"Reporters Gone Wild": Reporters and Their Critics on Hurricane Katrina, Gender, Race & Place

The great fiction of the southern United States is frequently characterized by its passionate embrace of place. In her classic essay, "Place in Fiction," the widely beloved Mississippi author Eudora Welty writes, "Place in history partakes of feeling, as feeling about history partakes of place. Feelings are bound up in place. Location is the ground conductor of all the currents of emotion and belief and moral conviction that charge out from the story in its course."1 Welty's rich stories evoke larger traditions of southern art and everyday culture imbued with multifaceted understandings of place. Starting with Welty's insight, in this essay I discuss the relationship of place and emotion and the expression of that relationship in journalistic storytelling-specifically, the rituals and techniques evident in the televised cable network news coverage of Hurricane Katrina as the storm and its aftermath devastated parts of the U.S. South. My aim is not primarily to provide yet another critique of network reporting (although much of it is ripe for such analysis), nor is it to present a systematic content analysis of television news texts. Rather, this essay offers a meta-critique, examining prominent published evaluations of the reporting in the earliest hours of the disaster, with a particular focus on moments in which normative national network news practices quite literally "broke down." I argue, in part, that "senses of place" are essential to better understandings of the "break down" of mainstream network reporting practices. Places are discourses, physical settings and ideological groundings; they are both where one is, and where one should be (as in one should know "their place"). But, importantly, they are about more than physical territory and are, in a broad sense, political. "Places are contested, intersecting, and uncertain, clearly shaped by power relations and human interests."2 While there are no essential meanings of a place or places outside of culture and particular social and historical contexts, as such meanings are understood, reproduced, discussed and enacted in daily encounters, they are powerful in their employment. Much more than a simple geography or a physical space, place matters.