Authors: Mickey Huff
Identifying the holes and distortions of post-Katrina coverage, and explaining the lack of a meaningful public discourse of the storm’s aftermath, requires that we look back at the initial coverage of the event. This first draft of history set the tone, directing media down a path difficult to alter, following a selection of themes seemingly impossible to change.
Academic researchers and media critics alike have demonstrated that news reports from New Orleans in the immediate aftermath of the storm were dominated by themes of anarchy and chaos and by stories of looting in which the residents, particularly poor African Americans, were portrayed as criminals and worse. Consider this
Washington Post
report on August 31, 2005: “Even as the floodwaters rose, looters roamed the city, sacking department stores and grocery stories and floating their spoils away in plastic garbage cans.… In drier areas, looters raced into smashed stores and pharmacies and by nightfall the pillage was widespread.”
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By September 3, Maureen Dowd of the
New
York Times
concluded that New Orleans was “a snake pit of anarchy, death, looting, raping, marauding thugs.”
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Who can forget the news images, which are now available on the internet, of people waist deep in water trying to negotiate supplies that are floating in large garbage bags? Under the pictures of white people the caption explains they are “finding supplies,” while under images of African Americans the caption identifies them as “looters.”
Writing in
The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science
, Kathleen Tierney, Christine Bevc, and Erica Kuligowski argued that reporting conformed to the conventions of a “disaster myth,” a predictable media frame in which a crisis is habitually “accompanied by looting, social disorganization, and deviant behavior.” The researchers attributed this mythic understanding to past news reporting of crisis, pointing out that in covering the storm “the media greatly exaggerated the incidence and severity of looting and lawlessness.”
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Author Rebecca Solnit, who writes about humanitarian crisis and media response to disaster, reported, “Many major media outlets repeated rumors of snipers firing on helicopters. These rumors were never substantiated, but they interfered with the rescue operations nonetheless.”
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Portrayals of the city’s residents going berserk—mostly African Americans who did not have the means to leave the city—coincided with punitive disaster responses from the authorities. Mayor Ray Nagin ordered 1,500 police officers to leave their search-and-rescue missions and return to the city streets to stop the looting. As Solnit put it:
Only two days after the catastrophe struck, while thousands were still stuck on roofs, in attics, on overpasses, on second and third stories and in isolated buildings on high ground in flooded neighborhoods, the mayor chose protecting property over human life. There was no commerce, no electricity, no way to buy badly needed supplies. Though unnecessary things were taken, much of what got called looting was the stranded foraging for survival by the only means available.
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Though initial media narratives demonized the victims of the storm, these portrayals have since been challenged and revised in films by Spike Lee
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and others, such as investigative reporter Jeremy Scahill and the producers of PBS’s Frontline,
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which feature other themes and points of view. In 2008, for example, journalist A. C. Thompson
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recounted the story of thirty-two-year-old Donnell Herrington, who had stayed behind to help rescue his grandparents and was shot by vigilantes in the white enclave of Algiers Point.
Less than a year after Katrina, while other independent reporters were tracking stories of white vigilantes and police murders in the wake of the storm, the
New York Times
was missing the story, instead sticking to the familiar “law and order” framework of “disaster reporting” that emphasized the need for police response to the violence caused by the poor.
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Reporter Christopher Drew followed law enforcement and found that New Orleans Police Department’s SWAT team, known as “The Final Option,” was “running dangerously low on firepower.” Hitting old themes that Katrina helped wash away a violent underclass, Drew wrote, “As residents return, [the team] is once again kicking in the doors at the worst drug dens,” for the new superintendent William J. Riley was not going to let the drug dealers and “gutter punks” take over. Drew explained that cops were bearing the brunt of “displaced anger” from citizens who “talk back.”
Similar themes with rhetorical flourishes appeared six months later in Adam Nossiter’s
New York Times
article “Storm Left New Orleans Ripe for Violence.”
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After Katrina, the city was a “stalking ground” where “teenagers with handguns” roamed with “impunity.” Kids returned with guns in a “tidal wave of violence.” Though they “begged” witnesses to come forward, “the police, feared and hated by the city’s poor, [got] no cooperation from them in solving crimes.” No explanation for the public’s fear of the cops was offered. In another caricature, Nossiter wrote, it’s “the classic Maoist strategy of guerilla insurgency: criminals swim like fish in the surrounding sea” of poor neighborhoods. Abstracted poor people, “fish,” are criminalized, lumped with the perpetrators.
At the end of 2006 and into 2007, the time frame depicted in
season two of
Treme
, there was, in fact, a heartbreaking resurgence of violence that shook the Big Easy, and the depictions in the fictional program are far more complex and balanced than those in the
New York Times
, for example.
Treme
shows the violence and its consequences from a very different point of view: from the victims experiencing the violence, the multiracial cast of characters. In post-Katrina New Orleans, bad things happen to good people who do not deserve it, such as the sexual assault of LaDonna Batiste-Williams (played by Khandi Alexander) in episode 3. In
Treme
we feel the pain of characters we have come to care about; African American men, usually stereotyped in news reports as simply criminal, are cast as musicians and also fall victim to the violence perpetrated by criminals as well as police.
Treme
depicts the shooting deaths of two artists in NOLA at the time, Dinerral Shavers, a local high school teacher and Hot 8 Brass Band drummer, and filmmaker Helen Hill at her home in the Marigny-Bywater. The program dramatizes a botched police investigation of the Hill murder, illustrating the sloppy police work that failed to protect residents and prosecute criminals. These real people and real murders were so troubling to New Orleans residents and their impressions of the viability of the city’s culture that on January 11, 2007, residents organized a March for Survival, five thousand marchers strong. Civil rights attorney Mary Howell—upon whom the character Toni Bernette (played by Melissa Leo) is based—said, “It was a unity march that included a broad, diverse cross section of New Orleanians.”
