More praise for Keith's Katrina coverage

[Berry Cool]

This from Aaron Barnhart at the Kansas City Star:

http://blogs.kansascity.com/tvbarn/

"...Olbermann has had a sense of urgency and outrage in his newscasts all week. He's to be commended."

[gkhouston]

1. and yet, he hasn't raised his voice or ranted in any way.

There's an incredible undercurrent of energy there, but he himself has showed outward calm although you can sense there's a lot going on just under the surface.

[Berry Cool]

2. Yeah, true.

Maybe part of it is because his reaction is more muted emotionally by the fact that he's not actually down there in the middle of the misery, reporting on it, suffering whatever hardships he'd have to suffer while seeing people suffering hardships that are far worse, and becoming enraged about the lack of action to the point where it becomes like a personal insult to one's self that nothing is being done.

Keith is relatively safe up there in his nice studio in New Jersey and he knows it. But he sees what's going on, and I think he takes it all in and says "My job is to be the voice of truth in all this and just try to tell people what is going on and why."

I have a feeling he's going to say a LOT next week. A LOT. It's just waiting to come out.

I was watching some of my tapes from earlier this week--and already on MONDAY, before the levees broke, he was talking about how funding to prevent this kind of disaster (which had not yet happened, which even he thought had been dodged and that everyone was lucky about that) had been cut. He was essentially saying "It's a good thing things were not worse, although they are pretty bad, because the politicians really didn't allocate much money for dealing with or preventing this stuff."

Already, on either Monday or Tuesday, he was talking about how the people who had evacuated to the Superdome might find themselves much like the people taking "express trains" out of Johnstown before the flood: on one train, all the people died and the ones left behind were safe; on the other, all the people left behind died and the only ones saved were on the train. Which situation would be theirs was entirely up in the air at that point. And of course, he hit the nail on the head. In a situation like that, how DOES one decide whether the safest thing is to "evacuate" elsewhere or stay where you are?

Even then, he understood that. And even early in the week, he was asking the kinds of questions of reporters on the scene that draw out the fact that a lot of the people still in the area, who did not evacuate, didn't do it because they COULD NOT AFFORD TO.

In the meantime, we're told that it took the news media many days to even raise the issue of race and class. Oh, Keith raised it all right. He just didn't rant about it, so nobody but the die-hards paid attention. And did I mention he was probably one of the first people anywhere to tell the truth about this not just being a matter of months of recovery, but of years? NOW, everyone else is saying it. But look how long it took.

I have a feeling that this week, he's going to be doing a lot of historical reflection (think Louisiana 1927) and a lot of blogging and a lot of good work on Countdown.

[gkhouston]

3. oh, I agree

he hasn't been jumping up and down and saying, "SEE! DO YOU GET IT YET?" but all the factual seeds of what could be a humdinger of a rant are there. He simply laid out the information and let us add it up ourselves, and no, the math isn't very pretty.

I do expect more historical reflection will come into play, as well. The 1900 storm in Galveston may well come up, partly because it was the deadliest, until now, but also for another reason. Before the storm, Galveston was a thriving seaport and an important city in Texas. The storm pretty much wiped it off the map and it never regained its former prominence: Houston built the ship channel and became the place where the shipping primarily went, and Galveston is now a popular tourist attraction. I wonder if New Orleans will suffer a similar fate when it's rebuilt. By the time the city can rebuild, most of the shipping will have found other routes out of sheer necessity, and that business might not return to NOLA. The New NOLA may be a ghost of its former self in more ways than one.