The Press Box - Covering Hurricane Ida

Episode Date: August 30, 2021

Bryan and David break down the ongoing coverage of Hurricane Ida as they discuss how social media and new technology are being used to relay footage and enhance reporting. Then, they weigh in on how these clips and updates are circulating throughout the news.  Hosts: Bryan Curtis and David Shoemaker Associate Producer: Erika Cervantes Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Dave Chang is an avid student and fan of sports, music, art, film, and of course, food. With a rotating cast of guests, they have conversations that cover everything from the creative process to his guest's guiltiest pleasures. Followed the Dave Chang Show on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. Hello, media consumers, Brian Curtis and David Shoemaker here along with producer Erica Servantes. David, I want to talk to you a little bit about Hurricane Ida this morning. Made landfall on Sunday in Port Fouchon, Louisiana. It was a category, four hurricane before being downgated to a tropical storm on Monday. At least one person has been killed in as many media outlets noted, Hurricane Ida's

landfall came 16 years after Hurricane Katrina's. I want to talk to you a little bit about how the hurricane was covered. And there are a few different parts to this. First comes to us from a column from CNN's Brian Stelter, who writes the following. In an ever more internet-connected world, we are getting close. close-up views of extreme weather in ways that were hard to imagine a generation ago. When Hurricane Ida barreled ashore and ransacked the Louisiana coast on Sunday, we were able to see the storm surge in and date Grand Isle through remote video cameras

that were installed by storm chasers. Locals also uploaded web-connected security camera footage of the rising waters to social media and streamed the winds on Facebook live. reporters weren't embedded in these coastal and low-lying areas because the danger was simply too great. So webcams were the main way to assess the damage on Sunday. I know I was looking at Twitter last night. Were you consuming any of the videos and other things people were posting of Ida as it came ashore? Yeah, absolutely.

It's, I mean, this column is right on. I mean, it's, it's, this is the first time we've, you know, interacted with a natural disaster in America of this magnitude probably in the Twitter age, although there have been many other very significant events that we're watching this way. But yeah, I mean, in the absence of traditional news footage, I mean, this has been, this is, and especially, you know, in the absence of after landfall, of electricity in so much of Louisiana and the, you know, affected part of the Gulf Coast, these are only access to this stuff.

Yeah, I was struck by a few things. I saw at least one of these on Twitter last night, but people who were in the path of danger tweeting for help from authorities. Stelter pulled out a few of these. One read, My fam is in need of rescue. Two babies and two adults. They are in a flooded home second floor.

Address Revere Drive. Please send rescue if you can. Now, there was, this came from actually a Dallas-based TV report. who tweeted this, just got a call from a man in Mesquite, which is a suburb of Dallas, where his mother is trapped in flooded waters on the 2,900 block of Donner Drive in New Orleans. Mom is in a wheelchair and she can't get through to 911. The power is out and the water is rising, hope someone can help her.

So we also saw, you saw the videos on Twitter and then also these really harrowing pleas for help. One also tweet that stuck out to me and Stelter pointed this out too. there's a Twitter named Don Trell, one name, who actually went to Port Fouchon and posted a video of a crane that was tipped over in the water and was apparently venturing out to kind of get an idea of what the storm and the aftermath looked like.

Stelter concludes his column this way. It was the latest sign that the way we witnessed landfalling hurricanes is changing, perhaps providing a more visceral education for the public. Can all the live feeds and social snapshots showing the real-time reality of the weather cause viewers to take the threat more seriously? So that's his conclusion here. Every time there's a hurricane or natural disaster like this, the authorities say,

you've got to leave, you got to leave, you got to leave, seek shelter, go someplace safe, and a lot of people don't leave. So is there a possibility that by just the sheer number of social people, media posts that get up that show how strong the winds are, how heavy the rains are. Do we think people might, that might sort of work, work as a warning system of sorts? You mean for future times or for people? Yeah. I would think of mostly for the future, right?

Yeah, I mean, it's not like that hasn't happened in the past. I mean, we all have indelible images from Hurricane Katrina stamped in our foreheads, although that does seem, I don't know exactly how to say this. there was a lot of failures in Hurricane Katrina, and we don't need to relitigate them all. But when you're left with the sort of images of, well, the aftermath as opposed to the storm itself, you know, when you're, the images that your mind immediately goes back to are people in pontoon boats trying to help other people or the images from the stadium, you know, the, just, you know, the real tragic images throughout, it does sort of, it's not that the urgent. isn't there, but it's a different sort of urgency, right? I mean, like I said, there are failures on many different levels, but when all you are seeing is the aftermath, I guess it's feasible to, you know, lay part of the blame at the government, at the infrastructure, at the response,

