Broadcasters in New Orleans Pledge Comeback
The Fox affiliate in New Orleans, WVUE-TV, off the air since Hurricane Katrina struck the Gulf Coast Aug. 29, is building a temporary facility in Mobile, Ala., and expects to be back with a low-power signal early next week, a spokeswoman for the station’s owner, Emmis Communications, told Journal-isms today.
It hopes to have a Webcast ready by Friday, Kate Snedeker of Emmis Communications said.
“The plan is, they will be doing a 15-minute newscast starting sometime this weekend. It will be looped and run continuously, and updated with a fresh one every 2 hours or so. That will be the entire content of the signal,” Snedeker said. She said she did not know how far the signal would go.
Despite speculation that some of the media outlets planned to sell or close because of hurricane damage, Snedeker and representatives of other parent companies declared, as the owners of the Times-Picayune did last week, that they were committed to remaining in New Orleans.
With the company’s blessing, some of WVUE-TV’s 94 employees have been spending time with their families, and all will be paid, Snedeker said. On both the local station’s and the Emmis corporate Web sites is a note that says, “Emmis Television asks all WVUE employees to please contact us and let us know you are okay.”
WWL-TV, “the market-leading CBS affiliate in New Orleans owned by Belo Corp. . . . has remained on the air ‘live’ since Hurricane Katrina’s arrival and disastrous aftermath, the only New Orleans television station to do so,” the Belo Corp. asserted in a news release Saturday.
“We are committed to WWL and its presence in New Orleans,” Belo spokesman Cary Hendrickson told Journal-isms today, “and doing everything we can to restore normal operations. We’re probably in a holding pattern for the next six months or so,” while things are sorted out. WWL’s journalists are working out of other studios, but the station’s transmitter was built on high ground in nearby Gretna and is able to transmit their reports to people remaining in New Orleans, Hendrickson said.
Gary Weitman, spokesman for Tribune Co., which owns WGNO-TV, the ABC affiliate, and WNOL-TV, a Warner Brothers affiliate, said its transmitter needs to be rebuilt completely. Its journalists have been doing a joint newscast from Baton Rouge with journalists at WBRZ-TV there, he said. WBRZ is also an ABC affiliate. Forty of its employees went to the state capital, he said. Tribune purchased temporary housing, and station executives took supplies, water and cash with them. “We’re committed to covering the story” of the hurricane, Weitman said.
“I expect we’ll be able to get a transmitter by the end of the month. We’re committed to the “New Orleans market,” he added.
In a notice on their Web site, the stations say, “The goal is to reestablish over-the-air broadcast signals for WGNO and WNOL this month.”
WDSU-TV, the NBC affiliate, “is currently telecasting over its website, WDSU.com, as well as via DirecTV and Echostar (DISH Network), using facilities and resources provided by sister Hearst-Argyle stations WESH-TV, Orlando, FL, and WAPT-TV, Jackson, MS, and those of other Hearst-Argyle stations along with the Hearst-Argyle Television Washington, DC news bureau. The stations have provided and are providing continuous news coverage of Hurricane Katrina’s impact,” the station said on its Web site.
Having to relocate meant “uprooting and moving your entire life from one location to the next and not knowing how you’re going to face and deal with your own set of emotions, because this time you’re going to suffer from the same experiences as the people you’re reporting on,” WDSU anchor Norman Robinson told Journal-isms last week from Jackson.
Carl Arrendondo, lead meteorologist at WWL-TV and a member of the National Association of Hispanic Journalists, told Journal-isms Tuesday night that the influx into Baton Rouge was making it difficult to find housing. He said he was staying in an apartment with seven or eight people, and that while his New Orleans-area house was destroyed, his wife, son and stepson were safe in Texas.
He was broadcasting from PBS station WLPB-TV at the Manship School of Journalism at Louisiana State University. While Arrendondo said he had not had much chance to watch other coverage, he strongly believed that areas outside New Orleans, such as St. Bernard and Plaquemines parishes, deserved more media attention.
Those places have “a whole lot of people that haven’t had much help at all and are in dire straits,” he said.
Meanwhile, Stanton Tang, vice president for broadcast of the Asian American Journalists Association and managing editor at Las Vegas ONE/KLAS-TV, arrived with a crew in New Orleans, covering the federalized disaster team Nevada Task Force One.
“A lot of people have seen hurricanes,” he told Journal-isms, speaking of the FEMA workers. “This is just a really, really bad one.”
- Ken Kerschbaumer and John M. Higgins, “A Massive Rebuild for Television” (Broadcasting and Cable)
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Hurricane Churns Up Race, Class Debate: Week 1
A week ago, Jack Shafer wrote a column in the Slate online magazine headed, “Why no mention of race or class in TV’s Katrina coverage?”
By Tuesday, after WashingtonPost.com blogger Joel Achenbach posted a piece called “Why Race Matters,” the Web site had recorded 125 responses from readers.
