The Aftermath Of Katrina: An Update Of Media Coverage, International Reactions, And Public Diplomacy

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It has been over two weeks since Hurricane Katrina blasted through the Gulf States, and as Americans watch the tragedy play out, so has the rest of the world. This is part two of a report that surveys media coverage in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina that explores the media’s reactions and international impressions of American politics and culture. In an effort to highlight the diverse array of perspectives that have been expressed, this report draws attention both to traditional media sources, as well as to less prominent media outlets, including television coverage in Qatar and Internet news service in Saudi Arabia.

This sample suggests that while much of the international coverage of Katrina started out like our own, the tone and direction of international coverage has gradually changed. Critical coverage, ranging from pointed criticisms of the administration’s climate policy to the perceived failure of the American social safety net, have become stronger, while some alternative media have even resorted to describing Katrina as an act of “divine redemption.” While certain criticisms have been publicly repudiated, exemplified by Prime Minister Blair’s disgust in the BBC’s “anti-US” coverage, the overall commentary indicates that some of the criticisms are becoming more spiteful of America.

The following is a continued aggregation of key articles and commentary about Katrina and its aftermath. If you would like to post your reactions and ideas about her appointment, you can add your comments at the bottom of this page.

Covering Katrina: How Media Control Faltered for a Moment
(Ramzy Baroud, Mill Gazette [India], September 21, 2005)
In the Iraq invasion, packaged by the Bush administration and promoted by major US news networks as Operation Iraqi Freedom, the government couldn’t take any chances at revealing the authentic motivation behind the war. It simply could not afford it. While propaganda has always been a prime component of US foreign policy, never before did US officials so blatantly broadcast their intent to lead a campaign of falsifications and deceit. And while the independence of the media has always been so aberrantly compromised by various business and official control mechanisms, never before were reporters enlisted (embedded) with army units, while ex-army generals bombarded the US public with all sorts of misinformation, without questioning the government’s motives and its methods.

Storm Warning: How the flood compromises U.S. foreign policy
(Richard N. Haass, Slate, September 9th, 2005)
“The images about Katrina seen around the world communicated a lack of competence and considerable chaos and suffering. The dominant overseas reaction has been sympathy mixed with shock and horror at what was seen by many as evidence of racism and a reminder of the extreme poverty in which many Americans live. The world’s only remaining superpower appeared to be anything but. In an era of 24-hour satellite television and the Internet, public diplomacy is about who Americans are and what they do, not just what they say. Unlike Las Vegas, what happens here does not stay here.”

Hurricane Katrina: Domestic and Foreign News Broadcasters View things Differently
(Alvin Snyder, Worldcasting, September 18th, 2005)
“There are at least two versions of what happened when Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans and other Gulf cities—of the flooding, the death and breathtaking destruction, and of the governmental response. Sharply different stories are being told, one by domestic broadcasters, the view from their bubble; the other by foreign broadcasters, as seen from their bubble.”

The American model is shaky: Katrina, the political hurricane that has not blown over yet
(Ali Bin-Shuwayl al-Qarni, associate professor of media sciences at King Sa’ud University, Al-Jazirah/BBC Worldwide Monitoring, September 17th, 2005)
Available via LexisNexis
“Katrina, “the political hurricane” that struck the United States, exposed the weakness of the American model for dealing with natural disasters. We know that the United States possesses powers of thinking, organization, written guidelines, and practical methods of handling crises. For this reason one would have expected US agencies to handle the crisis resulting from the hurricane with a greater measure of success than the agencies of other countries do. What actually happened, however, was a total failure in dealing with this crisis in a scientific and appropriately professional way. When the media interviewed some of the victims, they declared that they had not been able to evacuate themselves and their families because they were very poor and did not have the means to escape. They lacked everything. They did not own vehicles to take them out of the stricken areas nor did they have money to help them use public transportation to leave.”

Lessons learned from the black tsunami
(The Nation [Thailand], September 17th, 2005)
“The world has been horrified at Americas response to Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath in New Orleans. Four years after the terrorist attacks of September 2001, and with billions of dollars allegedly spent on preparedness for another emergency, America has shown the world that it was not prepared even for an event that came with ample warning. The difference between the tsunami in Asia last December and what is coming to be called the black tsunami in America because it brought so much devastation to the poor, mostly black, people of Louisiana is striking. The Asian disaster showed the ability of those affected to overcome long-standing rifts, as Aceh rebels put down their arms in common cause with the rest of Indonesia. By contrast, the disaster in New Orleans and elsewhere along Americas Gulf Coast exposed and aggravated such rifts.”

