Well, the WaPo at least put a link up to a few pics from the Mississippi Gulf Coast but little else and today’s feature story is about the trainwreck that is the post Katrina recovery in New Orleans from incompetent leadership at NOPD and from the Mayor, Ray Nagin to the outright thievery and unbridled corruption that is the Jeffersons. The media likes train wrecks.
That said you cross the line from cognitive bias to outright ignorance when you lede a review of Kathleen Kock’s new book on Bay St Louis, When the Levees Broke: Kathleen Koch, ‘Rising from Katrina: How My Mississippi Hometown Lost It All and Found What Mattered’. Kathie herself unwittingly explains why the national media as a whole had little interest in the Mississippi Gulf Coast as train wrecks evidently make better news:
I decided to write the book the week that we covered the storm. We were down there the entire week, from Sunday before the storm hit to the following Saturday, and I told the people at the citizens’ station in my hometown in Bay St. Louis, “I promise I’ll never let anyone forget what happened here,” and I meant that. I had already seen the media spotlight switch to focus on New Orleans, but I also saw before my eyes towns in an 80-mile stretch that looked like Armageddon. And every single story you do, there’s a lot that falls on the cutting-room floor — you accept it and you move on — but this was part of my town’s history, and it was so largely untold that I didn’t feel it was right to take stories to the grave with me. Continue reading “5 years later and Katrina ground zero is still the red headed step child: Katrina plus 5. So what? The same old tired song most everyone is sick of hearing.”