Reporting America’s Story

"NBC Nightly News" anchor Brian Williams, a standout during Hurricane Katrina, visited "The Daily Show" last week and detailed his harrowing experience covering the storm. His voice still edged with the indignation viewers witnessed in those broadcasts, Williams eventually landed on what dismayed him most about the government’s torpid response. Noting he’d been in "lousy" places before, like Iraq, and had seen horrible things, he went on to say the difference here was “these were Americans.”

CNN’s Anderson Cooper, another anchor noteworthy for his no-nonsense coverage of Katrina, also expressed a similar view while being profiled in the NY Times on Monday. “I have been tearing up on this story more than any story I’ve worked on. I can’t really explain why that is.” He added, “It’s not hard to be moved. The fact that it is in the United States, for me, added a layer and dimension to the story.”

A common argument for this bias centers on the reflexive notion that we should feel greater empathy toward our fellow countrymen. Proud to be American. Just as, say, an Italian citizen might be proud to be Italian. One man’s xenophobia is another’s patriotism? Fine. But where is the line drawn? Should the mainstream media make such distinctions for us in the way they report - or decide not to report - a story? And when does national pride determine whose suffering and loss of life we see on the nightly news and covers of newspapers and magazines?

Here in the States, we are conditioned to live in a vacuum, to see America as “the world” and an American life as somehow more valuable. We hear it every time a plane crashes overseas: X number of people died, X number of them were American. Innocuous enough on the surface, but the implication is that our lives are significant. While others? Not so much. Even if that isn’t the intent, such reporting has this effect, and over time becomes ingrained in who we are as a people. It slips into our national subconscious, so to speak. Maybe that’s why Anderson Cooper couldn’t explain why he was more choked up over Katrina than any story he’s ever covered.

Consequently, on the whole, our citizens do less international travel than our brothers and sisters in other industrialized nations. So while we still profess to be a melting pot, we mix very little with the rest of the world. The dangerous effect of this vacuum is that, by not recognizing all human life as equally significant, we as a country are more inclined to accept human suffering. As long as it’s not ours. This compels us to stand up and be outraged over those who died because of criminal negligence and mismanagement in New Orleans, but accepting of criminal negligence and mismanagement - and massive loss of life - in Iraq.

Whether it’s the estimated 100,000 plus Iraqi civilian deaths or the tortured prisoners of war in Abu Ghraib and other chambers of inhumanity condoned and utilized by this administration to dodge Geneva Conventions, our mainstream media has been woefully lacking in their coverage. Over the two and a half years since this war of choice commenced, ask yourself how often we've seen images of dead or disfigured Iraqi children or post-Abu Ghraib torture victims. (Incidentally, our soldiers’ lives didn't carry much currency either until Cindy Sheehan entered the scene; they continue to fight without the armor they need and their caskets remain off-limits to photographers, while the media barely bats an eye.)

Katrina revealed a similar bias in how we depict the poor and underprivileged in our own country, a microcosm of how we depict the suffering of those abroad. The victims of the hurricane were first dubbed “refugees” before many in the mainstream media (though some defended this usage, notably the NY Times) recognized the racist overtones and changed the reference to “evacuees.” Meanwhile, President Bush, evoking the perspicacity of Mr. Magoo, initially referred to the hurricane-stricken areas as “this region of the world." In addition to giving the impression our Commander-in-Chief is unaware that Louisiana and Mississippi are part of the United States, this gaffe seemed to compound the Third World flavor of their plight.

That the majority of faces suffering from this disaster had black skin was not lost on anyone either. Least of all, CNN anchor Wolf Blitzer, winner of the Freudian slip award for his reference to the victims: “…so many of these people, almost all of them that we see, are so poor and they are so black…” Throughout, the media spoke of these poor as if they had been belched from some ghetto Atlantis beneath the Mississippi River. Then, as if suddenly seeing the light, we heard them crowing about how America will finally be forced to confront its own poverty. (That is, until the next serial killer, fair-skinned missing person, celebrity breakup or shark attack comes down the pike.) On the heels of these empty assertions, we now learn that Katrina and its bungled aftermath may have contributed to the swiftest spate of gentrification since the origins of Manifest Destiny.

“These were Americans.” In the same interview, Mr. Williams also noted that this was the overwhelming refrain from viewers who followed the coverage of Katrina. It seemed as if he was trying to ring from these words a defining moment of national disgrace and a standard to which our government must never fail to meet. But I wonder instead how many Americans felt the hollowness of these words that night.

Looming over Times Square, an enormous billboard for “NBC Nightly News” with Brian Williams stares down at pedestrians. The tagline reads: “Reporting America’s Story.”

As Walter Cronkite used to say, “And that’s the way it is.”

Comments

[Jesmi]

NARP Executive Director Ross Capon made an appearance last night on a segment of NBC Nightly News with Brian Williams regarding Amtrak’s increasing popularity, prospects for expansion, and funding and operational challenges. The soundbite from Capon notes, “To get trains, it takes time, it takes money, and it takes political commitment.”