To The End of the Story

NBC has announced that it will be opening a bureau in New Orleans.

I'd feel a bit better about that if they had said they were opening a bureau ""on the Gulf Coast" -- one of the reasons it's been so easy for the press to lose sight of just how difficult it is to do the things that need to be done (or, at least, so easy for that perspective to be lost in the coverage) is that the coverage is so New Orleans-centric that it's easy to lose sight of just how massive this disaster was. This wasn't a normal hurricane and we aren't talking about getting relief supplies just to one city. But that's often the way it begins to look. (To their credit, NBC did make mention that "experts" had made that announcement yesterday, although they never bothered to mention which experts.)

Just the same, credit to Brian Williams, who said on Imus this morning that for the forseeable future he imagined he'd basically be commuting between New York and New Orleans.

He just couldn't get a hold of the story, he felt, from New York. There were just some things he couldn't understand fully, he said, from a studio.

Like I say, all due credit, and if there's a story that deserves this kind of attention, surely the rebuilding of this large a swath of the country is it.

But it is funny, isn't it, that that lesson isn't assumed to apply to the combat zones?

In particular, I would note that long before Katrina knocked Iraq off the front pages and almost (but not quite) off the air, Afghanistan was long, long gone.

That still amazes me, given the promises we were made four years ago, that the story would be followed to the bitter end.

I don't think Katrina makes one bit of difference by the way, to that story. It won't be covered now, it wouldn't have been covered before. We aren't at the end there, of course, but surely this weekend marks a substantial milestone. A milestone that, I'm guessing, will go all but unremarked.

Comments

[Brian Enjoord]

The devastation was so much greater in Mississippi; whole towns flattened, etc. But the "people" story was in NOLA. I, too, am saddened that the rest of the Gulf Coast seems to be forgotten.