The Register Citizen (Torrington, CT)
Covering Harvey: Real news in real time
Television, radio and websites, including those belonging to print outlets, provided the public with real news.
\For their coverage of Hurricane Harvey and its aftermath, I give the news media an “A.”
Television, radio and internet sites, including those belonging to print outlets, provided the public with real news in real time.
As Lorraine Ali wrote in the Los Angeles Times, reporters in dripping slickers “delivered minute-by-minute accounts from flooded boulevards in Beaumont, Texas, packed evacuation centers in Houston and harrowing boat and helicopter rescues in Corpus Christi and Cuero.”
Newspapers went “live” on the web with updates and video. Some removed paywalls to give a non-subscriber access to their nonstop reporting about the disaster.
I have some other thoughts about the coverage:
Should reporters interview victims of a disaster?
Often victims want to talk to a reporter. But a woman named Danielle didn’t. No last name was given.
She was approached in a shelter by Rosa Flores of CNN.
At first Danielle was responsive. Then she flared up, accusing Flores of bothering people at “their worst times.”
Flores apologized. But Danielle continued:
“Like, people are really breaking down, and y’all sitting here with cameras and microphones trying to ask us, “What the ____ is wrong with us?”
Many viewers probably agreed with Danielle.
Indira Lakshmanan of the Poynter Institute, a journalism think tank and training center, described this encounter on poynter.com and said that no matter how reporters cover a disaster they will be criticized.
What if the news media bypassed victims of Hurricane Harvey? “They would be savaged for callous disregard for fellow Americans,” Lakshmanan wrote.
President Donald Trump took a swipe at the news media on his follow-up trip to Texas.
He praised the Coast Guard for having saved lives “by going into winds that the media would not go into.” He added that the media “will not go into those winds unless it’s a really good story.”
Bill Bishop, managing editor of KHOU-TV in Houston, said in response, “Let’s see him stand in E. coli water reporting for hours.”
The social media — not to be confused with the news media — were often unreliable.
Photos posted on Twitter showed First Lady Melania Trump wearing high heels as she and the president boarded Air Force One for their first trip to storm-ravaged Texas. The images quickly went viral with comments making fun of her.
The fact is she changed into sneakers before landing in Texas.
On their second trip, the First Lady again wore high heels boarding the plane in the Washington area and changed into sneakers before landing in Texas.
Another social media posting that went viral seemed to show a shark swimming in flood water over a freeway in Houston.
It was a fake. The image was lifted from a photo of a shark behind a kayaker off the coast of South Africa in 2005.
Paul Janensch, of Bridgeport, was a newspaper editor and taught journalism at Quinnipiac University. His weekly “Memo on the Media” can be heard on wqun.com. Email: paul.janensch@quinnipiac.edu.