Hurricane Katrina, the Politics of Pity, and the News Media by Bradley A

Hurricane Katrina, the Politics of Pity, and the News Media by Bradley A. Jones A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy (Communication) in The University of Michigan 2011 Doctoral Committee: Professor Gerald Patrick Scannell, Co-Chair Professor Susan J. Douglas, Co-Chair Professor Margaret R. Somers Assistant Professor Aswin Punathambekar © Bradley A. Jones 2011 Acknowledgements Thanks are due to Paddy Scannell, Susan Douglas, Roopali Mukherjee, Aswin Punathambekar, Peggy Somers, Sean Jacobs, Catherine Squires, and Damani Partridge for their generosity with their time, their limitless patience, and for helping me to find my purpose here at school. Thanks are also due to my friends who helped do this: Helen Ho, my writing partner; Jimmy Draper, Lauren Guggenheim, Emily Chivers Yochim, Yong Jin Park, Megan Biddinger, Rossie Hutchinson, Krysha Gregorowicz, Sarah Crymble, Tamika Carter, Nat Poor, Laura Lee, Matt and Pat Lathrop, Jenna Gerds and Brian Wiltse. Going to college for 14 years, even with loans and stipends, is a quick road to poverty. I would not have made it without the support of my family: Mom and Dad, Grandma and Grandpa (‘Ol What’s His Name), Bret, Ashley and Jon, Bob and Ann, Grandma Boggs, Uncle Bob, Nana, Irene, Brian and Jolie, Aunt Barb, Aunt Kelly, Joey, Nick and Kayla, Drew, Lorelai, Logan, Harrison, and Grace, Sarah, Oscar and Murray. And finally, thanks to my wife, Jessamon Jones, for your friendship, your unwavering support, your sacrifice, your sense of humor, and for being everything that you are. ii Table of Contents Acknowledgements……………………………………………………………………….ii Abstract…………………………………………………………………………………...iv Chapter I. Introduction…………………………………………………………………......1 II. Managing Space and Time in Katrina Reporting…………………………......27 III. Finding an Anti-Racism of the Center: From the ‘Racist Media’ to the ‘Race- Baiting Media’ in Katrina Reporting…………………………………………….53 IV. ‘The Saints and the Sinners Marchi ng In:’ Hum an Interest S tories and the Limits of Colorblindness in Katrina Reporting………………………………….84 V. ‘Am I My Broth er’s Keeper?’ Katrina Reporting and the Politics of Provision………………………………………………………………………..117 VI. Conclusion………...………………………………………………………..159 Appendix………………………………………………………………………………..166 Bibliography……………………………………………………………………………178 iii Abstract This thesis seeks to account for how and why particular interpretations of Katrina achieved dominance or were undermined, and how the ethical crisis after the Convention Center was resolved without upsetting the balance of power, by examining the ‘politics of pity’ as it unfolded by and through the news media. As the crisis unfolded in New Orleans, the media’s presence on the ground produced what Frank Durham has described as a ‘decentered media,’ in which media interpretations diverged from those of mostly distant government officials.1 As the news media’s narrative became dominant, it provided an answer to what Luc Boltanski refers to as existential uncertainties, evaluative uncertainties and uncertainties over the motivations of the actors involved—all of which are products of communication over distance.2 I show how the ‘politics of pity’ eventually led to a recentering and a reconciling of media and official interpretations; repairing, as it were, this ideological breach. The recentering was set in motion by efforts from various quarters to contest the parts of the media’s narrative that threatened existing power relationships by reestablishing key uncertainties. The analysis situates the politics of pity within a framework of mass media as a site of hegemonic struggle by examining shifts in dominant frames as they signal evolving notions of what type of commitment to the victims of Katrina is just and who should bear ultimate responsibility. 1 See Frank Durham, “Media Ritual in Catastrophic Time: The Populist Turn in Television Coverage of Hurricane Katrina,” Journalism, 9 (2008): 95-116. 2 Luc Boltanski, Distant Suffering: Morality, Media and Politics, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 151. iv Chapter I Introduction Nearly six years after Katrina, the dominant narrative established in late August and early September of 2005 endures. Hurricane Katrina was a ‘natural’ disaster that over the course of a week was revealed by and through the news media to be a ‘manmade’ disaster. While the view that someone should bear responsibility for the suffering in New Orleans is mostly undisputed, how the blame should be distributed remains a political question. In the days after the storm, live reporting relayed the spectacle of suffering to the world—the thousands dead throughout the region and the tens of thousands left stranded in New Orleans when the levees breached. Due