Thursday, May 6, 2010
Media Why Did It Take So Long for National Media to Notice We were Flooded?
Posted by Betsy Phillips on Thu, May 6, 2010 at 6:21 AM
In a world of 24-hour news, when said national news channels will devote hours of programming to interviewing people who sleep with famous people, and when they'll interrupt that programming to bring you speculation on the identity of a guy in grainy surveillance footage, it was mind-boggling to flip by CNN, MSNBC, and FOX on Sunday afternoon and see not one station even occasionally bringing their viewers footage of the flood, news of our people dying.
I mean, fine, if they didn't have people on the ground here, but MSNBC is, you know, NBC. They have an affiliate here. But god forbid their viewers miss out on even one minute of whichever iteration of sensational footage from America's prisons they're showing at the moment in favor of actual news.
I mean, this is the thing to me that rings so hollow about, "Well, with the oil rig explosion and the car bomb, you just kind of fell off the radar."
Do they think we don't get their stations here?
On Sunday, Fox was airing an interview with Ann Coulter, which is barely a step up from the prisoner-exploitation porn on MSNBC at the same time. And bless CNN's heart, they were showing interviews with their own staff about what stories the staffers were going to be working on in the coming days.
People, it is sad enough when you're so pressed for something to put on the air that you're just wandering around asking staffers what they're doing this week. But when none of those staffers, whose job it seems to be is to have their finger on what's happening, has their finger on what's happening in a major American city?!
News Network Folks, you did not run out of space for us. We weren't even on your radar. Let's not bullshit here.
So what happened to change that?
Sadly, I think it came down to "the hook" — that thing about a story that makes it immediately understandable to outsiders and makes it feel relevant.
After all, when you're running a 24-hour news channel, and you're after ratings, it's not about passing along information and reporting facts, it's about getting ratings and having something that will keep viewers watching.
"Much of Middle and West Tennessee is experiencing catastrophic floods" is just a bunch of facts. How does that "entertain" the viewer?
Once social media users on Twitter and Facebook started pushing the "we have been forgotten" meme, we had a hook. I mean, it's the point of this post, right? It's a question you can built a narrative around. It's something your viewers can imagine — what if this terrible thing happened to your home and nobody gave a shit?
That's terrible. Now we have a narrative. It's these plucky Nashvillians having to do it on our own because no one else has noticed we're in trouble.
And that got their attention. That gave them a way to frame the story. "We are Nashville."
And goddamn it, we owe a big one to the Grand Ole Opry House for taking one for the team, because that gave them the second way in. If you don't care about plucky underdogs, you care about the loss of our cultural heritage, right? Or at least that makes it seem that this event is of national importance.
Now our loss is a national loss.
Don't get me wrong. I'm glad we have national attention now. Folks, please, donate to Red Cross. Come and visit. Buy our stuff (though maybe not our used cars or furniture for the next little bit). Make yourselves at home and open your wallets while you're here.
But we live in a society where attention for a disaster means money and support. If people don't know you're having troubles, they won't know to help.
And, if anything, what we learned this weekend is that if you want help, you have to market your tragedy in a way that catches folks' attention.
I find that troubling.
And what about Ashland City? Or Pegram? Or the three homes in a clump along a creek out west of here that don't have a name? What if they don't have time to "construct a narrative" or a vast army of people to push it out to the national media?
Do they just suffer unknown?
Do they just have to hope that the generosity people show towards us is so great that some of it spills downstream onto them?
Comments (39)
Showing 1-39 of 39
This is the God awful truth!! I emailed CNN, NBC, ABC, CBS, and Fox, complaining and asking why was this not news worthy? Then, I turned around and emailed the Weather Channel. If it had not been for them, it would not have been known at all!! It's a shame, but I think it was simply our status of, who we are, as to why it was not news worthy, if you know what I mean.
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Good column - i think you make a great point re: constructed narratives - what's fascinating is that now instead of the 'major media' creating the narrative the folks on the ground have to do it (we've been forgotten) and then have to market to the major media to get picked up - it's like folks have to pitch the news -
Jett, that's exactly how I feel about it--that we had to find the right "pitch" to get them interested. And that's very, very scary when you think about the implications of that. We had to pitch our tragedy to the media.
What happens to places that can't do that? What happens to actual news stories that don't have "great" angles? Do we just never hear about them?
"What happens to actual news stories that don't have "great" angles? Do we just never hear about them?"