Mr Bush’s glass house shatters
(South China Morning Post, September 20th, 2005)
Available via LexisNexis
“Chinese officials tasked with disaster relief have been closely observing fallout from Hurricane Katrina, with shock. It is not just the apparent ineffectiveness of the federal government’s response. Their greatest concern is they have been adopting Federal Emergency Management Agency procedures for years, assuming they knew best. Katrina has drawn into sharp focus the inapplicability of theory to practice. China’s political system, often criticised as lacking transparency and democratic mechanisms, has proved capable of effectively managing catastrophes. In 1954, record floods drowned 33,000 people. The August 1998 floods left more than 3,000 people dead and 15 million homeless; over 500,000 people had to be evacuated. The damage came to US$ 20 billion. Experience is a reality check.”

BBC ‘gloating’ at US problems: Blair
(The Australian, September 19th, 2005)
Available via LexisNexis
“British Prime Minister Tony Blair has complained privately to media magnate Rupert Murdoch that the BBC’s coverage of Hurricane Katrina carried an anti-American bias. Mr Murdoch, chairman of the media conglomerate News Corporation, parent company of The Australian, recounted a conversation with the British leader at a panel discussion in New York late on Friday, local time, hosted by former US president Bill Clinton. “Tony Blair—perhaps I shouldn’t repeat this conversation—told me yesterday that he was in Delhi last week. “And he turned on the BBC World Service to see what was happening in New Orleans,” Mr Murdoch was quoted as saying in a transcript posted on the Clinton Global Initiative website. “And he said it was just full of hate of America and gloating about (the US’s) troubles.”

Karen Hughes and Katrina: Trivial Pursuit
(Joseph Braude, The New Republic, September 16th, 2005)
“Newly sworn in as undersecretary of state for public diplomacy last week, Bush confidante Karen Hughes spoke to staffers at Foggy Bottom—about spinning Hurricane Katrina. “There are a lot of things being said about us around the world that aren’t true,” she said, according to The Washington Post. Hughes claimed that overseas pundits were wrongly attacking the White House for not doing enough to help hurricane victims, or for doing it too late. “We need to aggressively challenge that idea around the world,” she said. Also last week, Hughes singled out reports of looting in New Orleans as a particular public relations blemish for America: “The images of crime being committed in the face of an awful natural disaster is hard for anyone to understand, people around the world and Americans,” she said at a press conference. “It sickens me as an American.” Perhaps Hughes was inadequately briefed on what America’s fiercest critics really said after the disaster—because her analysis was irrelevant to the part of the world where her work matters most. In the Middle East, where esteem for the United States is infamously low, public debates over the New Orleans tragedy focused neither on White House neglect nor on reports of looting. Instead, much of the discourse went to the heart of the theological and political questions that divide Arab Muslims today: namely their relations with God, with the United States, and with one another.”

Egyptian Cleric Extends Condolences to Katrina Victims
(Qatar Television, Shaykh Yusuf al-Qaradawi, Egyptian Cleric, September 9th, 2005)
Available via LexisNexis
“On this occasion, o brothers, I extend my condolences to the families of the victims of Hurricane Katrina in the United States and to the American people. Perhaps some people may wonder why we extend our condolences on a disaster in the United States , which is hostile to Islam and Muslims and fights them everywhere. O brothers, I say that we are not hostile to the American people. The American people in general are good. We are hostile to the US Administration’s policy.

The old Bush magic isn’t working
(Frank Rich, International Herald Tribune, September 19th, 2005)
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“The worst storm in U.S. history proved perfect for exposing this president, because in one big blast it illuminated all his failings: the rampant cronyism, the empty sloganeering of “compassionate conservatism,” the lack of concern for the “underprivileged” his mother condescended to at the Astrodome, the reckless lack of planning for all government operations except tax cuts, the use of spin and photo-ops to camouflage failure and to substitute for action. In the chaos unleashed by Katrina, these plot strands coalesced into a single tragic epic played out in real time on television. The narrative is just too powerful to be undone now by the administration’s desperate recycling of its greatest hits: a return Sunshine Boys tour by the surrogate empathizers Clinton and Bush I, another round of prayers at the Washington National Cathedral, another ludicrously overhyped prime-time address flecked with speechwriters’ “poetry” and framed by a picturesque backdrop. Reruns never eclipse a riveting new show.”

Excuse by Name of Katrina
(Resalat [Tehran], September 7th, 2005)
Available via LexisNexis
“These were all the consequences and aftermath of hurricane Katrina that last week wreaked havoc on the southern states of America around the Gulf of Mexico. But these were just a small part of the repercussions! Washington’s incompetence and sluggishness in dealing with “natural calamities,” and consequently the awful awkwardness and failure of the authorities to carry out rescue and relief operations and help the mainly poor and coloured people of the area has turned into a political crisis on the scene of US domestic politics. People like Michael Moore, the famous filmmaker and critique of the United States’ ruling class, maintains the reason for such a poor and delayed relief operation was primarily the race and class of the victims; in other words, the fact that the inhabitants of New Orleans are mainly black and therefore poor was the main reason why the government remained indifferent to their distress and suffering. Other civil rights activists described the federal government’s concentration on the war in Iraq as the main reason for the mistaken set of priorities and their indifference and/or inadequacy in rendering succor and relief to the victims and survivors of the calamity. Among the high profile and outstanding figures in this group, Jane Fonda, the famous Hollywood actress, unrelenting dissident, and untiring critique of America incorporated, stands out most prominently.”

