Hurricane Harvey’s unprecedented onslaught
Onslaught of rain
Onslaught of waves ripping apart the coastline
South Beach right in the line of fire.
The Bahamas and Turks and Caicos, also in the line of fire.
News networks do this a lot: They cover natural disasters
using the same tricks they use while covering war.
Basically looks like a warzone.
Compared to a warzone
Warzone
Looks like a warzone?
Like a warzone.
There’s dramatic graphics,
helicopter shots of widespread destruction,
acts of heroism in the face of danger —
they even send reporters into hostile territory.
Stop putting Chris Cuomo in harm’s way.
He’s a national treasure.
This wartime approach gives news networks a compelling way
to tell stories about things like major hurricanes.
Thankfully, reinforcements are beginning to arrive.
The problem is, when you treat natural disasters like war,
you need to find an enemy,
some “bad guy” to fight against.
And that’s made us all really angry at the wrong things.
The first and most obvious “bad guy” in any natural disaster story
isn’t actually a guy.
It’s
Mother Nature’s fury
Trying to stop Mother Nature
Mother Nature has no boundaries.
I hate that phrase.
The only people you should call mother
are your actual mom and RuPaul.
Mother.
News networks use concepts like Mother Nature
because it gives audiences a clear culprit to blame for what’s happening.
The struggle against Mother Nature continues.
Swirling mass of Mother Nature’s fury right now.
and we are, by the way, separate from it.
That’s Katherine Fry, who wrote a book on media coverage
of the Great Midwest Flood of 1993.
It’s a nice storyline and it’s easy because
you can easily pick out the good guys and the bad guys.
It’s like “good guys: people; bad guys: nature.”
Mother Nature at her worst, human nature at its best.
That when we see the worst from Mother Nature,
we sometimes see the best from human nature.
Like you have mentioned before,
while we are seeing the worst of Mother Nature,
we are seeing the best of people, Chris.
Best of human nature, Rosa.
The problem with this frame is … well …
stuff’s not that simple.
In a lot of cases, human choices explain
why natural disasters end up being so catastrophic.
Take Houston, for example.
One of the worst flooding disasters in American history
One of the reasons Harvey caused so much damage
is because developers have been allowed to build
over the area’s natural floodplains over the past few years.
That’s put tons of people and property in harm's way
and made it way harder for the area to absorb stormwater
like the kind that came from Harvey.
A similar situation has happened in Tampa,
where unrestricted development has put people and property
right on the city’s vulnerable coastline.
Lot of the infrastructure here is very low-lying.
Barrier islands, like Miami Beach,
which are supposed to shield the mainland from storms like Irma,
are now bustling hotspots, increasing the chances that
any major hurricane will cause massive damage.
The problem is made worse by reckless federal policy.
The National Flood Insurance program
heavily subsidizes flood insurance, so people are incentivized
to keep rebuilding in the same spot.
The family says that they will rebuild.
All of this is happening at the same time that climate change
is raising sea levels and making powerful hurricanes more likely.
But last year, the former head of the Harris County
Flood Control District said he had no plans to study
the effects of climate change on flooding.
And Florida Gov. Rick Scott has banned government officials
from even using terms like “climate change” and “sea level rise.”
None of that is Mother Nature.
But news coverage that frames these as
“humans versus nature” stories helps politicians shirk responsibility
by depicting Mother Nature as some big,
uncontrollable monster we can do nothing about.
Was the issue poor planning or is the issue that
this storm is just so overwhelming?
A reminder that man is sometimes no match
for the forces of Mother Nature
Which might explain why, the Sunday after Irma hit,
only one of the Sunday morning news shows
even mentioned climate change.
Sometimes that’s to the detriment of the bigger context —
the larger discussions around why are these natural disasters occurring?
Why is so much damage happening?
This framing of disaster as war gets worse after the storm is over.
That’s when news networks focus on a new enemy: dangerous survivors.
Mass devastation in Houston has brought with it a breakdown in law and order.
Caught on camera, a man seen looting
from a tanning store in the middle of Hurricane Harvey.
Fears now of looting, many people say they’re carrying guns.
And they’re now afraid of looters.
Reporters, who often rely on law enforcement
and government sources for information,
tend to overhype the threat of criminal activity after natural disasters.
Law enforcement says this was needed to crack down on looting.
Police say they’re also going to be out here to prevent looting.
They want to make sure no one's kind of looting any of these stores.
It’s an easy way for news networks to keep that warzone frame
going after the storm has passed.
There are good guys and bad guys,
innocent victims and looters.
It’s also bullshit.
even though 60 years of empirical research tells us that
looting is quite rare when disasters occur.
That’s Kathleen Tierney, who studied
the impact of media coverage after Hurricane Katrina.
They don’t loot in disasters unless they’re absolutely desperate.
Experts actually agree on this point.
Reports of looting tend to be greatly overexaggerated.
But it’s become a staple of hurricane coverage,
and it can have really dangerous consequences.
Fear of looting could convince people in harm’s way not to evacuate.
A lot of homeowners have said they are hesitant to leave
because they’re worried about looters.
The looting myth often reflects racist stereotypes.
Like in Katrina, when news reports identified black scavengers as looters,
but white scavengers as just looking for food.
Media panic also gives license to politicians and law enforcement to overreact.
Reporting about looting carries a very strong message
about the need for authoritarian social control
to prop up the idea that we need the cavalry
to guard against these unsavory elements that are in our communities.
That overreaction can include aggressive, militaristic responses,
like the kind we saw in the aftermath of Katrina:
deploying military units to noncombat situations,
enforcing strict curfews that discourage civilian rescue efforts,
and ramping up police presence in disaster areas —
steps that Tierney argues could actually make it harder
for survivors to get the help they need.
Sometimes the authorities misallocate resources
to law enforcement that could be better allocated
to actually saving people because of this myth that people are dangerous.
The result is that disaster areas end up looking like the warzones
the media compares them to.
Good news there, troops are on the way.
I’m really happy to hear that the Marines are headed in
because it does look like a war zone.
Natural disasters are chaotic and devastating.
And it’s tempting, in the face of that destruction,
to look for an easy scapegoat, whether it be looters or Mother Nature.
But things are just more complex than that, and reducing
natural disasters to dramatic “us versus them” narratives
makes it harder to think critically about the choices we make
before the next big storm hits.