You got it Betsy. Shouldn't be any surprise in a place as devoted to 'the hook', 'ratings' etc. as Music City USA. Airplay is the thing. And the Grand Ole Opry saved the day because they have clout in the hook, ratings department. So now we have our airplay.
Every writer, musician and would be country music personality with a dead record knows all about all that stuff. We aren't shocked at all. So now you can join our club. Welcome.
On another note, kudos to the local media: tv, radio, and print. They all did a fantastic job. Still are.
First, I was in Franklin from Friday until Monday afternoon and I was actually wondering the same thing myself!! This was indeed a scary event, as we had just visited downtown Nashville on Sat. and saw that the river was rising, with no end in sight for the rain to stop. Luckily, we stayed at the Marriott (Cool Springs area) which was on a slight incline and not physically impacted by the water.
The problem there was the poor staff who could not get home themselves and had to work double shifts to replace the others who also were not able to make it in to work. I must say, they rose to the occasion though in splendid fashion to meet the needs of their guests! The tornado sirens that kept alarming several times during the night were unnerving, as was learning from local tv stations that just a short distance down the road (where we had eaten the night before) was under five ft of water and other such update stories of rescues, etc. Again, as everyone who has responded to this article has said----nothing from the national stations at all was mentioned!!! This is totally inexcusable!!!
My prayers go out to all the residents who lost loved ones and suffered personally in the loss of their homes, businesses, pets, and all the mess it left behind that they will have to deal with.
Finally, on another note, I would also like to add that this was a great article, but I did not feel that as a professional writer that the cursing was necessary to get your point across.
Hang in there!
A fellow east Tennessean
I'd like to pile on the mainstream media and rant about how the quest for profit has overwhelmed good news sense. But if you look back, the good "narrative" has always overwhelmed the facts.
In World War II, the overwhelming majority of coverage in the daily papers was from the European theater, and the Pacific theater was widely ignored. Part of this might be due to the fact that all the most famous correspondents from Murrow to Ernie Pyle elected to go to Europe. Pyle ultimately transferred to the Pacific, over his own strenuous objections, but was killed shortly after he arrived. It wasn't until Joe Rosenthal's famous Mt. Suribachi photo was published ("narrative" again) that the Pacific war gained an iconic image that triggered increased coverage.
Twenty years later, the "narrative" of "winning hearts and minds" dominated all the early coverage of Vietnam even as a few reporters on the ground like Halberstam warned that we were getting into an irretrievable mess. The "narrative" flipped after the Tet offensive in January 1968 to become increasingly pessimistic. You can make a good argument that the truth was never as rosy as the media portrayed it pre-'68, and was never as bad as it was portrayed post-Tet; but the narrative once again overpowered the facts.
Fast-forward to Gulf War II, where the mainstream media completely bought into the WMD/yellowcake uranium narrative pushed by GWB and the neocons, fully expecting jubilant Iraqi crowds to welcome western troops as liberators, and then expecting them to cooperate wholeheartedly with the occupying troops. That narrative, of course, ignored the reality that no citizen of any country will be happy over the long term to have foreign troops running his country.
Buying into the "narrative" or the "hook," and refusing to cover a story without a ready-made narrative are prime examples of lazy, conformist behavior common throughout the modern history of media. People who condemn the media as "radical" aren't really paying attention. The mainstream media seldom get more than a few steps out in front of public opinion. So when the nation (particularly that part of the nation inside the Beltway) was focused last weekend on the New York bombing and the Gulf oil spill, that's where the media focused its attention.
It ain't pretty, but that's the way it's always been.
Betsy, great post. Mark, great comment. There's a lot of food for thought here. On the one hand, the PR wisdom is that every story has to have a hook, right? But that's PR, not mainstream news. Mainstream news is supposed to cover events of significance. But what is significant? In the great 'man bites dog' tradition, there has to be some unusualness to the story, and like you said, B, 'much of TN hit by heavy rain' seems like a real yawner. I think what felt most like a slap in the face through this whole thing was having every last bit of navel-lint-picking minutiae of the car non-explosion story broadcast as breaking news while people were drowning and barely getting a mention. That seems less about the sensationalism and more about laziness: terrorism, even failed terrorism, works as a story and we know it, while catastrophic rain in the red states isn't worth looking into. But whether the delay in coverage was due to lack of story or lack of initiative, the end result is the same: as you say, now that there's a hook, it's a story that will play, and no new templates need to be defined for how this story plays out.
Think back to 2004 and Katrina. Louisiana got 95% of the press, when Mississippi was hit just as hard, with even less economic infrastructure to help them bounce back.
