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'The human element was accentuated, and the best of the writing was impressionistic.'
Let me begin with a confession. After watching television coverage of Katrina for nearly every wakeful moment over the first few dramatic days, I quit. Cold turkey. TV news had morphed into a mutant reality show: "Survivor" gone berserk. Even The Weather Channel seemed to be anchored by Chicken Little. So I turned it off. An odd reaction, I know, for someone who spent nearly 40 years as a reporter and visited his share of catastrophes. But I was suffering sensory overload and found my spirits in free fall, because my home is in New Orleans.
Long ago, I had given up on radio, the happy medium of my childhood, as a news source. With the exception of National Public Radio, the airwaves seem to have been taken over by talk shows promulgating nonsense, rumors and invective or music stations carrying the sameness of Clear Channel play lists. I'm not adept at the Internet, the latest means to obtain information-as well as all sorts of misinformation. I am-another admission-wedded to print journalism. So I began to rely entirely on newspapers as I followed events from Oxford, Mississippi, where I teach and have a second home. And as the disaster played out for weeks, I felt satisfied I was getting a clearer and more detailed picture from the written words than from the frantic scenes on TV
Television had the advantage of immediacy and the ability to transmit visual images. But so much of what I saw and heard in those early days was unfiltered, not always factual, and too often failed to provide any context.
While Brian Williams of NBC News provided strong first-hand reporting from the Superdome within hours after the storm hit, others relied on hearsay and repeated it...