'E&P' in New Orleans: 'The Press Has Moved on Too Fast'

By: Mark Fitzgerald New Orleans is a devastated city. I know, that's not exactly breaking news. But I just got back from there, and all I can say to everyone I've talked to since is: New Orleans is a devastated city, almost beyond belief.

You've got to see it, I told people again and again this weekend, back home in Chicago. Everyone in America should see it.

Because you're not seeing it in your newspaper. Not really.

The press, of course, is famous for rushing to disasters, and then moving on. But it's moved on too fast in New Orleans, with the result that Americans either figure the city has descended into anarchy, or is doing just fine.

Instead, block after block, mile after mile, New Orleans is a landscape of houses bumped off their foundations, spray-painted by National Guardsmen with big X's, inscrutable markings except for the bottom number that signifies whether a body, or two or three were found inside.

New Orleans is a pile of TVs on every other street. It is a highway underpass converted into a graveyard of flooded cars. It's a New Yorker magazine poking up from the silt a few hundred yards from the breach in the London Avenue levee, the really bad breach that nobody outside of New Orleans has heard about. It's a city of refrigerators duct-taped and dumped on the sidewalk, some of them converted into advertisements for itinerant demolition crews: "Gutting," the spray paint legend will say, followed by a phone number.

True enough, New Orleans can still make the front pages in America, more than 100 days since Hurricane Katrina stormed ashore.

Everyone headlined President Bush's commitment to rebuild the city's levees with $3.1 billion, and The New York Times reported over the weekend that just about every person who stayed in New Orleans during Katrina did so by choice--news, perhaps, to the rest of America, but a fact long-ago documented by The Times-Picayune.

A few out-of-town papers have made a commitment to ongoing coverage of the struggle to clean up and rebuild New Orleans. But making my first visit since Katrina to New Orleans--a city I've visited nearly a dozen times for the past two decades, thanks mostly to newspaper industry conventions--I was struck at how little prepared I was for what I saw.

The same national media that riveted us by showing the horror of the conditions endured by hurricane survivors at the Superdome and the Convention Center now tells the New Orleans story without much passion. It's all about numbers, like the levee appropriation, or bloodless debates about how--or even whether--to rebuild that great city.

Even when newspapers go down there to write about, say, the struggle to reopen such storied restaurants as Galatoire?s or Commander's Palace, the context of daily New Orleans living gets lost.

For instance, until I went to New Orleans myself, I had no idea that virtually no McDonald's fast-food sites have reopened inside New Orleans. I had no idea that traffic lights are non-existent outside of downtown.

I glimpsed one reason for this lack of context just as I was leaving Friday. New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin was holding one of his frequent town meetings at the downtown Sheraton hotel, and I figured I had just enough time to catch it before getting the last flight back to Chicago.

Before the meeting, he held a press conference, with the ground rules being that every reporter could ask two questions. As Nagin's harried press spokeswoman went down the line, it became apparent that the reporters were either New Orleans locals, or foreigners. There were two crews from Japanese television, and at least three correspondents from Europe. So far as I could see there were no newspaper or broadcast reporters from outside Louisiana.

So there are few from outside the city to tell the hard story of how New Orleans is an odd mix of civilization carrying on under almost survivalist conditions.

At night, the French Quarter can seem almost normal, its bars packed and the music spilling onto the streets as in days of old. But then you can hear two words I never expected to hear in New Orleans: "Last call." There's a 2 a.m. curfew, and long before that you notice that the streets are filled almost entirely by males, demolition and construction workers who have replaced tourists.

Friday, empty streetcars adorned with swags of Christmas green rode the tracks downtown in dry runs for the scheduled resumption of service this past Sunday.

Outside of downtown, the devastation is numbing and redefines normal. The tenth, or hundredth, time you see "2 cats found" or "house off foundation" spray-painted in orange on the wall of what used to be someone's family home, the fact is remarkable only in its familiarity.

During the day, whole neighborhoods of New Orleans are utterly deserted, and at night they are dark and silent. It would be a cruel fate indeed if this great American city were to similarly fade into darkness while the press remains silent.

Driving in the Lower 9th Ward early Friday afternoon, I saw orange graffiti on a wrecked home that thankfully wasn't an "X" with a body count. "Psalm 55:18" was all it said.

The King James version renders the verse this way: "He hath delivered my soul in peace from the battle that was against me: for there were many with me."

Restless and unpeacable though we often are, we in the press must stay among the many who abide with that anonymous and hopeful soul in New Orleans.

ADDENDUM

At one point in my Dec. 19 commentary above, I let my passion for the topic push aside my reason. Casting about for an exception to prove the rule that too much of the press outside the Gulf has drained its post-Katrina coverage of context and compassion, I latched on to a Dec. 18 New York Times front-page story by Shaila Dewan and Janet Roberts.

I wrote that "The New York Times reported over the weekend that just about every single person who stayed in New Orleans during Katrina did so by choice -- news, perhaps, to the rest of America, but a fact long-ago documented by The Times-Picayune."

That was a gratuitous, if unintentional, swipe at what was a very well-reported story that challenged the myth that most New Orleanians who stayed behind as Hurricane Katrina approached were left behind. The persistence of this myth is one reason that, with the rebuilding of vast neighborhoods of New Orleans virtually paralyzed, Congress feels no embarrassment focusing a hearing instead on why a couple of hundred school buses were not deployed in the hurricane evacuation. Sure, The Times-Picayune was first to shoot down the myth, but The New York Times report brings welcome national attention and clarification to the issue.

Ironically, too, while I was in New Orleans two other exceptions appeared in my hometown Chicago papers: an up-close look at the devastation to housing by Chicago Tribune architectural critic Blair Kamin, and a view of New Orleans destruction through the eyes of local and national musicians by Chicago Sun-Times staff writer Dave Hoekstra.

Mark Fitzgerald
Editor-at-Large
Editor & Publisher