Why? The "hook." Mississippi invited FEMA in immediately, while Louisiana tried to go it alone in the most crucial hours of the disaster. The "hook" of the federal government "ignoring" Katrina became the story, and once they started that narrative, they COULDN'T tell the Mississippi stories, because they would have refuted it.
The news media hasn't been about reporting the news since Cronkite decided to try and end the Vietnam conflict.
"But that's PR, not mainstream news"
I would argue that in today's society, the two are not as separate as they should be.
"The news media hasn't been about reporting the news since Cronkite decided to try and end the Vietnam conflict."
+1 for this. If it wasn't for Cronkite's defeatist coverage of Tet we probably would have "won" Vietnam. Militarily we did win & Tet was a military failure. But because Cronkite turned public opinion, we lost the war politically.
Another WWII example. Until recently 75%+ of what we heard about the war was focused on D-Day and The Battle of the Bulge. Meanwhile the 'real' war was being fought on the Eastern Front, where many times the number of casualties were piling up. The Soviets won the war in Europe, but since that's not the story we wanted to hear, its rarely talked about.
The media wants to tell us stories, not provide facts.
Totally agree. I've been emailing and commenting on news sites trying to drum up some interest, and the response I get is "oil spill and Times Square." No one has mentioned that we have multiple TWENTY HOUR news channels in this country, not to mention the multi-hour morning shows and evening broadcasts, and none of them could spare more than 2 minutes (and in some cases, 15 freaking seconds) to get this across? And the web sites ... don't get me started on the web sites. Putting info on web sites isn't about broadcast time. There is nearly infinite room to put info on web sites. There have been days in the last few weeks where you couldn't even find a link to the story from the home page of CNN or the NYTimes.
It's funny about the "everyone is ignoring us" hook. I had assumed that when the country artists started talking, that THAT'S when the attention might pick up, and that has certainly happened. I mean, look at Anderson Cooper, who is coming here because he finally got the message: He's interviewing Kenny Chesney and Faith Hill and Tim McGraw. I mean, thank heavens we have these people because if we didn't have the celebrity hook, we really would be no where.
And, just like Nashville isn't the whole story in the context of TN/KY, country music isn't the whole story in Nashville. I have seen comments on the few news stories out there that make jokes about this being a good topic for a "country western" song *roll eyes*, or some variation of, "Stupid redneck Teabaggers, ha!"
Face it, the news has always needed a hook, but in our modern culture, the hook is all there is. Certain topics are chosen to sensationalize and over-hype and run into the ground, and everything else is ignored. If it's not salacious, who cares.
Just wanted to point out that the story made the national PRINT news quite early on. The AP was filing stories Sunday; the New York Times had a story Monday (and they go to press overnight, so the reporting was from Sunday); international media outlets also had coverage on Sunday and Monday. Cable TV news is not the only media out there. (It's just the loudest.)
You know what - I don't want them here now. Tell 'em to go to www.HON.org and donate directly to the cause or another NFP that will keep their cash right here in Middle Tennessee where it's needed.
Sorry, Aramalian and Tobin, but history doesn't support your thesis. If you track public opinion month-by-month from 1963-1973 you'll find that public support for the war, initially almost universal, had fallen sharply by the fall of 1967, four months before Tet. The dropoff in public support for the war was so severe that Lyndon Johnson brought Gen. Westmoreland home from Vietnam in November 1967 to spearhead Johnson's public relations effort. So the Tet offensive coverage in January of 1968 only served to confirm a downtrend in public support for the war that already existed.
Like most of the media, Cronkite seldom got an inch out in front of public opinion. (Famous exception: when he described Mayor Daley's goons at the '68 Democratic Convention as "thugs" on live TV). Even Lyndon Johnson, who had attempted to manipulate the public with his "policy of minimum candor" about Vietnam didn't BLAME Cronkite for his Tet reporting: he merely realized that Cronkite's 1968 pronouncements symbolized the loss of Middle America's support. Johnson understood that Cronkite had an almost psychic ability to articulate what the American public was already thinking.
I don't know how old you are, but I'm old enough to remember 1967 & 1968 vividly, as I was approaching draft age. Being called up to serve in Vietnam didn't sound so bad in 1964 and 1965. By late '67, it didn't sound like such a good idea. By mid '68, the very thought could give you nightmares. I was very glad to be young enough to have a student deferment through the worst of the war. By the time I was eligible to be drafted, America and its government were trying to pretend that we had never sent troops to that awful place, and to forget the poor SOBs who actually bore the burden of our insane foreign policy.
