Neil deMause: The Website

So the reports by CNN’s Gary Tuchman of serious flooding in the Lower 9th Ward - as well as his later report that the police were telling anyone in the area that the levees there could “explode at any time” - turned out to be inaccurate: Some water did overtop the levees there, but it looks as if the levees held firm. Of course, it took hours before viewers could be assured of this, as CNN’s (and other stations’) reporters otherwise stayed out of New Orleans’ low-lying neighborhoods, relying solely on Army Corps of Engineers assurances that the levees were holding. Which turned out to be true this time, but if it hadn’t been, who would have known?

In all, the Gustav reporting was a notch better than that during Katrina (at least someone bothered to train cameras on some levees), but still exhibited the focus on the tourist district and reliance on official sources that plagued coverage three years ago, at least until one NBC cameraman thought to walk the few blocks to the Convention Center. For example, while disgraced former FEMA chief Mike Brown has been interviewed on nearly every news station about the Gustav response, I’ve yet to see any interviews with New Orleanians who were evacuated on the buses that, this time, the government provided for people with no means of getting out of harm’s way. (Though Anderson Cooper’s blog does have a brief item about one evacuee shelter with no working plumbing.) If nothing else, asking evacuees whether they knew of people who’d been forced to stay behind in New Orleans would have helped answer the question of whether official claims that only 10,000 people remained in the city were true - something no station attempted to verify.

Anyway, looks like there will be two more opportunities coming up for the news media to work on their coverage. We’ll see how they do.

With Anderson Cooper momentarily off the air (he’s moving his satellite truck so it doesn’t blow over), CNN has turned to Gary Tuchman, who’s finally made it to the Lower 9th Ward. There, he reports, a “deluge of water” is pouring in “over and through” the levee, and stop signs are already underwater. Tuchman promised camera footage to come.

So kudos to CNN for getting somebody out into the neighborhoods this time. Though they’d get more kudos if Tuchman hadn’t been standing next to Cooper in the French Quarter an hour ago, talking about how it looked like New Orleans would be spared flooding this time.

Best unintentionally funny moment of the Gustav reporting so far: Anderson Cooper, standing in the official reporting zone of the French Quarter, assuring viewers that “You don’t see anyone on the streets here except police and emergency personnel - anyone still in town is hunkered down.” At that very moment, four twentysomething guys in street clothes wandered through the shot behind him, waving their arms in the hurricane-force winds.

I figure another ten minutes before it ends up on YouTube.

Flipping cable channels for the latest on Hurricane Gustav, I can’t help notice a striking similarity to the run-up to Hurricane Katrina three years ago: Every single news station is reporting from the French Quarter, or the adjacent downtown region. Even Anderson Cooper, the supposed hero journalist of Katrina, remarked a bit ago that while city officials say the city is mostly evacuated, he has no way of knowing if it’s true.

Is it really too much to expect that, now that Katrina alerted the nation that parts of New Orleans exist outside the tourist districts, the media actually go report from there to see how folks are handling this new threat? Probably yes - after all, a mere six months after Katrina, the vast majority of the reporting was on how Mardi Gras had returned to normal, and never mind that the rest of the city was a disaster, and tens of thousands of people were still displaced.

I did just see one CNN correspondent - I didn’t catch his name - mention to Cooper that while the tourist areas of New Orleans are in reasonably good shape today, the outlying neighborhoods are not. Still, I haven’t seen a single piece of video footage, or even blog post, from the poorer sections of town. Let’s hope we don’t have a repeat of 2005, when the nation went to bed on Monday night assured that “the water is going down” in the French Quarter, only to later learn that at moment, the levees had been breached for more than 12 hours, and half the city - the not-ready-for-prime-time half - was already underwater.