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Twenty years ago this week, Hurricane Katrina slammed into the Gulf Coast and caused devastation in New Orleans and beyond. The rest, as they say, is history. Recently, an inevitable slew of anniversary coverage has mined it in all sorts of areas, from the impact of the storm on New Orleans schools to the role of restaurants in rebuilding life in the city. Chelsea Brasted—a journalist with the New Orleans arm of Axios, who was fifteen when Katrina hit—listed as many as seven new documentaries about Katrina (and that was without counting a buzzy Netflix series, executive-produced by Spike Lee, that will drop on Wednesday). “For people who were directly impacted,” Katrina “can just be painful—or even impossible—to relive,” Brasted wrote. Ultimately, though, the profusion of content is “as it should be—we may never have a full picture of that storm and the recovery it required.”

Journalists who reported on Katrina at the time have also been reflecting on their experiences (another staple of news coverage whenever the anniversary of a major story rolls around). WLOX—a TV station based in Biloxi, Mississippi, just along the coast from New Orleans—convened a discussion among current and former staffers who were on the ground during the storm; they initially expected that Katrina would pass the area by, before having to hunker down and then come out to report on the aftermath. One of the journalists, Trang Pham-Bui, recalled that “one of the hardest things for me was juggling my emotions”; she was cut off from her family, so much so that she didn’t know if they were still alive, but knew that she “had a job to do, because we had so much coverage coming in from New Orleans, and we have so much devastation in our home towns, and I knew that I had to get out there and tell our story, give our people a voice.” Bill Snyder, an anchor, recalled staying on air for around two weeks straight. “Those were the best days of journalism ever,” he said. 

Snyder was talking about the solidarity that emerged among those covering the storm. In other ways, however, Katrina did not showcase the best of journalism; indeed, over the years, numerous criticisms have emerged of how the press—and in particular, outlets based far from the Gulf Coast—handled it. On the first anniversary of the disaster, in August 2006, Danny Heitman, a columnist at the Baton Rouge Advocate, argued in the Christian Science Monitor that the news media had done an inadequate job of capturing the “eerie silence” of the New Orleans neighborhoods that had emptied of residents after Katrina hit and the levees that were supposed to hold back the resulting floodwaters broke—a consequence, Heitman suggested, of the fact that “journalism, by its nature, sees the world as a series of dramatically packaged episodes rather than the dry continuum that a recovery from disaster can be”; jumping off of Heitman’s column, Paul McLeary wrote in CJR at the time that quantitative evidence suggested the story of the recovery was already receiving less and less airtime on network news shows, drowned out by “tabloid fare” like developments in the JonBenét Ramsey case and the capture of the FLDS cult leader and convicted child sex offender Warren Jeffs. In the eye of the storm, which knocked out local communications infrastructure, some of the media problems were logistical; in 2015, a decade after Katrina hit, Walter Baranger, then the senior editor for news operations at the New York Times, wrote that “since our newsroom moved to computers in 1978, there have been two major eras at The Times: Before Hurricane Katrina, and after,” when the Times “began investing even more in the latest mobile and satellite technologies” to ease some of the complications the paper experienced during Katrina. Other problems were squarely editorial. In 2017, when Hurricane Harvey smashed into Texas (almost twelve years to the day after Katrina hit Louisiana), Kathleen Bartzen Culver, a media ethicist at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, told Poynter that Katrina had come to be seen as “a real black mark on journalism.”

Culver was talking specifically about coverage of race, which has often been name-checked as the media’s most significant failing post-Katrina. Around the time that Culver spoke with Poynter in 2017, critics resurfaced an infamous pair of wire photos taken in the aftermath of Katrina: both showed people hauling groceries through chest-height floodwaters, but the couple in one of them, who appeared to be white, were described as having “found” the goods they were carrying at a grocery store, whereas the young Black man in the other photo was said to have “looted” one. (At the time, CJR’s Pete Vernon wrote about the images after Tom Llamas, then a reporter at ABC and now the anchor of NBC’s Nightly News, was criticized for posting on Twitter that he had informed the police of an incident of looting in the aftermath of Harvey. Vernon noted that the agencies behind the Katrina photos had stood behind their divergent captions, citing “additional observations” beyond the images themselves.) 

