Up here at the tiptop of the Mississippi there is little Minnesotans can do to salve the misery downriver in New Orleans except throw money at it and seethe.
I have never seen our readers so angry. For two weeks they’ve raged, though generally not about news coverage. They simply needed a messenger and I was handy.
Here are some of their messages: They are livid about the slow reaction of the federal government to the disaster caused by Hurricane Katrina. They are sickened by the sight of fellow citizens dying — not from a force of nature but from neglect by leaders. They have questions and they want answers, not political spin that labels those tough questions “Bush-bashing.” Any confidence developed since Sept. 11, 2001, that government was better prepared for a possible terrorist attack on an American city has been badly shaken.
They do not want the truth to get lost as officials scramble for high ground and political safety, and they are looking to this newspaper to help ensure it doesn’t.
The Star Tribune, which for two weeks has offered stories and photos that have made us weep over the human toll of this catastrophe, must not fail these readers in holding government accountable for a massive failure of leadership that contributed to the death toll.
Stories that lay bare the flawed response before, during and after the hurricane must be put on equal footing with the wrenching stories of human catastrophe as the coverage moves forward. The newspaper has published some very strong stories raising questions about the federal government’s astonishingly poor planning and reaction. But none of those stories cracked page one until Thursday, 10 days after the hurricane, although there had been references to the topic in stories otherwise devoted to on-the-scene calamity.
The failure of government to respond is front and center for many Minnesotans who are no strangers to the challenges of extreme weather but have shown again and again how quickly and capably they and their elected officials respond to disaster. Ever practical, Minnesotans want to figure out how to fix what happened to New Orleans because they know it doesn’t have to work this way.
Heidi and Tim Culbert wrote to me with deep concern rooted in their backgrounds. He’s a pediatrician and she’s a school nurse on leave to finish up a master’s degree in public health at the University of Minnesota. “Both of us have worked with refugees in Africa and cannot believe how inadequate the response has been from the richest, most advanced nation in the world. We are outraged!” they wrote. The Culberts worked with refugees in Uganda in 1987.
Joanne Johnson, a retired travel agent living in Edina, said, “I’m appalled at the Star Tribune’s front page. Instead of putting the blame where it belongs, your headline blames the anarchy. It’s the federal government! Where is the help for these people?”
Darlene Davis, an executive assistant from St. Louis Park, wrote that it “doesn’t help with the head of FEMA saying he just learned the conditions of the Superdome in New Orleans [two days after the hurricane struck]. So he has had his head stuck where since Sunday?”
These are the reactions of citizens with their eyes wide open, informed by unflinching journalism. While FEMA dithered for an unconscionable number of days, journalists made their way into the city and went to work — often setting aside notebooks and cameras to help victims when no relief arrived. Their stories and photos will make it hard to gloss over the horrific truth of what happened in New Orleans.
The performance of the staff of that city’s newspaper, the New Orleans Times-Picayune, has been breathtaking to behold. With their families missing in some cases, their homes destroyed in others, their presses inoperable, those journalists continued publishing online and then on borrowed presses beyond the flood area, informing readers around the world what had happened to their beloved city. They had warned citizens and officials of the inevitability of disaster in a five-part series in 2002.
The coverage these past two weeks has moved many of our readers, first to grief and then to indignation. I find ample evidence of that in frustrated phone calls and stinging e-mails. Those sentiments are reverberating across the Twin Cities; I can’t go anywhere without overhearing a furious public conversation about the failure of government at every level in Washington and along the Gulf Coast.
The newspaper needs to tap into that conversation here in Minnesota, write about it and urge others to chime in. If there’s a part of this story that has gone largely unreported, it is this fury from normally stoic Minnesotans.
“On Sunday [Sept. 4] we devoted more than a page to how it could have happened,” noted Managing Editor Scott Gillespie, who has been faced daily with the tough decision of what to put on page one: more stories and photos illuminating the extent of the human tragedy or stories digging into the failures of leadership. “We’ve had a FEMA or government mismanagement story almost every day,” he said, although they hadn’t made it to page one. “We’ve been looking for a good page one candidate that answers a lot of questions.”
On Thursday, this part of the story finally made page one as criticism of FEMA Director Michael Brown boiled over. That’s where the story of government mismanagement should stay as the search for victims recedes and the search for answers intensifies. Holding the government accountable on behalf of our readers is a newspaper’s core purpose in a democracy.
“Dig into the general reaction of Minnesotans to the lack of a federal response,” Brian O’Connor, a retired railroad switchman who lives in Minnetonka, urged when he called me last week. “It’s fine to say congressional leaders are up in arms, but a lot of us common folks are up in arms too.”