to the immediate reports of looting and violence in the city, reporters initially criticized the victims who had seemingly defied evacuation orders as criminals and opportunists. As the suffering intensified day after day in New Orleans, a consensus emerged within the media that federal government failed to recognize the magnitude of the disaster and likewise failed to immediately respond to a crisis that had clearly overwhelmed local and state authorities. While public officials remained committed to a zero-tolerance policy on looting, in time, reporters on the ground came to tolerate property crime considered necessary for survival. During the first week of reporting, the news media determined that it was the poor, many of whom were also black, that had been most deeply impacted by the storm and by federal inaction. As the news media made sense of the spectacle of suffering, critical questions were raised concerning the persistence of racism, the relationships between race and poverty, and the problem of government’s indifference to the poor— questions that rarely so thoroughly capture the media agenda in this country. Throughout these discussions the Bush Administration firmly maintained that the storm ‘didn’t 1 discriminate and neither would the response.’ Two weeks would pass after the Convention Center before President Bush officially affirmed the need to address that poverty that “has roots in a history of racial discrimination, which cut off generations from the opportunity of America” while at the same time, suggesting a range of ‘free market’ proposals aimed at expediting the recovery.1 For scholars of journalism, the reporting of Katrina defied conventional wisdom on how the central news media operate; specifically, that they maintain a position of ‘objectivity’ with regard to political questions and that they defer to the statements of government officials during an emergency. Frank Durham rightly suggests that as an example of crisis reporting in the U.S., Katrina was an anomaly. Drawing on Nick Couldry’s work, Durham argues that a ‘decentered media’ emerged in the wake of Katrina whereby presence on the ground coupled with a lack of immediately available official interpretations imbued the news media with the authority to speak.2 In the early days of the crisis, the interpretations of reporters broadcasting live on the ground dramatically diverged from the assessments of mostly distant officials. Indeed, immediately after the storm, state and federal officials relied heavily on the mainstream news media for information about what was happening in New Orleans and throughout the region. As Durham argues, since “the traditional press-government media ritual was undermined, broadcast journalists…were forced to vary from their routines of objectivity, producing instead a more populist form of coverage that resonated powerfully with their audience’s cultural experience of the storm.”3 For Couldry, a ‘decentered media’ problematizes the “myth of the mediated centre: the belief, or assumption, that there is a centre to the social world and that, in some sense, the media speaks ‘for’ that centre.”4 Rather than rejecting “the centrality of 1 George W. Bush, “Address to the Nation on Hurricane Katrina Recovery from New Orleans, Louisiana,” Thursday, September 15, 2005. 2 Frank Durham, “Media Ritual in Catastrophic Time: The Populist Turn in Television Coverage of Hurricane Katrina,” Journalism, 9 (2008): 95-116. 3 Ibid., 111. 4 Nick Couldry, Media Rituals: A Critical Approach, (New York: Routledge, 2003), 2; Cited in Frank Durham, “Media Ritual in Catastrophic Time;” 99. 2 the media in the construction of social reality,”5 and thus, central media’s role in reproducing the ideology of the center, the example of a ‘decentered media’ after Katrina should direct scholarly attention to analysis of the interpretive space created by this temporary indeterminancy of the center, as well as the complementary process of recentering—of reconciling official and media interpretation through strategic adjustments within dominant discourses that sustain existing formations of power. In other words, an analysis of the anomaly of ‘decentered’ media after Katrina must account for what is enabled—what interpretations can legitimately be accommodated—as well as what is revealed as the limits of the center’s flexibility. During Katrina, this interpretative space at the nexus of central media (encompassing a range of competing and contradictory voices), government, and the critical public via the ‘new media,’ emerged as the contested terrain in which the politics of pity unfolded. The aim of this thesis is to better understand what the reporting of Katrina can teach us about the role of central news media in making sense

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