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[Commentary] By their disposition, hurricanes are a television story: great pictures, an informational crawl at the bottom, and a wind-swept, rain-soaked anchor. But big papers like The Washington Post, The Chicago Tribune, The Wall Street Journal and The Los Angeles Times all dug in, sending dispatches out of New Orleans that shed light where there had been only heat. What exactly happened at the convention center? Is Mayor Ray Nagin a saint or a kook? Were the levees overtopped or undermined? Will New Orleans be a real city again, or just Disneyland with Jell-O shots? Those are not questions that get asked or answered much on television. The New Orleans story needed the big muscles of print journalism to gain custody of facts that seemed beyond comprehension. People could Google their way through the storm, but for a search engine to really work, you need women and men on the ground asking difficult questions and digging past the misinformation and panic that infect a big story. Newspapers are a civic good, especially right now, but they cannot function as a nonprofit. Make all the jokes you want about dead trees, a printed artifact that people pay to read and advertise in is an absolute necessity. On television, it always seems like Groundhog Day - get wet, rinse, repeat. There is undeniably something compelling about Anderson Cooper standing in wind and rain in Galveston at 3 a.m. on Saturday as Rita blew ashore - "You feel very much at the edge of the world," he said, blinking against the rain - but that does not address the issues of governance, logistics, race and class that the hurricanes reveal. Those are stories newspapers tell well. But with department stores consolidating both their operations and their advertising and with readers canceling the newspapers that land on their doorstep in favor of more instant gratification on the Web, big newspapers full of deep reporting and serious ambitions seem like dinosaurs at the beginning of a very cold age.
[SOURCE: New York Times, AUTHOR: David Carr]
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Eight days after Hurricane Katrina decimated the Gulf Coast, CNN's "Anderson Cooper 360" included in its coverage of the storm's aftermath a report on toxic water and another piece on global warming. The story on the toxic soup created by the New Orleans floodwaters raised issues about the environmental impact of the cleanup as the dirty water is drained into Lake Pontchartrain. The global warming story explained the complicated cycles of increased and decreased hurricane activity and their relationship with rising temperatures in the oceans. These types of pieces-taking a long-range look at environmental issues-were less likely to generate attention in newsrooms in a pre-Katrina world. The destruction caused by Katrina may have created a defining era for environmental journalism. Coverage of environmental topics has been sparse on television over the past few years. Now viewers appear more keenly invested in such issues because Katrina isn't just the story of the worst natural disaster to hit the United States, it's also a story that has brought into sharp focus the issues of man's impact on the environment. In fact, the ongoing cleanup and the assessment of the impact of Katrina are likely to usher in a new wave of environmental reporting on TV in the next few months. What is unknown is whether that attention will translate into a long-term, consistent focus.
[SOURCE: TVWeek, AUTHOR: Daisy Whitney]
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Telephone and cellphone outages persisted in parts of Texas, Louisiana and Mississippi on Sunday as crews repaired damage caused by Hurricane Rita. Joe Chandler, spokesman for BellSouth, said about 560,000 customers were without service, mainly in northern Louisiana and northern Mississippi. He said crews were at work in areas that weren't severely flooded. San Antonio-based SBC Communications said its core network in Texas “is fully functional, with the exception of a small central office in Sabine Pass,” near hard-hit Port Arthur. Mark Siegel of Cingular Wireless said that “well over half of our sites are up” in Texas and Louisiana.
[SOURCE: USAToday]

Public broadcasters are taking seriously proposals by Republicans to eliminate federal funding for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, and will fight such attempts, Association of Public TV Stations (APTS) President John Lawson said. In measures to cut federal costs to pay for Katrina relief, the House Republican Study Committee (RSC) urged slicing $400 million in annual CPB appropriations, which it says would save $1 billion over 5 years and $2.5 billion over 10 years. RSC’s war on CPB funding seems to be a "kind of willful disregard of the fact that public broadcasters are part of the solution to recovery in the Gulf states," Lawson said. "We will be vigilant in ensuring that CPB funding is not singled out." Gulf state Congressional representatives know the "positive impact" public broadcasters are making in the region, he said, "and we are confident that our funding will be protected." Public TV and radio stations in areas hit by Katrina are broadcasting special programming to help children deal with the disaster. They also are distributing educational DVDs and free books at shelters, an plan job training programming and outreach, he said. "So they are definitely playing a very constructive and cost-effective role in recovery." Still, public broadcasters are bracing for some sort of across-the-board cuts in all domestic discretionary spending to pay for Katrina relief, Lawson said, and "we will certainly be willing to do our part." But they will fight any bid to eliminate CPB funding, he added.
[SOURCE: Communications Daily, AUTHOR: Dinesh Kumar]
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