In the spring of 2020, nearly fifteen years on from Katrina, The Atlantic’s Vann R. Newkirk II dived deeper into this vein of coverage in Floodlines, an eight-part podcast series. (“Floodlines is not about a natural disaster,” The Atlantic wrote at the time, “but an unnatural one: the failure of government, media, and society, leading to one of the most misunderstood events in modern-day America.”) “Looting became a fixation” for the media in the aftermath of Katrina, Newkirk said. “Sometimes, reporters would make attempts at empathy,” but “lots of other times, they were just snitching,” he added. They seemed “especially interested in images of people taking TVs or Jordans. You would see the same reels of the same Black people going into the same stores, over and over.” This was downstream of the bigger problem: journalists gorging on rumors or small details and then blowing them out of proportion, if they were even true in the first place. This was a function, in part, of what Newkirk described as the “weird technological moment” in which Katrina struck; rolling TV news was well established, but this was before the time of ubiquitous smartphones and social media, and in any case, New Orleans was largely offline due to the storm—a combination that meant that “national audiences expected around-the-clock coverage about the disaster, but the national media didn’t have around-the-clock information.” In 2021, Ko Bragg wrote for CJR that the “credulous coverage of ‘looting’ contributed to what many have since described as a damaging feedback loop” after Katrina, by hardening the official response. (Kathleen Blanco—the governor of Louisiana, who would later state that the “rampant violence that was reported was definitely out of proportion to the reality”—called in the National Guard and showed off their guns at a press conference, stating that “these troops know how to shoot and kill.”) The media lessons here seem clear—and yet, Bragg observed, the looting narrative returned after Hurricane Ida hit New Orleans and the surrounding area in August of 2021.

Over the years, there have also been criticisms of—or, at least, reflections on—how the press covered the weather and climate aspects of the Katrina story. In 2018, Jed Gottlieb wrote for CJR that the storm reinforced the media practice of using hurricanes’ category designations (on what, I was today years old when I learned, is called the Saffir-Simpson scale) as the “default shorthand” for their severity, when the scale is actually “relatively ineffective…in predicting life-threatening dangers and property destruction”; in 2020, Eva Holland noted, also in a piece for CJR, that while some early coverage did link Katrina to global warming, she had not thought to do so at the time, and that the writer Mary Annaïse Heglar, who lived through Katrina, told her that she didn’t think “most people down here did either—I don’t remember seeing a lot of people make that argument, certainly not on TV.” The scientific methods that help researchers link individual extreme-weather events to the climate crisis were, in fairness, underdeveloped at the time, and this practice remains complicated in many respects. Nowadays, in this age of extreme weather, we can at least place major storms in the context of a climate picture that makes them, on the whole, likelier to happen and to be more intense. Some of the recent anniversary coverage of Katrina has done just this, warning that the hurricane risk on the Gulf Coast is rising, for example, and that Katrina would likely be even worse were it to happen today. The lessons seem clear here, too. And yet, as I’ve written often over the years, the news media still do an at best inconsistent job of linking new extreme-weather events to the underpinning scientific context.