At least Cronkite wasn't lazy. He actually went to Vietnam, poked around on the ground, and made a judgment based on the facts as he personally saw them. That's a far cry from editors sitting in New York, LA, and Atlanta ignoring the Nashville story altogether last weekend because it didn't fit into their preconceived narratives about national news.
Yeah, I get that impulse, Anamolly, but we do need them here now. We're looking at at least a billion dollars worth of damage in Nashville alone and Nashville is not the only place affected. We've got 21 counties that are federal disaster areas now, with more sure to come. We're about to lose Dyersburg. We're going to be lucky if we haven't lost half of Ashland City (I can't even think about all of the houses in low-lying areas there without wanting to throw up). And, like I said, there are people who live in places that don't have names.
Even if Nashville has got this, for us, it would be a grave, grave evil for us to turn away help that might bring attention to those folks.
I can't reiterate that strongly enough--it would be evil for us to show our tails and cause our neighbors to not get help.
We can roll our eyes in private, but in public, we'd all better roll out the welcome mat.
You are exactly right! A former Nashvillian who so loves the city the best news I found was a periodic live feed on the Weather Channel!!!! Our thoughts and prayers go out to everyone in our city......
Never will forget y'all,
Sherry Park
Lake Wylie, SC
Dear Betsy,
I've got plenty to say on the subject, but you said 95% of it... and said it well. Amen!
The obvious hook here is that this is exactly the kind of flooding we should expect to see more of in a warming world. But since the MSM is almost always loathe to make that connection, then this was, as you put it, just a collection of facts. By not acknowledging humanity's role in this disaster, there was nothing in the story that was "actionable." If we were a more enlightened news consuming (and producing) society, the lesson would be "expect more of this, until we get our climate house in order."
How many of you people whose lives were ruined by the Nashville Flood and who have watched as the lame-stream media and Barack Obama ignored you happened to have voted for Barack Obama.
Because you can start blaming yourselves. Right about now.
Obama only has so many buckets. He is busy bailing out Wall Street, and now Greece with your tax dollars, so the Volunteers can fend for themselves. Give the guy a break so he can get in a little golf. He is lucky Detroit didn't flood , that would have made National News and ruined his weekend . Taosnow
Look on the bright side. We will never have a terrorist attack because it would not be covered by the media, and that's the sine qua non of the terrorist.
I wondered this same thing myself: Nashville's a major city, yet we had little coverage of a city of 500,000 people paralysed by flash flooding. Methinks the news channels could have delayed the celebrity gossip, shows hosted by partisan hacks, and the missing coed stories to tell us what the hell was going on in Nashville.
Good luck guys.
Chris Branski
Madison, Wisconsin
There was good coverage in Canada of the Nashville events on both CTV and CBC. Maybe the USA needs a national network and not political/commercial media outlets.
Canadians know the area well and are always concerned about their neighbors.
Cheers,
Tim Doyle
I really don't know what you are talking about. I was watching the Weather Channel because, at least in the beginning, it was strictly a weather event. I knew as it was happening that Tenn. was flooding and was kept up to date of the situation as it unfolded. CNN, Fox, MSNBC were slow to respond. No doubt. But unfortunatly, the flood had to share the spotlight with the terrorism in NYC, the Gulf oil spill and the Iceland volcano. It is very busy news time and I think it didn't get the attention it would have otherwise. It wasn't on purpose...it just got lost a little in the shuffle.
Went through the floods in 2008. I wish you the best.
Elizabeth, Iowa
I think it's more what media outlets citizens are paying attention to, as opposed to what what the media itself is covering. I've got a half-dozen national print websites [NYT, WP, Trib, etc] embedded on my homepage and every one of them had ongoing coverage of the storms and resultant flooding. Can't speak for the TV coverage - no cable and don't pay much attention to the broadcast news - so I don't know how much of it they presented. But again, if you were paying attention - even from out of state - you knew what was happening as it was happening.
My sympathies go out to those in Memphis, Nashville [two wonderful cities I've spent much time in] and the victims of the flooding throughout the state.
"People drowned because they were stuck in Interstate gridlock, and a building went floating down I-24" seem like fairly attention grabbing hooks. But since it couldn't be blamed on Bush, cue the crickets.
Why are people in Nashville convinced that there was no national media coverage of the flood? I live in New York City and I easily found information from Reuters, AP and NY Times among others. Most of my friends know I'm from Nashville and were aware of the flooding when I mentioned it.
