Good for these kids for doing this...
GALVESTON — A month after Hurricane Ike, Austin Almanza felt as though the world outside Galveston had forgotten about the terrible pounding his hometown had suffered from Hurricane Ike.
“I heard nothing on the national news,” said Almanza, 17, a junior at Ball High School. “After hurricanes like Katrina you heard about it months after it happened.” So Austin, along with the seven other students who showed up on the first day of school after the hurricane for Robert Weiss’ advanced media technology class, readily agreed to make a documentary about Galveston’s recovery from the most damaging storm since the Great 1900 hurricane.
Yep, I remember that very well, the media saturation of the airwaves with Katrina in the storm's aftermath. Of course it was a big storm and deserving of the coverage, but there was and seemingly continues to be a huge imbalance of coverage of Katrina's impact and the impact of every storm that came after it, in a couple of ways. When you look at just the coverage of Katrina by itself, it seems like it's been all-New-Orleans-all-the-time, from the moment the Katrina coverage started in the waning days of August 2005. And I can understand that to an extent -- major American city under water, potentially tens of thousands dead -- but the thing is, people were affected in other places too. Many of the smaller Louisiana towns surrounding New Orleans were inundated, and a good chunk of the Mississippi Gulf Coast was, you could probably say, washed and blown right away, being on the bad side of the storm as it was. But it seems all those people were completely ignored in favor of the impact on New Orleans, and don't even get me started on that little storm that blew in barely three weeks later a couple hundred miles to the west. And of course, there was the relative dearth of Ike coverage, which seemed to me to be basically equivalent to that of Rita; that is, they gave it a few days and then they left. The more cynical among us might say that the media gave those other storms so little coverage because they couldn't use them as a cudgel with which to beat on President Bush. That seems to me to be as good of an explanation as any. If anyone has a better one I am certainly all ears.
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