The climate crisis, extreme-weather events, and racism are closely linked stories, of course—communities of color have often disproportionately borne the brunt of environmental and climate hazards (a stretch of land that is home to many Black communities between New Orleans and Baton Rouge, for instance, has long been nicknamed “Cancer Alley” due to the polluting plants that line it), and, as the premise of Floodlines suggests, Katrina was not an act of God, but an event whose impact was exacerbated by political failings, both in the protection and recovery phases. (During an NBC telethon in the wake of Katrina, Kanye West famously declared that “George Bush doesn’t care about Black people”; this quote has become a meme, Newkirk noted on Floodlines, but much of what West said about the shortcomings of the official response resonated with Black Americans, and—amid the metaphysical flood of rumors about looting and chaos—would be vindicated, as victims of Katrina became “targets,” in Newkirk’s words.) When Holland spoke with Heglar in 2020, the latter had recently written in Guernica that “the climate crisis is covered in the fingerprints of slavery and Jim Crow and colonialism and genocide and patriarchy,” and is “what happens when large swaths of people are not only systematically ‘left out,’ but forced to be their own gravediggers and pallbearers.” Heglar linked climate change to her family’s experience during Katrina, and to the lynching of Emmett Till in Mississippi: Till was murdered, Heglar noted, almost fifty years to the day before Katrina.

As I’ve argued before in this newsletter, media coverage of significant anniversaries can feel arbitrary—inadequate, even, in a world that’s much messier than the neat passing of round-number intervals. But anniversaries do at least give the news business, an industry famed for its short attention span, a structure to remember the past, and to apply its lessons to the present. Anniversaries can also help the press to observe what’s changing in the world around us—a bit like how birthdays are convenient yardsticks to notice how our lives move forward. The anniversary of Katrina hit differently in 2006 than in 2015 than in 2020 than in 2025, in ways that say as much about those moments as the aftermath of the storm itself.

As chance would have it, the climate-themed issue of CJR in which Holland’s article appeared and The Atlantic’s Floodlines podcast came out around the same time in 2020, entering into a world that had just been transformed overnight by the arrival of the pandemic. That story—which I referred to at the time as “the everything story”—threatened to engulf all others; on a recent, ninth episode of Floodlines, released to mark the twentieth anniversary of Katrina, Newkirk said he’d feared that the original episodes might not “matter that much with so much going on.” As I wrote at the time, however, our climate magazine was timely—the climate and COVID stories were linked in all sorts of ways, from the granular and logistical to the sweeping and philosophical—and the same would prove true of Floodlines, the themes of which foreshadowed not only 2020’s ever-present sense of crisis, but also the racial reckoning that would sweep the US later that year, following the police murder of George Floyd. These themes are all super relevant now, too, even if they hit differently these days. On the recent episode of Floodlines, Newkirk said that his fear back in 2020 had proved unfounded, and ticked off even more recent news stories—Hurricane Helene, last year; the California fires, this—during which “people kept coming back to Hurricane Katrina as a point of reference.” That it will surely remain—in 2030, 2035, and beyond.

Other notable stories
By Jem Bartholomew

• On Monday, four journalists were among at least fifteen people killed when Israeli strikes hit Nasser Hospital in Khan Yunis, according to Gaza’s civil defence agency. Those killed reportedly included journalists working for the Associated Press (Mariam Dagga) and Al Jazeera (Mohammed Salameh), a cameraman for Reuters (Husam al-Masri), and a photographer (Muath Abu Taha). Before Monday’s attack, the Committee to Protect Journalists said one hundred and ninety-two journalists and media workers had been killed in the conflict, twenty-four of which “CJP classifies as murders,” with people directly targeted by Israeli forces for their work. Monday’s bombing came after, on Thursday last week, twenty-seven countries signed a joint statement urging Israel to immediately allow independent foreign journalists to enter Gaza amid “the unfolding humanitarian catastrophe.” Israel has denied all reporters access in the twenty-two months of war, which has killed more than sixty-two thousand people. The statement, drafted by the Media Freedom Coalition, said: “We oppose all attempts to restrict press freedom and block entry to journalists during conflicts.” Several close Israeli allies signed the statement, including Germany, France, and the UK. Philippe Lazzarini, UNRWA’s commissioner-general, has said Israel’s block on foreign media “is fueling propaganda, disinformation, and the spread of dehumanization.” The Guardian’s chief Middle East correspondent wrote this month that Israel is fighting a second war in Gaza—over the narrative—whose strategy has been to ban international reporters and kill Palestinian reporters. Last week, CJR published a special report about new approaches and ideas for defending press freedom in Gaza, which you can read here.