The American way of death
(Azmi Bishara, The Daily Observer, September 19th, 2005)
“America is a maximalist state viewed from the outside, and a minimalist state when the perspective is from within. Tellingly, Washington had to bring troops back from Iraq to deal with the crisis in Louisiana. While there seems to be no limit to the resources the US can deploy abroad, at home it appears to be ill-equipped to deal with calamity. The US is not a Third World country yet it suffers from a desperate shortage of domestic institutions.”

Nobody is gloating at America
(Iain Macwhirter, The Sunday Herald, September 11th, 2005)
“Those who accuse Europe of gloating conflate the United States of America with the Republican White House. They are very different things. I speak with some authority here since I receive more e-mails from the US than I do from the United Kingdom. Some are grossly offensive and invite me to introduce various items into my back passage. But most come from intelligent, broad-minded Americans who are profoundly concerned about what has happened to their country. They can’t understand it any more than we can. If there is schadenfreude, it is at the expense, not of the ordinary, generous people of America, but of the crackpot ideologues in Washington who seem to regard social welfare as a capitulation to communism. Humane America is horrified by Bush’s military adventurism and disrespect for international law; insane America thinks it can “make its own reality” and throw its weight around the world.”

Will Domestic Crisis Affect Foreign Policy?
(Andrew Tully, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, September, 12th, 2005)
“Patrick Basham, who specializes in government administration at the Cato Institute, says the administration’s faltering response to Katrina is viewed very negatively overseas. As a result, he says, he expects people around the world will be even less susceptible to Bush’s new public-diplomacy initiative, which is designed to sell American policies worldwide, particularly in Muslim countries.”

Behind America’s façade
(John Pilger, The New Statesman, September 19th, 2005)
“The wilful neglect by the Bush regime before and after Hurricane Katrina offered a rare glimpse behind the Facade. The poor were no longer invisible. The bodies floating in contaminated water, the survivors threatened with police shotguns, the distinct obesity of American poverty - all of it mocked the forests of advertising billboards, relentless television commercials and news soundbites (average length 9.9 seconds) that glorify the “dream” of wealth and power. Reality, a word long expropriated and debased, found its true meaning, if briefly. As if by accident, the US media, which are the legitimising arm of corporate public relations, reported the truth. For a few days, a select group of liberal newspaper readers were told that poverty had risen an amazing 17 per cent under George W Bush; that an African American child born within a mile of the White House had less chance of surviving its first year than a baby in urban India.”

Polishing the U.S. Image
(Newsday, September 11th, 2005)
“Hughes, and her boss, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, would do well to understand that the heart of this country’s public image problem has more to do with the substance of the administration’s policies than with a lack of adequate public relations techniques. Hughes can spin things all she wants, but if the policy is wrong-headed, spinning won’t do much good…Part of being effective in public diplomacy is being candid and therefore credible. Hughes said that she wanted to emphasize all the aid and relief efforts that the government has made to the victims of Hurricane Katrina in the Gulf Coast. She would be better off first admitting that there were serious failures but that in our system of government we don’t try to cover it up. We will hold officials accountable and find ways to do a better job the next time. That’s the American way.”

U.S. Showing Vulnerability
(Anne Gearan, chief diplomatic correspondent for The Associated Press, The New York Times, September 11th, 2005)
“Rarely in U.N. history has the United States, the organization’s chief sponsor and host, looked as awkward or vulnerable to foreign eyes as it does now. With 170 world leaders meeting in New York this week, the Bush administration is scrambling to save lives and restore its can-do image. Hurricane Katrina has produced scenes of devastation and deprivation shocking to the rich and powerful U.S. but all too familiar elsewhere. Televised images of fetid floodwaters in New Orleans and grim-faced U.S. officials, from President Bush on down, are greeting heads of states arriving for the U.N. General Assembly…Washington still has more money, military muscle and political say-so than anyone else. Yet Bush and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice are coming to New York dogged by the perception of disarray and government bumbling that gives other nations a rare glimpse of a superpower on its heels.”

