Katrina and the Press, Twenty Years On

Twenty years ago this week, Hurricane Katrina slammed into the Gulf Coast and caused devastation in New Orleans and beyond. The rest, as they say, is history. Recently, an inevitable slew of anniversary coverage has mined it in all sorts of areas, from the impact of the storm on New Orleans schools to the role of restaurants in rebuilding life in the city. Chelsea Brasted—a journalist with the New Orleans arm of Axios, who was fifteen when Katrina hit—listed as many as seven new documentaries about Katrina (and that was without counting a buzzy Netflix series, executive-produced by Spike Lee, that will drop on Wednesday). “For people who were directly impacted,” Katrina “can just be painful—or even impossible—to relive,” Brasted wrote. Ultimately, though, the profusion of content is “as it should be—we may never have a full picture of that storm and the recovery it required.”

Journalists who reported on Katrina at the time have also been reflecting on their experiences (another staple of news coverage whenever the anniversary of a major story rolls around). WLOX—a TV station based in Biloxi, Mississippi, just along the coast from New Orleans—convened a discussion among current and former staffers who were on the ground during the storm; they initially expected that Katrina would pass the area by, before having to hunker down and then come out to report on the aftermath. One of the journalists, Trang Pham-Bui, recalled that “one of the hardest things for me was juggling my emotions”; she was cut off from her family, so much so that she didn’t know if they were still alive, but knew that she “had a job to do, because we had so much coverage coming in from New Orleans, and we have so much devastation in our home towns, and I knew that I had to get out there and tell our story, give our people a voice.” Bill Snyder, an anchor, recalled staying on air for around two weeks straight. “Those were the best days of journalism ever,” he said.