Media Response to Hurricane Katrina

This presentation examines the media response to Hurricane Katrina and its impact on public health emergency response. It discusses the role of traditional media and social media in reporting the disaster, as well as the perspectives and biases adopted by the media. The presentation also explores the effectiveness of social media and other technology platforms in reporting the emergency situation. Overall, it provides insights into the importance of media in emergency response and the challenges faced in reporting such events.

Public Health
Emergency Response

Introduction: Media response to
Hurricane Katrina
 The hurricane Katrina disaster in USA on august 2005 is considered to
be the third most deadly catastrophe to be recorded in US history.
 The resulting damage showed that it consumed an estimated $125
billion dollars in damage costs.
 The city of New Orleans and its surrounding was the worst hit with a
resulting flooding caused by fatal engineering and drainage flaws.
 It is on record that the total number of fatalities were more than
1830 (De Albuquerque, et al, 2015).
 Disaster reporting of the hurricane Katrina was done mostly by the
mainstream media and TV outlets.

Social Media
 Social media also played a major role in communication of emergency
situations caused by the disaster.
 Days before the hurricane disaster, media outlets warned people of
imminent flooding that would be caused by the hurricane.
 They warned people to get out of unsafe areas that were very low
lying and evacuate to possibly better and safer areas.

Types of media
 On the aftermath of the Katrina Hurricane, many representatives of
the media became directly involved in the events unfolding.
 The loss of most means of communication such as telephone
systems, cellular phones and land line based telephones led to field
reporters of TV and radio stations to become conduits of information
between authorities and victims.
 In the rescue missions, several reporters could locate stranded
victims and report the location through enhanced satellite links to
their networks.
 After the report, authorities monitoring the news could attempt to
coordinate emergency rescue operations based on the reported news.

Cont….
 The best illustration was seen when Geraldo Rivera and Shepard Smith both of the
Fox News Agencies reported thousands of stranded hurricane Katrina victims in
Ernest N Morial Center.
 Rivera become very popular after tearfully and with a lot of emotions pleading
with authorities to either let the people leave or immediately send help.
 The internet too played an important role in disseminating of information although
not verified.
 He went further to make comparisons between the center and other places which
were worse (Granell, & Ostermann, 2016).
 With unsubstantiated and rumor filled news, many journalists led to rumors of
lawlessness that a lot of people have interpreted as instances of yellow journalism.
 News agencies reported that there were a lot of murder and rape cases and
repeated the claims as facts without attribution.

Media in emergency response
 Only one case of rape was actual but the reports led to often impeding rescue and relief efforts.
 Some of the reporting led to people wondering the racial bias that was associated with the
reporting.
 For example coverage report began to surface as Caucasian victims of the flood as “finding food
supplies “while some agencies portrayed a black person as looting the supplies.
 The photo journalists later clarified that in the two pictures he witnessed a black person looting a
store while in the other picture he witnessed the white man finding food floating on the water.
 This led to anger and protest due to racial bias that was witnessed while reporting some of the
events that were happening.
 Both traditional media and the internet(blogs) played an important role in helping victims of the
hurricane to be located after missing.
 Television video clips and online photos were mostly used to locate a victim as families were
unable to report a missing person to local authorities.
 For example in one of the rescue success stories, one family in Clearwater was able to discover
that their mum was alive in Mississippi after seeing her photo on an online regional news site.

Perspectives, including biases, adopted by the
media in reporting the emergency/disaster
 The article examines the numerous attempts of the journalistic community
to regulate the activities of a journalist when covering emergencies
regarding social responsibility and public health to viewers.
 However, in practice, television in the pursuit of rating does not always
comply with these standards, releasing unverified, shocking and even
dangerous information on the air.
 Events of media reporting after Hurricane Katrina deals with the numerous
attempts to regulate journalism in emergency incident media coverage.
 These regulations regarding to social responsibility of media come within
the journalistic community.
 However, practical media do not always comply with these regulations,
airing unverified, shocking and even dangerous information in pursuit of
television ratings (Houston, et al ,2015).

Perspectives in media
 “Emergency” - this phrase we hear on television news, perhaps every day.
Emergency scenes, as a rule, become the main materials of television
broadcasts, attracting the attention of millions of viewers to the screen.
 Of course, to date, emergencies of various kinds are an inexhaustible source of
interesting, "exciting" information for news broadcasts of television channels,
print media and Internet sources.
 What makes us, consumers of information, watch with such attention on what is
happening on the TV screen when it comes to an emergency? What is an
emergency in general?
 Of course, all of the listed emergency situations, upon reaching a certain level of
danger, are of interest to the population and, as a result, to the media, including
television channels.
 Moreover, it is not uncommon for the scale of media coverage of any emergency
to significantly exceed its real danger and significance for information consumers.

