Spotlight: Slate's Jack Shafer

Jack Shafer, Slate.com's editor at large has been focusing on media coverage of the Katrina aftermath in his last couple of articles.

In his latest piece, News You Can Lose: What I hate about Cable TV Journalism, Shafer focuses on Cable television's shortcomings when it comes to sharing which news is truly important as opposed to structuring a broadcast simply to maximize viewership and profits. They don't want you to check back every couple of hours to see if anything has developed... they want you to watch straight through. And during that time, they want you to watch the same dramatic images they took three days ago because they're better (and cheaper) than new shots.

… I hate the absence of context and continuity. Where are we in the story? What came before? What's next? More than once while watching reports, I've felt as disconnected from the narrative as that guy in Memento, who can only remember the last 20 minutes of what happened to him before his memory purges itself.

I appreciate the difficulty of covering this story, but if the news networks can't bring coherence to it, they can at least offer the disclaimer that circumstances will render their breaking-news accounts fragmented and flawed, and that they promise to sort things out in a 9 p.m. or 11 p.m. broadcast. With so much air to fill, why haven't they produced a 15-minute segment on the engineering of the levees or an animated 3-D representation of how the storm surged into New Orleans and broke upon the coast?

On Friday, Shafer posted an article titled The Rebellion of the Talking Heads about journalists taking on the role of public advocate in the face of politicians who have attempted to put an optimistic and innocent face on the handling of the situation.

Last Wednesday, Shafer was one of the first journalists to bring up that the major news outlets were skirting the fact that almost all of the victims remaining in New Orleans were black and poor. Lost in the Flood: Why no mention of race or class in TV's Katrina coverage?

But I don't recall any reporter exploring the class issue directly by getting a paycheck-to-paycheck victim to explain that he couldn't risk leaving because if he lost his furniture and appliances, his pots and pans, his bedding and clothes, to Katrina or looters, he'd have no way to replace them. No insurance, no stable, large extended family that could lend him cash to get back on his feet, no middle-class job to return to after the storm.

What accounts for the broadcasters' timidity? I saw only a couple of black faces anchoring or co-anchoring but didn't see any black faces reporting from New Orleans. So, it's safe to assume that the reluctance to talk about race on the air was a mostly white thing. That would tend to imply that white people don't enjoy discussing the subject. But they do, as long as they get to call another white person racist.