After months of my yelling (quietly, digitally) about the failure of the national media to "get" and report the story of New Orleans fully, my hopes were raised when I saw that WaPo's media critic Howard Kurtz was doing a long Sunday piece on the subject. The dash of those hopes came quickly, however--by the end of the first sentence:
I walked down the street next to a failed levee here the other day and saw house after house that had been pulverized by Hurricane Katrina.
Yes, those failed levees can spawn a pulverizing hurricane, all right. It got worse. Though Kurtz faulted the national media for Katrina "burnout", he himself never mentioned the failure of the national media to cover the independent engineering teams investigating the levee failures--apparently, they failed for no reason--or to cover the Army Corps of Engineers' head Lt Gen. Carl Strock admitting under oath to "design and construction flaws" at the 17th St. Canal floodwall. (Kurtz claims in his piece that he has "followed the Katrina story closely", but apparently not closely enough to notice the reporting on the engineering teams and the Corps' concession in the Times-Picayune) So what was Kurtz' objection--not enough time/space telling more victim stories? At one point, he even says, after observing a shrimp boat three miles from water in the middle of a St. Bernard Parish street:
I cannot envision the kind of winds that deposited it among the brick split-levels.
No need to, since what pushed that boat inland was not wind, but floodwater.
I emailed Kurtz with the question of why he, like the media he criticized, conflated the hurricane (which did "pulverize" Mississippi) with the floods (which did the damage he observed, under the equally clueless tutelage of Brian Wiliams). Here's his entire response:
A lack of precise wording on my part. Obviously the flooding caused the greatest damage.
Yes, just a usage question. Call Fowler. Not a question of missing the essence, the context, the reason-why of the story. Just something the copy desk should have cleaned up.