Social media/other technology platforms used,
and their effectiveness, in reporting the
emergency situation
 The effectiveness of social media during the hurricane Katrina was little. In 2005 when Hurricane Katrina hit,
social media was in its infancy.
 Twitter and Instagram didn’t exist while Facebook was not even a year old. Not many people had access to
social media platforms.
 The lack of social media and these types of communication when they are so crucial at this point raises basic
question of what if social media truly existed at that point.
 What if the social media networks were ubiquitous and vibrant as they are now? The answer is
communication would have been a lot easier and more lives would have been saved.
 However, other forms of technology had taken up the mantle to educate resident’s days before the Katrina.
 Capitalweather.com, a blog wrote a comprehensive report on the vulnerabilities of New Orleans to the much
waited Hurricane Katrina.
 The blog wrote about the potential of one of the worst weather catastrophes seen in the US for a while (Palen
& Hughes, 2018)..
 It is in fact possible to state that not many people were too much concerned about what was happening to
the digital media platforms and just waited.
 The fact that social media was not available at the moment in large parts of the country only limited the
number of people who could have been saved.

Cont…..
 It is necessary to distinguish between the terms "emergency" and "emergency", which are not always
correctly used, including in the media.
 An emergency is an event that can lead to an emergency.
 As a rule, the effects of an emergency are highlighted on the air - an emergency, since television cameras
are not always able to remove the incident itself.
 However, with the development of video surveillance systems (from which video can later be removed),
an increase in the number of film crews working in areas where there is a high probability of an
emergency, as well as thanks to amateur shooting of eyewitnesses, it is sometimes possible to remove
and subsequently show the viewers the emergency itself (hurricane acts), man-made and natural
disasters,, etc.).
 If the TV channel has video, photography or audio recording (for example, negotiations between pilots at
the time of the crash of the aircraft) of the emergency itself, its use makes the material about the
emergency much more saturated and interesting for the viewer.
 At the same time, the journalist often does not have time to seriously verify the information received: it is
necessary to broadcast it as soon as possible, ahead of competitors (Wang, & Ye, 2018).
 In such conditions, the verification of the accuracy of information, as a rule, is carried out only formally or
not at all. The facts voiced by official sources do not pass the test at all - they are immediately broadcast.

Other problems Barriers and
solutions
 Cases that provoke tension between certain groups of people, divided by ethnic, religious or
other grounds, can be observed in the media quite regularly.
 Moreover, such tension can be deliberately provoked through the press by certain political
forces that control the media, in order to achieve their own political or other benefits.
 Such restrictions on interference are strictly enforced when it comes to people placed in
medical and similar facilities.
 Unfortunately, these recommendations, are often ignored, and we see materials that directly
affect people's privacy by mentioning their personal data.
 Including the norm, including for our television, became speculative materials from hospitals
and hospitals containing interviews with sick or crippled people(Xiao, Huang, & Wu, 2015).
 I consider it important to note that, in accordance with the law on the media, journalists are
allowed to work in places where an emergency occurred and in territories where a state of
emergency was declared.
 Given this, the journalist has no right to prevent access to the territory where the emergency
occurred.

References
 De Albuquerque, J. P., Herfort, B., Brenning, A., & Zipf, A. (2015). A geographic approach for
combining social media and authoritative data towards identifying useful information for
disaster management. International Journal of Geographical Information Science, 29(4), 667-
689.
 Granell, C., & Ostermann, F. O. (2016). Beyond data collection: Objectives and methods of
research using VGI and geo-social media for disaster management. Computers, Environment
and Urban Systems, 59, 231-243.
 Houston, J. B., Hawthorne, J., Perreault, M. F., Park, E. H., Goldstein Hode, M., Halliwell, M. R., ...
& Griffith, S. A. (2015). Social media and disasters: a functional framework for social media
use in disaster planning, response, and research. Disasters, 39(1), 1-22.
 Palen, L., & Hughes, A. L. (2018). Social media in disaster communication. In Handbook of
disaster research (pp. 497-518). Springer, Cham.
 Wang, Z., & Ye, X. (2018). Social media analytics for natural disaster
management. International Journal of Geographical Information Science, 32(1), 49-72.
 Xiao, Y., Huang, Q., & Wu, K. (2015). Understanding social media data for disaster
management. Natural hazards, 79(3), 1663-1679.