The question of race’s impact on the government’s response to hurricane victims was asked on every Sunday talk show. The question was also put to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, and some conservative pundits agreed with her that race played no role in the government’s response.
But elsewhere, the idea that race and class had influenced the predicament in which New Orleans’ African Americans found themselves had become so accepted that some commentators said they believed that President Bush, fearing a backlash, might be deterred from appointing another white man to the Supreme Court, now that he must again nominate someone to fill the vacancy created by the departing Sandra Day O’Connor.
“What a shocked world saw exposed in New Orleans last week wasn’t just a broken levee. It was a cleavage of race and class, at once familiar and startlingly new, laid bare in a setting where they suddenly amounted to matters of life and death. Hydrology joined sociology throughout the story line, from the settling of the flood-prone city, where well-to-do white people lived on the high ground, to its frantic abandonment,” Jason DeParle wrote Sunday in the New York Times.
“The best monument to the catastrophe in New Orleans would be a serious national effort to address the poverty that afflicts the entire country. And in our shock and guilt, that may be politically feasible,” columnist Nicholas D. Kristof wrote Tuesday in the same paper.
The most viewed piece on washingtonpost.com at one point Tuesday was a commentary by Terry M. Neal, “Why, Oh Why?” that simply asked questions. The first was, “Why, throughout most of last week, was the most eloquent ambassador, and the only recognizable white face in New Orleans, the great and noted statesman . . . Harry Connick Jr.?”
But other questions were being asked as well. Why did MSNBC pull the plug on rapper Kanye West‘s unscripted denunciation of President Bush during NBC’s “Concert For Hurricane Relief” Friday night? Will blacks share in the awarding of rebuilding contracts? Have the networks placed too much emphasis on looting and not enough on rescue efforts? How is the status of blacks in this environmental disaster different from other instances of what has become known as “environmental racism”? Why isn’t more attention being paid to the role of oil companies? Why do the media use the word “looting” for African Americans and call them “refugees”?
On the listserve of the National Association of Black Journalists and elsewhere, there was praise for ABC-TV’s “Nightline” shows and marvel that Oprah Winfrey devoted two programs to the hurricane’s aftermath and her declaration that that the nation owed an apology to those who died in New Orleans.
Some noted that “Good Morning America” news anchor Robin Roberts, reporting from her home state of Mississippi, shed tears Tuesday after ABC colleague Charlie Gibson asked her about her family’s well-being, as Bill Keveney reported in USA Today. It also did not go unnoticed that Barbara Bush, mother of the president, said that many of the poor people she had seen while touring a Houston relocation site were faring better than before the storm hit.
Columnists of color, particularly, felt obliged to weigh in on both policy questions and the human side of the tragedy:
- Amy Alexander, “News and Notes,” National Public Radio: Noting Disparities in Flood Aid
- Herb Boyd, The Black World Today: Cuba, Yes!
- Donna Britt, Washington Post: From a Dorm, Life Lessons in Surreal Tragedy
- Sylvester Brown Jr., St. Louis Post-Dispatch: Scenes of disaster indict more than just the looters
- Tammy L. Carter, Orlando Sentinel: A city so easy to love, a city with roots so strong, won’t be kept down long
- Tammy L. Carter, Orlando Sentinel: Why was relief so long in coming?
- Cary Clack, San Antonio Express-News: The people of New Orleans need a real act of love from the world
- William Jelani Cobb, AOL Black Voices: It Is About Race
- Ralph De La Cruz, South Florida Sun-Sentinel: What took so long?
- Dwight Cunningham, NNPA News Service: Media Hurricane is Spinning Out of Control
- Lynne Duke and Teresa Wiltz, Washington Post: A Nation’s Castaways
- Bob Herbert, New York Times: A Failure of Leadership
- Gregory Kane, Baltimore Sun: Two photos pose puzzle: When is it not looting?
- Wil LeVeist, Daily Press, Newport News, Va.: Katrina left frustration, yes – but also kindness
- Dwight Lewis, Nashville Tennessean: Tragedy of poverty underlies violence after the storm
- Deborah Mathis, BlackAmericaWeb.com: Along with the Broken Levees Lies the Illusion of Dubya?s Competence
- Courtland Milloy, Washington Post: Hope and Horror Mingle in Native Of New Orleans
- Les Payne, Newsday: Prepared to protect the ride of his life
- Clarence Page, Chicago Tribune: When the ugly truths bubble up
- David Porter, Orlando Sentinel: Rapper wrong about racism in rescues
- William Raspberry, Washington Post: Two Storms, Ample Warning
- Rob Redding, Redding News Review: Drudge Likens Blacks to ‘Animals’
- Rochelle Riley, Detroit Free Press: College term has a stormy start for many
- Eugene Robinson, Washington Post: It’s Your Failure, Too, Mr. Bush
- E.R. Shipp, New York Daily News: Looking for church vans & preachers
- Jason Whitlock, Kansas City Star: The games just wash over the hopelessness of Katrina’s victims
- DeWayne Wickham, Gannett News Service: An opportunity to rebuild the South
- Leon Wynter, National Public Radio: Seeing Black America in Crisis on TV (audio) text
Other News Stories:
- Calitoday: Dozens of Vietnamese Americans Stranded Outside of New Orleans
- Mary M. Chapman, BET: Gulf ‘s Toxic Stew Adds to Crisis for Black Residents
- David Gonzalez, New York Times: From Margins of Society to Center of the Tragedy
- Wil Haygood, Washington Post: ‘To Me, It Just Seems Like Black People Are Marked’
- Dwight R. Worley and Gary Stern, Journal-News, Westchester-Rockland counties, N.Y.: Poor residents trapped long before Katrina
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Don’t Call Me “Refugee,” Shelter Workers Told
If news organizations’ policies are to call people what they wished to be called, then they won’t refer to those displaced by Hurricane Katrina as “refugees,” according to a story in the Washington Post today by Robert E. Pierre and Paul Farhi.
