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A Year Later: TVNewsers On Katrina
The television journalists who covered Katrina reflect on the storm — and how they covered it — in a series of exclusive interviews. Here are some of the highlights.
August 31, 2006 |
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[Editor's Note: The following article was culled from the mediabistro.com blog TVNewser, which has been running a series of posts on Katrina's anniversary.]
Viewers didn't know it at the time, but NBC Nightly News anchor Brian Williams — whose on-the-scene coverage of Hurricane Katrina helped earn NBC a Peabody Award — fell "terribly ill" in the days following the storm. On Tuesday, August. 30, "we did a broadcast from the I-10 overpass," Williams recalls. "I thought I could stand up, and I got very weak. They started pumping me with fluids and made me sit down on an equipment box for the broadcast." Williams was clearly uncomfortable discussing the illness. "The only problem I have with it being public ... is that I am the last person people should be thinking about," he says. "I was surrounded by such depravity, watching people try to survive with such great quiet dignity, that I have a real problem with any attention [directed toward me]." Williams never revealed his illness to viewers.
He was inside the Superdome for the height of the hurricane. He left the shelter to anchor Monday's Nightly News. He said the vacuum of information in New Orleans was "appalling." "I think the despair set in around Thursday," Williams says. "I later learned that our broadcast that night prompted a call to the president by an aide in the West Wing asking if he was watching." (The president apparently wasn't; an aide burned Bush a DVD of the coverage.) It happened like a slow train wreck. Williams calls it the "archetype television story." "I don't think there has been a story better told by television," he says.
"ABC thought I was there to work," Roberts says. "But I was there to find my family!" Roberts is a native of the Mississippi Gulf Coast. On August 29, 2005, Roberts was live on GMA until noon. She lost contact with her Mississippi relatives at 10:00 a.m. that morning. Within hours, Roberts was aboard a chartered flight to the Gulf Coast. After it landed in Lafayette, Louisiana, the crew drove all night toward Roberts' family home near Gulfport. By 5:30 a.m., Roberts was walking the last half-mile to her mother's house. Sunrise revealed a shocking landscape. "I believed, like so many people, that we had dodged one. We had missed it. But to see it that morning, as the sun's coming up, to see it live like that ... This is a place I knew like the back of my hand. And I had no clue where I was, on this road I've traveled for decades." That's when she lost it. "I broke down, live on TV," she recalls. "The most surreal moment of my life, and career."
"Call him Hurricane Harrigan," Tim Cuprisin declared 52 weeks ago. That nickname for Fox News correspondent Steve Harrigan was heard in the halls of FNC as Katrina washed ashore last August, first in Florida and then in Mississippi. "The reporter stands out there and people like to see the reporter get blown around," says Harrington. ""To see the aftermath — on the streets, with people waiting for help and not getting it — it felt like the Congo." [Brian Stelter is the editor of mediabistro.com's TVNewser blog. He can be reached at Brian AT mediabistro.com] |
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