wherever you want to put it. And it sort of separates it somewhat from the sheer terror of the storm itself. And to be able to witness the storm itself in real time, I guess does refocus the way that we perceive these things. It's a particular feeling, isn't it? Seeing those videos, a lot of which are shot out of like the windows of houses or people that have kind of batten themselves down or just showing like this is what my front yard looks like

or this is what my street looks like right now. I think one thing I came away with last night is a sense of you do have none of us would of course say, you know, we know what it was like to be there, but you do have just like little snapshots that give you, that communicate at least some of what the feelings were like being there. Some of how scary it is, some of how intense it is,

and things like that. I will say this. As I read the stories this morning and watched a little bit of TV last night, one thing that's so interesting about this age we live in that Stelter talks about and the way we see these snapshots of storms is that we didn't get, last night and even early this morning a sense of how extensive the damage is and how, you know, how dangerous the storm actually turned out to be because that information was really hard to get. I'll direct you to a write-up in the New York Times this morning as people across southern Louisiana

slowly began to take in the scale of damage from Hurricane Ida on Monday, a day after accounting severely hindered by widespread power outages and limited phone service, search and rescue teams fanned out to respond to calls for help that had gone unanswered. Cynthia Lee Scheng, president of the Jefferson Parish, said in an interview that Jefferson Parish officials had not yet been able to make contact with residents of Grand Isle, a narrow beachy islet of homes on stilts facing the Gulf of Mexico near where the storm came ashore, though many residents evacuated before the storm. She estimated that about 40 people had remained behind, quote, we lost contact with them yesterday, she said. So you have this just very interesting.

juxtaposition. On the one hand, we're seeing more of what Ida's like than we ever have at any point as people that just watch television or looking at Twitter. On the other hand, the information about Ida's effects is still very, very hard and slow to come by. And that just strikes me as sort of an interesting sort of second half to Stelter's column, which is to say that we are experiencing things viscerally, but in terms of getting that sort of information, which is at the end of the day, right, what we're after last night. How bad is it? How many people were affected? What is the damage going to be like in Louisiana? And what does it require from us from the government to clean up? That information is still almost to me as difficult as it would

have been to come by a few years ago. We're just to say we're experiencing it through social media, right? I mean, isn't this just the way that we, you know, if all the news that you get is through Twitter, Facebook, whatever else, you're necessarily left with a really fractured, incomplete view of whatever it is. So, I mean, and that's, that's right. I mean, listen, I would never, I would never want any journalist, I would never vote any journalist into harm's way to cover these, a situation like this. And I fully understand the position of, the networks to not send anybody in, but it does feel like we're in a world where there are reporters in the front line for everything now. And to have a vacuum like that is a little bit

halting in some ways, right? I mean, in some ways that underscores this, you know, the entire situation, how dangerous it is, how, you know, life-threatening a storm like this can be. But it does, I mean, it does, I mean, when we have, you know, people reporting live on the streets of Kabul or whatever right now. I mean, it does seem strange that we're relying on Twitter to experience this. We're also in another era would not have realized what we're missing to some extent, right? Because these are always things that you catch up with on the news. And, you know, obviously in the generation before hours, you catch up with on the evening news, sometimes 24 hours later. So the fact that we're getting any, I guess, live streaming stuff at all is, can, I mean, is, well, I mean, to be kind of clinical about it, it's additive to what we know. But you're right, it's impossible to get a complete picture.

Right before we started recording and, you know, I was watching a press conference, I believe, from the New Orleans area. And, you know, it's just like very, very, well, clinical, you know, going beat by beat through every sort of manager and seeing how, and watching. them discuss how their teams are doing and what we can look ahead to. But even then, it's, it's, well, I mean, it's harder to zoom out than it is to even get boots on the ground. And I think that that's the unique thing I'm talking about here, which is that you see more of the storm in terms of just like seeing video than we've ever seen before. But that the other part of the reporting the story is just probably as difficult or nearly as difficult as it ever was before. Well, just in terms of the media outlets themselves, I mean, these are people on every network, you know, every news network are trying their hardest to, to help process the story.

Mm-hmm. But you, but you do see, this is a very odd, you know, new media sort of moment where they can throw to clips from Twitter, but they don't, but they don't have their processing power that they would have by having a reporter on, you know, usually the reporter on the ground is the one that explains the images that you're seeing because they are there to process it, right? They are there to explain it. They're there to make sense of it. And now, by and large, we just have the images. Yeah, I saw the writer Jonathan Katz tweet this. The disasters I get the most nervous about are the ones where very little information is coming out of the zone in the hours

during and right after. And I felt that anxiety last night because I was watching the videos and I'm like, but I'm not able to get hard information, right? I'm not able to have someone because they don't know the answer. And that's the reason, right? I'm not able to have someone stand on television or be like, here's what Louisiana is facing right now in its totality. Even reading the New York Times this morning, about the closest they came to a definitive

conclusion about anything was they said, and I'm quoting here, the $14.5 billion dollar flood protection system built around the New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina seems to have succeeded at keeping the city from going underwater again. Yeah. That's great news. If true, seems is, but they're hedging, right? Because they don't actually quite know the answer to that question yet. I believe that was confirmed on the press conference that I was just watching.

