Viewers and listeners expected to get the benefit of correspondents' experience, putting the story into context with a sense of how it fitted into the history and politics of a situation.
While I agree with this, my impression is that most "correspondents" have insufficient detailed knowledge to do a good job and feel they must oversimplify in order to communicate to their audience. That problem is blatantly apparent in the US where the latest news clips have people saying everyone will move back to New Orleans because of how great the food is.
The BBC has usually done much better. But the historical, political, and social context of Katrina seems to have not included comparisons to prior natural disaters nor any discussion of the roles and responsibilities as defined by law and mandate for FEMA, state, and municipal officials nor any discussion of why specific disaster planning and exercises were left underfunded by state officials nor what other army corp of engineer projects have been delayed or underfunded in other parts of the country, etc.
In fact I was somewhat shocked no discussion of Army Corp failures managing the Mississippi and Missouri rivers in the St. Louis area was brought up at all. There's an entire town/small rural city abandoned south west of St. Louis because of flodding leading to massive pollution in the early 90s. Why isn't that mentioned for instance?
So it's a bit strange all around to read the response about correspondents' responsibilities when I saw most of the coverage while I was in the London and it was largely a toned down version of hyperbole targeting the federal gov't for not stopping, preventing, or otherwise overriding the local gov't when they made bad decisions right up front.
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timeasmymeasure
no subject
Date: 2005-09-19 12:31 am (UTC)While I agree with this, my impression is that most "correspondents" have insufficient detailed knowledge to do a good job and feel they must oversimplify in order to communicate to their audience. That problem is blatantly apparent in the US where the latest news clips have people saying everyone will move back to New Orleans because of how great the food is.
The BBC has usually done much better. But the historical, political, and social context of Katrina seems to have not included comparisons to prior natural disaters nor any discussion of the roles and responsibilities as defined by law and mandate for FEMA, state, and municipal officials nor any discussion of why specific disaster planning and exercises were left underfunded by state officials nor what other army corp of engineer projects have been delayed or underfunded in other parts of the country, etc.
In fact I was somewhat shocked no discussion of Army Corp failures managing the Mississippi and Missouri rivers in the St. Louis area was brought up at all. There's an entire town/small rural city abandoned south west of St. Louis because of flodding leading to massive pollution in the early 90s. Why isn't that mentioned for instance?
So it's a bit strange all around to read the response about correspondents' responsibilities when I saw most of the coverage while I was in the London and it was largely a toned down version of hyperbole targeting the federal gov't for not stopping, preventing, or otherwise overriding the local gov't when they made bad decisions right up front.