• Far-right influencer Laura Loomer claimed credit this month when the US State Department halted temporary humanitarian visas for Gazans requiring urgent medical treatment. The decision from Secretary of State Marco Rubio came after Loomer posted a video of Palestinian children arriving in San Francisco that attacked them as “Islamic invaders” to her 1.7 million followers on X. The DC policy influence of Loomer, a conspiracy theorist whose unwavering loyalty to Trump has earned her the president’s ear, has again been the subject of media attention in recent weeks. A New York Times piece last month described her as “Trump’s blunt instrument” and an “ideological purity enforcer,” while an Atlantic profile last week framed her as “the Joseph McCarthy of the Trump era.” Loomer’s far-right provocations have posed a problem for media outlets: How do you critically cover someone who describes themselves as a “proud Islamophobe”? After Michael Scherer’s Atlantic piece came out on Thursday, with the headline “Make McCarthy Great Again,” Loomer reposted it on X, adding: “Amazing.”

• Two former advisers to New York City mayor Eric Adams were accused of bribery in separate cases last week, as multiple scandals and allegations of corruption continue to swirl around his administration. (CJR’s Josh Hersh explored covering the manic Adams news cycle on The Kicker last October.) According to The City, Winnie Greco, a longtime Adams ally who resigned last year as his liaison to the Asian community after she was targeted in multiple investigations, allegedly handed a City reporter a wad of cash stuffed in a packet of potato chips. The City asked her to explain the apparent bribe. “I make a mistake,” she said, according to the publication. “I’m so sorry. It’s a culture thing. I don’t know. I don’t understand. I’m so sorry. I feel so bad right now. I’m so sorry, honey,” adding: “Can we forget about this? I try to be a good person. Please. Please. Please don’t do in the news nothing about me.” Separately, Adams’s former chief adviser, Ingrid Lewis-Martin, was indicted by Manhattan district attorney Alvin Bragg, accused of accepting “more than $75,000 in bribes” as part of a “wide-ranging series of bribery conspiracies.” Adams is running as an independent against socialist Democratic nominee Zohran Mamdani.

• When Wired received a pitch from a freelance journalist in April, an editor liked the sound of the story, about people getting married in niche online spaces such as Minecraft and Roblox. They commissioned it, went through edits, and the piece was published in May. But “it became clear that the writer was unable to provide enough information to be entered into our payments system. They instead insisted on payment by PayPal or check,” Wired later said. The magazine was one of at least six publications, including Business Insider, that published pieces by “Margaux Blanchard,” who is now believed to be a fabricated persona relying on fake, seemingly AI-generated content. After being contacted by UK publication Press Gazette, several publications took down stories for not meeting editorial standards. The scam was noticed by an editor at UK publication Dispatch, when “Margaux Blanchard” pitched a long-form magazine story about a decommissioned mining town in Colorado that didn’t exist. When it comes to “on the ground reporting, you can’t fake it,” Jacob Furedi, Dispatch’s editor, said. “You can’t make up a place.”

• And the peacock days are over at MSNBC, which will soon be rebranded MS NOW, it was announced last Monday. The network is leaving Comcast’s NBCUniversal TV empire and moving to media company Versant. That means it must get rid of its NBC branding and signature peacock logo. MS NOW will soon stand for “My Source News Opinion World.” The rebrand quickly attracted mockery online, with right-wing opponents of the liberal network ridiculing the name as “BS NOW” or “Most Surely No One Watching.” But it wasn’t just MAGA deriding the new name, with unfavorable comparisons made to HBO Now (which later became HBO Max, then Max, then HBO Max again) or to it sounding “like a fundraiser for multiple sclerosis.” MSNBC’s president, Rebecca Kutler, said MS NOW is planning a marketing campaign, aiming to settle any confusion.

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