice president, "Go fuck yourself," which he repeated a second time in case Cheney had not heard him. Ben Lee, in Spike Lee, When the Levees Broke, act 3, 2006.