“At shelters in Louisiana and Texas, workers and volunteers have heard loud and clear from those living there that the government, the media and everyone else should call them something other than refugees,” Pierre and Farhi wrote in a story datelined Baton Rouge, La.
“. . . ‘They’re not refugees,’ says Mark Effron, vice president of news and daytime programming at MSNBC. ‘Given what we’re dealing with, there was a sense in the word “refugee” that it somehow made these United States citizens, people who live in Louisiana and Mississippi, into aliens or foreigners or something less than they are,” the story said later.
“Brian Throckmorton, copy desk chief at the Lexington Herald-Leader in Kentucky, says his paper has stopped using the word in headlines and display type ‘to avoid provoking those who object to it, but our policy is that it is not a tarnished word and we’re allowing it in body copy.'”
Bennie Ivory, executive editor at the Courier-Journal in Louisville, told Journal-isms today that his paper made the decision Saturday not to use the word ‘refugees’ in its coverage. “We are recommending ‘evacuees’ or simply ‘people,’ which they are. There are any number of reasons why we made the decision, including that it is inaccurate. One definition in Webster’s New World Dictionary: ‘a person who flees from home or country to seek refuge elsewhere, as in a time of war or of political or religious persecution.’ You be the judge,” Ivory said.
CBS News and and the St. Petersburg Times have joined those that “have chosen to avoid use of the R-word in describing hurricane victims,” Eric Deggans wrote Tuesday in the St. Petersburg Times.
As reported Monday, the Washington Post, Miami Herald and other outlets have restricted use of the word, while the Associated Press and New York Times defended use of the term. The Associated Press on Tuesday did its own story on the debate.
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Hampton Announces “Dream Team” J-Faculty Hires
Dean Tony Brown of Hampton University’s Scripps Howard School of Journalism and Communications has announced this year’s faculty in a flier proclaiming a “NEW JAC” faculty team that “is stronger at every position.”
It’s called “Dean Tony Brown’s ‘dream team'”
New hires are: assistant professors Kissette Bundy, formerly of WBIS-ITT Dow Jones TV in New York; Wayne Dawkins, former associate editor at the Daily Press in Newport News, Va.; William Chris Leonard, formerly executive for special productions for National Geographic Nationwide; Joy A. McDonald, formerly director of student advising at Norfolk State University; Bonnie Jo Mount, deputy managing editor of the News & Observer in Raleigh, N.C.; Edward Welch, former chair of the Mass Communications Department at Jackson State University; and Bonnie Winston, formerly general assignment team leader at the Norfolk Virginian-Pilot, who will teach part-time. Will Sutton, formerly deputy managing editor at the News & Observer, is the Scripps Howard visiting professional, as previously reported.
The university announced in July that Jack E. White, former Time magazine columnist who had been a visiting professor, would assume the Scripps Howard Endowed Chair held by veteran journalist Earl Caldwell, who becomes a writer-in-residence, and that Doug Smith becomes visiting professor of journalism ethics.
Seven professors left the Scripps Howard School after the last school year, an unusually high number. The Scripps Howard Foundation has put $10 million into journalism programs at the historically black university in an effort to increase the number of African American journalists in the nation’s newsrooms.
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Gay Journalists Honor S.F. Chronicle Reporter
The National Lesbian & Gay Journalists Association today announced this year’s recipients of its national Excellence in Journalism Awards — including its Journalist of the Year honor to be presented to Meredith May with the San Francisco Chronicle.
“In 2004, May wrote ‘Operation Lion Heart,’ the powerful four-part narrative tale of a nine-year-old Iraqi boy who was maimed in an explosion and flown to the Bay Area for treatment. The story captivated readers and helped reunite the boy and his family and won the national SPJ award for feature writing,” according to a news release.
“NLGJA chose to honor Meredith May to express our profound respect for an excellent story-teller and craftsperson,” NLGJA President Eric Hegedus said in the release. “Meredith May also honors us as a dedicated member of NLGJA and a role model for outstanding feature writing and coverage.”
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