Just watching TV  

I've heard any number of people asking why the government didn't pay more attention to the media in responding to the catastrophe. Not meaning to excuse the failures in any way (which imho were inexcusable and should result in the resignation of the relevant executives -- the FEMA director, the head of Homeland Security, and the President of the United States), one of the biggest barriers to getting help where it was needed was the inability of front line responders and the authorities to communicate with each other. Obviously watching CNN isn't going to solve this problem, but it seems now that the cable-watching public may have been more informed about the situtation on the ground than the people coordinating the federal response. And of course if you think like a politician, responding directly to calls for help from Shepard Smith has the added benefit of allowing you to communicate to that cable-watching public that something is actually being done.

In talking to a friend today about the castastrophe, I was surprised that he didn't view it as anything more than the usual wall-to-wall hurricane coverage, and that he had no sense of the scale in relation to other "big stories" like for example the missing teen in Aruba or the Michael Jackson trial or even Rehnquist's death (which will probably turn out to be a far less significant event in American history). He also called me a news junkie. After my lengthy and somewhat exhasperated response, he blamed his uninformed disinterest on the media's incessant wolf-crying its inability to communicate scale -- which sounds about right.

Now, is there a deliberate policy on the part of the government to ignore media reports, for the same reasons my friend does? Michael Brown's early response to the question of why he was uninformed about certain aspects of the catastrophe was that he had obtained "factual information" on the ground; this suggests that he has some contempt there for the media. One can only speculate as to what the reasons for such an attitude might be, whether it is institution-wide, and whether it really affected the government's not-a-response last week, but it's hard to avoid the conclusion that in this case those media reports could have saved lives -- that given a channelchanger and a TV set, Brownie could have done an even better job.

For me the media has really distinguished itself in its coverage of this event, despite the difficulties conveying scale I mentioned before. From the Times-Picayune's heroic coverage to the insistent on-the-scene reporting of Shepard Smith and Anderson Cooper, the media has challenged the authorities and the viewing public. Let's hope Matt Wells is right and this really represents a sea change for mainstream media.