But again, we won't know for some time, right? And it's almost, I think, you know, the levees break. breaking became sort of symbolic of everything that went wrong during Katrina. And this storm, if it needed to be made clear, makes it perfectly clear that, you know, strengthening that system, making that system work perfectly is not a magical shield against, you know, the forces of nature when they strike like this. But yeah, I mean, if that worked, then that's, that's fantastic. I mean, it is, it isn't, I mean, just from a personal point of view, my brother-in-law,

lives in New Orleans and lives in New Orleans. And it's funny because we have access to the news and we have access to social media. And yet I don't feel like there's any real one-to-one correlation between what I'm seeing and what he and his fiancee are experiencing. I mean, they're in Birmingham. But like, and they got there. That was the closest hotel that they could find when they decided to leave,

which is I'm sure the experience that many fortunate people are having. You know, people who were able to leave and left in time and still, you know, having to travel that far away to find a place to stay. But it doesn't, you know, I kind of, I think, I think most deeply I feel like I will know, I will only have some idea of the damage that New Orleans has suffered when he gets back and tells me. Does that make any sense?

Like it's like we're, like we're in an age where we can access human responses and and people interacting with the stuff in real time on social media. And yet there's something still very foreign about it, very alien about it, that it takes, I mean, you know, maybe that's a good thing,

but I mean, to have that sort of pause. But, you know, it is a deeply human experience. And it's something that we only can accept sometimes through humans that we know. Yeah, and very localized,

right? Because if we learned anything about it from, from previous coverage, It's been that just because somebody's home is okay doesn't mean somebody else's home is okay. Exactly. Sometimes that's just really from Birmingham or wherever you are. Sometimes it's hard to tell exactly what has happened. You know, even though videos you watch, different buildings are affected.

You know, roof is blowing off one building and it's not blowing off the other building. So you don't quite have a sense of those kind of answers, I think, really in the same time. A couple of media stories I wanted to point you to that came across my, radar screen. One, this was from MSNBC related via the Daily Beast, Justin Barragona.

MSNBC reporter Shaquille Brewster was in Gulfport, Mississippi. Oh, yeah. I just want you to listen to the beginning of this report, and we'll sort of go from there. We're in Gulfport, Mississippi, Craig. And I'll tell you the biggest sign, the biggest indicator that I saw this morning

about the force of the storm last night. So pretty standard opening there, but what you can see in the background is a white pickup truck pulling up on the beach behind Brewster, a man getting out of the pickup truck and running toward him. Brewster is still, you know, reporting here on the beach, telling us what's going on, doesn't see this coming. Then it devolved into this. Sure, that they're okay. Craig, I'm going to toss it back to you because we have a person who needs a help right now.

Hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey. We're going to check in with Shaq Brewster just to make sure all is well. That was Craig Melvin there on MSNBC. The man was apparently yelling reported accurately at Brewster. MSNBC later came out and said that Brewster was okay. Yeah, Craig Melvin jumped back in to make sure everybody knew that. And Shaq Brewster did, I think, said the same on tour. Twitter.

That was really bizarre. I mean, I don't know exactly what to say about it, although, you know, talking about how we have experienced similar things on Twitter, you know, we've talked about a lot on the show about other experiences that we've experienced first on social media and then by regular news. This is a very, like, it feels like a very Twitter moment, doesn't it? even though it happened on broadcast news, the sort of like, I can't like near tragedy slash like take a look at this asshole video, you know?

I mean, it's just, I don't want to make light of it, but it did feel like a very, a very viral video sort of moment amidst all this other sort of hard news. Yeah. And also, I don't know the person's motivations who was yelling at the reporter, but it does feel at least when you hear reported accurately, like the whole kind of, you know, mainstream media sort of, you know, kind of questioning, whatever you want to call it, is now applying to reporting about a hurricane, right? This is, yeah, that sounds, again, I don't quite know the motivations here, but it just felt like, like some of the confrontations we see outside

political rallies and things like that. Well, I mean, it felt, reported accurately. It felt like, yeah, I mean, it felt like how many, like, COVID mask video, people, you know, refusing their masks in the airport or on airplanes videos that have been circulating of late. I mean, it's just one angry white dude. But the, the, yeah, I mean, I was trying to turn over in my head what he could, what he was specifically, what I, what I would guess he specifically upset about or what his argument would have been. I can't, I couldn't put my finger on it, but I'm guessing it's just like, it'll be like,

gallingly dull or obvious when, you know, if, and when we ever find out. I mean, I'm not sure what the controversy was, but I'm not sure that it really matters that much. I want to talk to you about one more media moment, David, but first, let's do the Overwork Twitter joke of the week where we celebrate a gag that was so obvious that all of media Twitter made it at exactly the same time. Send your nominees to at the press box pod where they are always a gratefully received. College football season began Saturday, David. The Rose Bowl here in sunny Pasadena. UCLA drew only about 33,000 fans in a season. stadium that holds 80,000 fans.