Nothing new about this. In 1996, we had a storm in Phoenix, AZ that had the same winds and damage levels as a Category III hurricane. There were $165 million bucks in insurance claims, many people were without power for a week or more (in the Arizona summer), the National Guard was handing out dry ice, and many, many homes were damaged. Two of my co-workers were unable to live in their hours for 6 months or more afterwards. This in a city of 4,000,000 people.
National news? Not a whisper, ever. At least I have been hearing plenty about Nashville on Fox and online. The Phoenix disaster was never reported to the best of my knowledge.
As one of your neighbors in the state to the south, I have been trying to find news of the flooding in central Tennessee and to find out how Mississippians can help. There has been none: no photos, no reports, no updates. It is shameful. Luckily, I have friends in Nashville who have been able to keep us up to date. Tennesseeans are a resourceful bunch. I know that with a little help, you will pull through this better than ever.
It seems that part of the problem arises from Tennessee being populated with (many, not all) decent people who go out and help their neighbors, not prey on them. The national media paid attention to Katrina because of the uncontrolled criminal behavior amidst the destruction and the loss of life. When decent people help one another (how many 'good ole boys' put their boats in the water to go out and rescue people?) so that they don't die, that's of minimal interest nationally, as you correctly pointed out.
I'm thrilled to see the point made so well. I have one observation. The Nashville story really did get trumped by the oil rig explosion and the failed bombing. Not because they didn't have time, but because these 24-hour news stations are 90% bubblegum. They talk about trivia all day and set up rock-em sock-em robot debates at night. They do periodic, hour-long in-depth reports about global tragedies where everyone gets to look sad and serious, but nobody is actually agitated or fretting over the plight of children born in Indian brothels. Even when they're serious, they're not really serious, they're just deep. When things matter, when things are scary or important, they simply don't wanna unless they hafta. And besides, their medium can't handle it anyways. They can only do scary and important if it's also sexy. This whole situation is a perfect example of that limitation: something has to blow up (or almost blow up) before they are jazzed up enough to put up big flashing banners and go to video. I mean, where are the riots? The explosions? The wounded, innocent victims of mankind's selfishness? I mean, Michael Bay couldn't do anything with a plot about a flood, why should you expect more of us?! *sigh* Thank God for the internet, right?
sure thing, boo boo, and if nashville weren't a blue town who kicked sister sarah and her teabagging hooligans to the curb, you might have seen it on FOX.
Well. The thing is-- you have to ask yourself why you are tuning in for news from stations that have demonstrated how limited they are when it comes to delivering it? Good thing there's only a monopoly on news in Hi-D. Other resources obviously deserve the reputation and respect of actually carrying "the news" in any kind of capacity at all. Getting the scoop should be measured by hours. Not days. (and that's back in the fifties, not the so called age of information) When Nashville's flood doesn't register on a news channel, what it really means is that that news channel did not register as the news for the duration of that story's "news cycle" vacuum. Seek and ye shall find? Somewhere, some people are getting the news they expected in hindsight. Maybe not in Hi-D...
I live in Atlanta and was as amazed and outraged as all of you Tennesseans that your tragedy went unreported. I mentioned this to an acquaintance, whose comment was " well, it really didn't affect lots of people, only commercial areas in downtown Nashville and that rich neighborhood, Belle Meade". I am not kidding. Gotta love mainstream media.
Next time you have a flood, climb up on your roofs and hang big "Help" banners. Float a few mannequins and take blurry cellphone shots of them. Also, organize a looting squad- break windows at a WalMart and a few liquor stores. Oh, and call the president.
The answer is simple: George W Bush is no longer President, hence the MSM aren't looking for a disaster to blame on him. Sometimes they act like real reporters. Bottom line though is that the era of trumpeting catastrophic news has ended. When was the last time you saw anything about American casualties in Iraq? They still happen. Suicide in the military? No change. Problems with the VA? Are you kidding? Not on Barry's watch. we are supposed to be happy because because more people are looking for work and aren't depressed about being unemployed still.
Just two points.
1) The Nashville blogger coverage was better than anything the MSM could come up with anyway.
2) The world missed an epic display of tough-as-nails survival and heroism. A big city with small town honor.
Now, if you folks had looting and other such happy horseshit for the media to drool over, you would have been covered with reporters. Next time, try and be a little less heroic and a little more selfish and uncivilized.
The MSM loves it when you lose, but you won. That's not exploitable news.