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They demanded that the police and city officials do their jobs and keep the public safe.
The New York Times
allotted 604 words to the march, claiming that most marchers were white, describing a “monochrome crowd” and an “unpromising augury for any possible resolution of the city’s crime crisis.”
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Why? Because of poor black people: “Law enforcement officials have for years spoken of mute circles of witnesses around crime scenes in largely African American neighborhoods here.”
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In
Treme
, the unity march begins with Antoine Batiste (played by New Orleans local Wendell Pierce) and his girlfriend Desiree (played by another New Orleans resident, Phyllis Montana-LeBlanc), with other musicians at the front of the line that begins in the poor, African
American neighborhood of Center City. They come together with marchers from other neighborhoods and walk on chanting as police stand mute on the sidelines. In the last scene, LaDonna, in emotional recovery with her face still bruised from the attack, watches on television.
The program criticizes the focus on crime in news coverage through the character of NOPD Lieutenant Terry Colson (played by David Morse). Early in the second season, Colson argues over the phone with a
New York Times
reporter, saying that the “crime could have happened in any city; it wasn’t particular to NOLA, the guy was a disturbed Iraq war vet.”
The March for Survival and community activism did nothing to shake the
New York Times
framework of “culture of violence.” Less than a month after the march, Nossiter and Drew teamed up to produce their longest tome yet, a full 2,354 words: “In New Orleans, Dysfunction Fuels Cycle of Killing.” It began with two boys watching a body carried out of their building, boys who do “not stop chewing their sticky blue candy or swigging from their pop bottles,” while a teenage girl is “laughing up on a worn stoop.” Police have said that evacuees from Katrina have been involved in many killings, and “successive killings became easier, once the first was accomplished.” The implication is that even arrest and convictions won’t stop the murder, that they can’t break the cycle of violence. Nossiter and Drew quoted prosecutor Eric E. Malveau—“You can put a cop on every corner, and you will not stop the murder”—and concluded that “the killing is integrated deep into the community.”
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The blanket condemnations of the poor as violent and deviant, evident in the rhetorical spin of such reporting, helped justify the demolition of four low-income housing projects in New Orleans, and fed into the racial coding that identified “revitalization” of the city as synonymous with preventing the “undeserving” poor from finding their way home.
These issues are documented in Spike Lee’s film
If God Is Willing and Da Creek Don’t Rise
. Sequences contain footage of the former secretary of the US Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), Republican Alphonso Jackson, arguing to “get rid of these drug-infested killing field environments,” and claiming that anyone who wants to keep the low-income housing “really doesn’t care about people having sanitary places to live.”
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But as
In These Times
reported, it took over $700 million to demolish the public housing, and the cost of new “mixed-income” housing was over $400 million for each unit.
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Insurance estimates have shown that it would have cost less than $10,000 per building to repair the low-income projects, most of which had never flooded. Later forced to resign from office because of corruption in managing post-Katrina contracts, Alphonso Jackson publicly stated in September 2005 that New Orleans was “not going to be as black as it was for a long time, if ever again.” He later said, in front of Spike Lee’s cameras, in an attempt to use his own skin color to deflect attention from his racist remarks, “When I woke up this morning, I was still black.” The second season of
Treme
portrays the process of corruption of local politicians as well as the demolition and destruction of undamaged property.
Treme’s
portrait of the character Albert Lambreaux (played by Clarke Peters) follows his struggles to rebuild his destroyed house and the problems he faces finding a place to stay when he returns after the flood. At one point he illegally enters a vacant but habitable apartment in one of the housing projects. After several days, and under cover of night, cops enter the apartment, beat him, and forcibly remove him from the building. Similarly,
If God Is Willing and Da Creek Don’t Rise
contains disturbing footage of police pepper spraying New Orleans residents who are trying to enter the city council to protest the destruction of the projects. Inside the council chambers, those trying to speak to politicians are seen being brutally tasered by New Orleans police.
The television series derives its name from the oldest inhabited African American neighborhood in the country, the Faubourg Treme, where free people of color owned property as early as the 1700s. At its
center in Congo Square, African slaves drummed and danced, and American jazz was born.
In early episodes of the series, a belligerent DJ Davis (played by Steve Zahn) directs huge speakers that blast loud music onto the streets of Treme. They seem particularly targeted at his closest neighbors, a gay couple, a pair Davis perceives as outsiders to the culture and history of the Treme. Reasons for the hostility emerge slowly, as one of the threads subtly woven through the texture of the program. This thread is gentrification, a process that has taken its toll on the culture of the real-life neighborhood, especially damaging to the spontaneity that lies at the heart of jazz culture.
An October 2007 piece by
Times-Picayune
staff reporter Katy Reckdahl titled “Culture, Change Collide in Treme” offers some explanation, with a story about police breaking up a funeral parade in honor of tuba player Kerwin James, who died of complications from a stroke suffered after Katrina. As the second line made its way along a traditional route in Treme, about twenty police cars stormed the procession and grabbed local musicians, taking two away in handcuffs. Residents complained of the “over-reaction and disproportionate enforcement by police.” Others called it “a sign of a greater attack on the cultural history of the old city neighborhood by well-heeled newcomers attracted to Treme by the very history they seem to threaten.”
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After Katrina, as well-heeled newcomers moved into Treme, they often complained about the noise when musicians took to the streets spontaneously. When Davis blasts his speakers into the neighborhood, it is to protest this changing composition in the neighborhood. The conflict is resolved amicably in
Treme
, at a party at Davis’s house when his neighbor admits and apologizes for calling the police about the loud music.