America’s eroding credibility: Fallout from Baghdad and New Orleans makes it difficult for Bush administration to mobilise support
(Leon Hadar, The Business Times Singapore, September 14th, 2005)
Available via LexisNexis
“Glimpse through the commentary pages of American newspapers and you are bound to run into a headline comparing the mess in American-occupied Iraq to the chaos in hurricane-devastated Louisiana. In fact, forget about the op-ed and commentaries bashing the Bush administration and watch for a few minutes the 24/7 coverage of one of the cable news networks. What you’ll probably see is that famous split-screen: There on the left side of your screen are American soldiers patrolling the ruins of what was once a thriving urban centre and is now the scene of death and destruction. And there on the right side of your screen are American soldiers patrolling the ruins of what was once another thriving urban centre - but, hey, is it New Orleans that you are seeing on the left and is it Fallujah that is being shown on the right?

Not the Sun King after all
(Andrew J. Bacevich, Boston Globe, September 15, 2005)
“As for the indispensable nation, far from standing astride the world, the United States, hemorrhaging red ink, is today desperately seeking breathing space to reconstitute itself. Iraq was conceived as a short war, producing a quick victory. Instead, it has become a tar-baby that has left the mystique of the American military establishment in tatters. Hurricane Katrina, meanwhile, has exposed the dirty little secret of a supposedly classless society: While many Americans enjoy affluence or at least decency, others subsist in squalor and neglect.“

Katrina is “Divine Revenge” Against the United States
(Khalid al-Ashhab, Al-Thawrah, September 14th, 2005)
Available via LexisNexis
“The divine will is innocent of the destruction, killing and occupation that the Americans willingly inflicted on Afghanistan and Iraq. It is also innocent of the calls and prayers that triggered Katrina and the killing, destruction, and flooding it brought upon the Americans. It is innocent of what evil and terror cause anywhere in the world, including the United States”.

The Lessons of Baghdad and New Orleans: Short Order
(Lawrence F. Kaplan, The New Republic, September 15th, 2005)
“On both the foreign and home fronts, things truly do seem to be falling apart. Parallels between New Orleans and Baghdad, for instance, have become a staple of nearly every editorial page. Were television crews as free to move about Iraq as they are to wade about New Orleans, it would rapidly become clear that Baghdad on its best day is more lawless than New Orleans on its worst. The analogy, however, contains a kernel of truth. Writing in the Arab newspaper Al Safeer, Hussam Aitani notes the “twinning” of the cities: “In New Orleans and in Baghdad armed gangsters are storming the streets ... bodies of the dead float in river waters and shots are fired at military helicopters that are supposed to be there to provide help. Talking in these two cities centers around the collapse of society’s organizations.” Hence, the new sister cities: In neither has the United States been able to impose order.”

Breach of a myth: After Katrina, the country no longer believes in Bush the protector. His presidency is ruined
(Sidney Blumenthal, Salon.com, September 15th, 2005)
“Can Iraq be saved if Louisiana is lost? Bush’s credibility gap is a geopolitical problem without a geopolitical solution. So long as Bush could wrap himself in 9/11 his image was shielded; he could even justify Iraq by flashing the non sequitur to his base. But once another event of magnitude thundered over his central claim as national defender, the Bush myth crumbled.…The rest of the Bush presidency will consist of his strained efforts to cobble his myth together again while others cope with the consequences of his damage. The hurricane has tossed and turned the country but will not deposit it on firm ground for at least the three and half years remaining of the ruined Bush presidency.”

Glance at Global Aid Offers for Katrina
(The New York Times, September 15th, 2005).
“Dozens of nations have pledged assistance for victims of Hurricane Katrina. In addition, European governments agreed to release the equivalent of 2 million barrels of oil per day from strategic reserves.” [Link contains a list of all donors and their contributions to the relief effort]

A Fatal Incuriosity
(Maureen Dowd, The New York Times, September 14th, 2005)
“ Given that the Bush team has dealt with both gulf crises, Iraq and Katrina, with the same deadly mixture of arrogance and incompetence, and a refusal to face reality, it’s frightening to think how it will handle the most demanding act of government domestic investment since the New Deal…Newsweek reported that the reality of Katrina did not sink in for the president until days after the levees broke, turning New Orleans into a watery grave. It took a virtual intervention of his top aides to make W. watch the news about the worst natural disaster in a century. Dan Bartlett made a DVD of newscasts on the hurricane to show the president on Friday morning as he flew down to the Gulf Coast. The aides were scared to tell the isolated president that he should cut short his vacation by a couple of days, Newsweek said, because he can be “cold and snappish in private.” Mike Allen wrote in Time about one “youngish aide” who was so terrified about telling Mr. Bush he was wrong about something during the first term, he “had dry heaves” afterward.”

Victory disease’ blinds Americans to possibility of trouble
(Steve Chapman, Baltimore Sun, September 14th, 2005)
“Americans have always been an optimistic people, with a confidence in our ability to meet any challenge and a sense that we enjoy God’s special favor. That’s been a great asset in creating a nation, settling a wild continent, building a boundlessly productive economy and becoming the most powerful country on Earth…But it can also be a drawback, as we have learned from the occupation of Iraq and the destruction of New Orleans.”