Covering Hurricane Katrina at the BBC

 by Martin Belam, 6 October 2005

I was at a fascinating session on Monday lunchtime about the BBC's coverage of the devastation wrought by Hurricane Katrina in the south of the USA. The panel included two of the BBC's main correspondents who had covered the events, Jon Sopel and Gavin Hewitt, as well as Fran Unsworth, the BBC's Head of Newsgathering.

It was great to get a perspective on events from the reporters themselves, and also to see some of the coverage they filed, which I would have missed by being at work at the time.

There was a great piece by Jon Sopel when he literally just arrived in Gulfport. They had rounded up three vox-pops to stand there and tell their stories, and in the build up to the interviews Jon had pointed out a giant pink casino behind them that he said looked like it had been picked over by a demolition machine, with chunks of the frontage torn away. The piece carried on, but when he got to the second interviewee he said "By the way, that casino you pointed out, that used be 600 yards further back that way". You could visibly see Jon's stunned reaction to the fact that the whole building had been shifted by the force of the storm.

Gavin Hewitt told of how as he journeyed from Houston to New Orleans his cameraman Hedley Trigge saw a boat store and said "Why don't we buy a boat". Whilst at first sceptical, in the end Hewitt agreed, and the decision turned out to be fortuitous not just for their newsgathering.

They came across a family of five children who were left in their house with their mother. One of the children explained on camera that their mother needed oxygen to breathe and she ran out so she wasn't breathing. The shock of the storm and living alongside the corpse of their mother for a couple of days seemed to have left the kids in a state of utter bemusement. Gavin and crew rescued them in their boat, and took them a place for evacuees.

He discussed how difficult it is to strike the balance between reporting and actively getting involved in rescuing and helping. At times they put the camera down because they were too involved in getting the five kids to safety, describing a couple of hairy situations that they did not file reports on. I wasn't going to explicit ally state them in this post, but the BBC's in-house paper, Ariel, which is open to public subscription covered it on Tuesday.

I did not ever expect to see this in the US. I actually had a gun put to my head by the National Guard - which was inexplicable.

The thing he couldn't seem to get over was the sense of "Where is everybody?". For a while they had the only boat in the neighbourhood, and each day would paddle past the same uncollected corpses in the street.

Jon Sopel also couldn't understand how when he had been in Sri Lanka the way bodies were dealt with was so different - "the moment it washed up it was taken to the morgue". This wasn't happening in the USA. There was a piece of footage shown where two brothers were holed up in the top floor of their house, whilst the corpse of their mother hung in a make-shift sling beneath their balcony, just above the waterline, and had been there for several days.

Alistair Leithead later joined in over the phone, and described how he kept his broadcasting apparatus running, getting 20 minutes worth of charge onto his sat-phone at a time via his car which was the only source of power. He was the BBC correspondent on the ground when the storm hit, and he had filmed some behind-the-scenes footage of getting stuff on air, effectively turning the car into both a radio studio and a bed-sit. I had to admire the technical know-how that managed to broadcast live to the UK with bits of equipment jammed into place against a car window at the right angle to get a satellite signal.

One of the topics that inevitably came up was the criticism of the BBC's coverage, notably in the comments attributed to Tony Blair.

Gavin felt that the coverage had been in a sense emotional, but that if you are emotionally immune to the story you are covering you were not a good reporter. Jon Sopel also didn't feel the tone was very different from that in the USA, claiming Fox coverage seemed incandescent that this was actually happening in the U.S.

Also on the panel was Producer Declan Wilson, who made the point that although they knew back home their houses and possessions were safe, they were still living the story, as it was as much an everyday struggle for them to obtain the food, fuel and water they needed, just like the people around them.

It seemed that there was a real sense that the reporters, for whichever network, had managed to penetrate into the disaster areas much further than the official attempts to provide relief, and this at first baffled and then outraged journalists. One exchange on U.S. news was described, where the anchorman in the studio said "Let's put this in perspective" and the reporter on the ground cut straight back with "This IS perspective"

Gavin Hewitt also commented that there was such a clear disconnect from what was being said officially by the city, state and federal authorities with the reality that they were experiencing on the ground that it made the tone for all of the reporters in the area 'unusual'. Tuesday's article in Ariel added:

Hewitt does accept that with hindsight BBC coverage might have benefited from additional analysis - especially when it came to explaining the peculiarities of a system which accounted for some of the disconnect between federal and state relief efforts.

As I understood it the knee-jerk reaction in the UK press and UK public was to blame Bush for everything, but in this session Gavin Hewitt stated that the Mayor of New Orleans also "had some bad days", and that there were some real misconceptions over here in the UK about who could do what. When the 82nd Airborne Division arrived it was generally assumed by people consuming the media that they could carry out forced evictions if they were necessary, but apparently under Louisiana State Law only the National Guard can do that.

There were also some bizarre moments whilst they were covering the story. One of the crews ended up in a tour-bus as their place to stay. Jon Sopel found to his disbelief that although they didn't have water to use the on-board shower or flush the toilet, they were still able to watch the Wales - England match via $25 worth of pay-per-view TV. Producer Declan Wilson was grateful because it meant they could text him the score whilst he was waiting for 4-and-a-half hours in a queue for petrol. He was hoping to fill up for all of the equipment, but by the time he got served the $50 sale limit meant he could only get about a fifth of the fuel the crew needed.

I was particularly interested to here what Lizo Mzimba had to say. He had gone out a couple of weeks later to make an hour-long special for children's news show Newsround. The logistics of finding children to participate in the show had sounded like a nightmare, as in many cases although families had stayed behind the children had been moved in order to return to school, and the programme team didn't want to put any pressure on the kids who were there to participate, since they would probably be re-living the worst experience of their lives. I love the fact that the BBC still does Newsround (which was of course very much John Craven's Newsround in my day), and that with their site they have made a really good job of introducing children to the concept of news on the web.

The thing that most stood out for me though was the real sense of passion that both Jon and Gavin still had about the situation - they said they had been shocked and outraged by the situation, and in the way they spoke it clearly showed through that they still were.

In my job I very rarely work with people from the television side of the BBC, so I found this a fascinating glimpse into how the newsgathering team pulls together coverage of such a big story, and how much emotional investment these presenters and journalists have in their work.

On a lighter note the session at the Beeb was well over-subscribed, with people standing at the back, but the audience was remarkably skewed towards women - I think less than a fifth of those present were men. Outside someone quipped "Maybe it is because it was Hurricane Katrina? Perhaps Hurricane Kevin might have had more male appeal?"

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