The 1980s gave birth to 24-hour cable news, and this changed journalism from reporting facts to capturing and entertaining an audience. This cultural shift created the need for "news" agencies to escalate fairly routine stories into events, and this has led to credibility issues surrounding television news stories in general. Given this background, the media needs to look in the mirror when it comes to placing blame for the deaths associated with Hurricane Katrina.
Case in point: in 1990, a scientist named Iben Browning speculated that the New Madrid fault was due to create a major earthquake. He embellished his prediction by stating he believed this would occur in December of that year. The town of New Madrid, Missouri, was suddenly the focal point of every major news agency in the country. CNN, NBC, ABC and CBS sent news crews to New Madrid to report on any tremors. Of course, newsmen had to maintain interest in the story, so they went around interviewing citizens. They ultimately fomented mass hysteria from Missouri east through Illinois and Indiana, locations through which the New Madrid faultline ran.
Based upon nothing more than speculation combined with the attention this story was getting, Evansville Indiana public schools were closed the week of December 5. Eyewitnesses reported seeing the Mississippi River "bubbling." Many citizens of New Madrid began stockpiling food, water and batteries, anticipating the total destruction of their town. And then, on December 5, 1990 ...... nothing happened.
One of the common themes expressed in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina is that many of the people who stayed in New Orleans didn't believe the news reports regarding the gravity of the situation. They didn't buy that Katrina was, in fact, a level 5 hurricane, they didn't believe that a "mandatory evacuation" was really necessary, they pretty much discounted most of what the news media broadcast 48 hours prior to Katrina's assault. What was their rationale? They had heard a lot of this "stuff" before, and it never amounted to a hill of beans. They gambled that the odds were against the news media having their facts straight; unfortunately in this instance, they lost that bet.
Television news broadcasters have to take the blame for this. Far from the days when Walter Cronkite was considered the most dependable, reliable source of information ("...and that's the way it s..."), today's television "journalists" have created skepticism in the minds of the audience. The CBS debacle with forged documents, the NBC non-news story on GMC trucks using trumped-up crash data and whistleblower Bernard Goldberg's bestselling books (which basically confirmed what the "silent majority" always believed) have chipped the veneer of "objectivity" and "just the facts, ma'am" away from television newscasters and placed their reports in the same category as those of night-owl radio personality Art Bell or the National Enquirer. Television news has slowly morphed into snippets and factoids that separate the commercials. Stories about big business, Iraq and yes, the weather are viewed with the same jaundiced perspective as those late-night interviews with individuals claiming to have been abducted by UFOs. Viewers take everything they say with more than a grain of salt, seek out alternative sources of information, or in the case of New Orleans, just ignore it all and do what had always worked in the past.
In determined adherence to political correctness and the pursuit of ratings, television news created the conditions that allowed citizens of New Orleans to feel safe and content in ignoring storm warnings broadcast over the airwaves by the city's leadership. If any lesson is to be learned from this tragedy, it's that television news broadcasters need to clean up their collective acts, learn once again to report the facts and leave editorials to bloggers and skilled news analysts, and regain the credibility that they willingly threw away during the past generation. Broadcast journalists now have more blood on their hands than either President Bush or Osama bin Laden. Perhaps a war on bias and blarney would be more appropriate than a war on terror; it could only save American lives.
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