Tuesday, September 20, 2005
Reporters Changed by Horror
AP's David Bauder writes,"Jeanne Meserve is haunted by voices in the dark pleading for help. John Roberts won't forget the woman whose husband of 53 years died at her feet. Shepard Smith remembers seeing bodies on highway ramps around the stadium where he had often driven to football games. Campbell Brown never wants to lose track of the 9-year-old who scavenged for water to keep his grandmother alive.
The horror of Hurricane Katrina will stay with the television journalists who covered it long after the story moves on, and some say it will profoundly influence how they work in the future.
"I'll never forget those mothers and daughters, the elderly, who swam out of their neighborhoods looking for life's basic necessities of food and water, hoping to walk on the road to somewhere and find it and couldn't for days," said Fox News Channel's Smith. "It was the most helpless feeling I've ever encountered."
Smith, Fox's chief anchor, reported on the plight of people stuck on the highway seeking help that took days to come. As their anger increased, so did his.
It was that emotion, and the angry confrontations with public officials by familiar faces like ABC's Ted Koppel, NBC's Tim Russert and CNN's Anderson Cooper, that made clear to viewers how desperate things had become in New Orleans.
So did Meserve's halting voice when she described a late-night boat ride through flooded neighborhoods to CNN's Aaron Brown. She told of the cries from people who couldn't be rescued.
"People have made a lot of the emotion that was in my voice that night," she said. "It was totally spontaneous, it was totally unrehearsed. It was simply a human reaction to what I was hearing and what I had seen."
Besides those voices, Meserve won't forget the woman she saw pleading with a police officer to help her mother who was overdue for dialysis. There was nothing he could do." MORE
The horror of Hurricane Katrina will stay with the television journalists who covered it long after the story moves on, and some say it will profoundly influence how they work in the future.
"I'll never forget those mothers and daughters, the elderly, who swam out of their neighborhoods looking for life's basic necessities of food and water, hoping to walk on the road to somewhere and find it and couldn't for days," said Fox News Channel's Smith. "It was the most helpless feeling I've ever encountered."
Smith, Fox's chief anchor, reported on the plight of people stuck on the highway seeking help that took days to come. As their anger increased, so did his.
It was that emotion, and the angry confrontations with public officials by familiar faces like ABC's Ted Koppel, NBC's Tim Russert and CNN's Anderson Cooper, that made clear to viewers how desperate things had become in New Orleans.
So did Meserve's halting voice when she described a late-night boat ride through flooded neighborhoods to CNN's Aaron Brown. She told of the cries from people who couldn't be rescued.
"People have made a lot of the emotion that was in my voice that night," she said. "It was totally spontaneous, it was totally unrehearsed. It was simply a human reaction to what I was hearing and what I had seen."
Besides those voices, Meserve won't forget the woman she saw pleading with a police officer to help her mother who was overdue for dialysis. There was nothing he could do." MORE
# posted by ATN @ 4:17 PM 
