The Media's New Orleans Burnout

"We can't just shove somebody's grandmother in an incinerator or landfill," the Army veteran told me. "We're not going to let it happen here. You remind yourself that this is somebody's mother, father, brother, sister, and this person is important to someone."

Ride around the area and you find yourself staring in disbelief. Houses dented and bent and smashed like papier-mâche, many marked with the ubiquitous blue FEMA spray paint, destined for demolition. Massive trees, uprooted and lying in front yards. Cars caked with dirt, trunk lids open, many stripped of tires. And the tires -- piles of old tires everywhere -- and waist-high weeds covering the front yards are silent markers of abandonment.

I met people with varying accents who were desperate to share their misery, frustrated by the lack of progress and feeling ignored by the rest of the country. A spunky lady named Carmen Morial said she had lost her home, her clothes, her car. She is 91.

The day after my visit to Lakeview, the close-in neighborhood near the damaged levee, I went to St. Bernard Parish. The car ride there featured mile after mile of strip malls, their stores rendered useless hulks by the hurricane. You can still see the bright logos: Wal-Mart, McDonald's, Office Depot, laundromats and chicken joints, still standing like archaeological relics. The storm destroyed just enough of these buildings to make them uninhabitable, but not so much that you can't see that they were once busy little places of commerce.

And further out in St. Bernard, a jaw-dropping sight: a large white shrimp boat with blue trim, called the Dolphin, that sits smack in the middle of a suburban street, listing to one side. It is said to be three miles from the waterway where once it sailed, when it had sails. I cannot envision the kind of winds that deposited it among the brick split-levels. It was a vivid backdrop for Williams's newscast, but again, one image, one street, one snapshot, merely begins to hint at the larger picture. It is journalism by metaphor, the haunting shot that must stand for the vast, unseen reality.

Across St. Bernard you see houses that are collapsed like accordions. You see holes in the roofs, where perhaps the residents escaped by helicopter. You see seaweed clinging to other roofs and no water line along the windows, which tells you that these entire blocks, this entire neighborhood, was utterly submerged.

And then there is the unsettling quiet. There is no one for miles around -- no traffic, no children, no dogs.

The front yards of these upscale houses are now piled high with rubble, from slabs of plywood to mildewed rugs. Wherever you look, normal life has been obliterated. How does journalism convey that? How do you communicate that so many months later, vast swaths of a major American city remain paralyzed?

It is a depressing story, hardly a ratings grabber. It is like Iraq, day after day of numbing sameness: violence and suicide bombs there, a frozen-in-time lack of recovery here. Reporters like to cover tangible issues -- the battle over small-business loans, the race to buttress the levees, the failures of FEMA, the campaign for mayor, the first post-storm Mardi Gras. Everyone knows what happened to New Orleans; it is not new news.

But it is still news, if news is defined as a catastrophic event that alters a community and a country forever. Williams, dismissing some viewer complaints and nasty e-mail saying that he devotes too much air time to this city's struggles, stays on the case, as do a handful of other television and print journalists.

CNN's Anderson Cooper has been here several times, and ABC maintains a bureau for rotating correspondents. Major newspapers have devoted plenty of resources to the region. Since Jan. 1, the New York Times has run more than 110 news stories on New Orleans, the Los Angeles Times about 90, The Washington Post about 75, dissecting the current state of hospitals, schools, housing, even Cajun cooking and jazz.

But can anyone really say that New Orleans remains an urgent, top-of-the-newscast issue, that the recent coverage captures the raw emotion of a crisis that continues unabated? By and large, the plight of this crippled city seems to have become background noise.

Reporters by trade parachute into disaster zones, steeling themselves against sadness. You start out as a young scribe chasing car accidents and then graduate to plane crashes. Later you might find yourself in Oklahoma City or in Lower Manhattan, trying to chronicle the aftermath of a terrorist attack, or in Bosnia or Baghdad, filing dispatches about military conflicts. Then the war ends, the community rebuilds, and you move on. Collectively, we all move on.

That is not possible in New Orleans. Yes, many people are tired of the Katrina saga. In a world filled with problems large and small, in a business that gravitates toward the latest buzz, the up-to-the-minute news flash, that's easy to grasp. If people saw what I saw, however, they would understand why journalism's work here is not done -- not by a long shot.

kurtzh@washpost.com

Howard Kurtz covers the media for The Washington Post.