It was an overwork Twitter joke to write, impossible to tell just from looking at the game whether California still has attendance limits for sports or just no one cares about UCLA football. You remember early in the pandemic when they're saying like the Jaguars are playing in front of zero fans? Yeah. And the overwork joke was, it sounds about right or sounds like week 14.

This is kind of pandemic attendance joke 2.0. Wait, did they still have the attendance limits, or that few people want to see UCLA football? Thanks to Thomas A. Nguyen for that one, UCLA, by the way, beat Hawaii. A tweet from the New York Times, David, a silent majority of American workers do want to get back to the office, at least for a few days a week. As coronavirus cases rise and companies keep workplaces closed, these frustrated employees can't wait to return to their cubicles. It was an overword Twitter joke to write, did a cubicle write this? Always makes me laugh.

Thanks to Michael G. And finally, David, from the Department of Not Overworked, but very, very punny. Did you see the stories about people buying and taking the horse

deworming drug? Ivermectin, I'm saying that correctly, I think, to prevent or treat COVID. Yes, it's nothing to laugh about. I was laughing at the pause in your attempt to pronounce it.

The FDA had to come out and tweet, you are not a horse. You are not a cow. Seriously, y'all, stop it. It was a good Twitter joke to write. Anti-Vactors who take ivermectin shell hereby be referred to as nay-sayers. Nay, sayers. Thanks to our pal, Ken Barrett.

Can we vote for more public agencies addressing people as y'all on Twitter? Yeah, I think it's effective. So this is actually, it didn't, it didn't sort of stop you down at all. You were, you were, you were paid more attention to an FDA tweet than you know. Absolutely. And people always say about these cranks out there that like it's easy to be, you know, to have whatever retrograde point of view until it, until it's someone that you know, you know. Maybe it's just easy to assume that all government agencies are, you know, cruel, robotic groups of people who are

out to get you until they talk like your neighbor. And then you can, you know, actually take them seriously. Did it remind you at all of the morning announcements in Fort Worth, Texas when we were in high school? Y'all don't block the teacher's parking lot. Things like that. That's the new voice of the FDA. Yes, it's great. That's great. I totally forgot. Yeah, y'all is. You're something disarming about. Yeah, it is. As you say, it takes the edge off bureaucracy. Yeah. Yeah, y'all get your vaccines, all right? Don't wait around. One more media note, David, from the Louisiana

area. This is from the New York Post. I missed this on social media, so I just had to read about it later. It's about Al Roker of the Today Show. Quoting here from the New York Post, the 67-year-old veteran TV meteorologist made a brief appearance from New Orleans in a

full-body wetsuit on NBC's Meet the Press on Sunday and was immediately smacked by waves from Lake Pontchartrain as Hurricane Ida bore down on the region. I guess we lost communication. Roker sputtered at one point to host Chuck Todd while crushing waves alternately engulfed him and receded back into the water. The clip quickly went viral with concerned critics asking why someone of Roker's age would risk life and limb to share information he could get from the National Weather Service without leaving the house.

So one tweeter wrote, it's 2021, I don't need to see Al Roker risking his life and his cruise live to show me a hurricane. It can be reported on without standing outside in the middle of it. What do we make of Al Roker in the waves?

I know Al Roker is a well respected, highly compensated. You know, it's the integral part of the NBC news team. I would not have guessed that he had the I don't know, the sway to say, I'm going there whether you want me to or not.

Give me a camera crew and a wetsuit. Let's go. That seems more like, I don't know. That's, that's Anderson Cooper territory. You know, it doesn't really strike me that out Roker is that guy. There's that stage where all news anchors get to where, you know, they're on the get me on a plane stage for a certain part of their career. And then most of them, yes, they get to a stage where you're kind of an elder statesman or stateswoman of news. and you're back in the studio

while someone else is braving the wave. So it is kind of amazing that Al Roker, yes, is raising his hand and saying, I need to be there. Yeah. I need to be, I need to be on this thing. It says, yeah. I mean, I guess he has the, like,

the where in the world is Al Roker? Or was that Matt Lauer? Yeah, no, Roker. Never mind then. I don't know what the background is. We knew where Al Roker was. He was right where the news was. Al himself would tweet this

For all those who were worried about me out on Lake Pontchartrain covering Ida A, I volunteered to do this part of the job B, my crew and I were safe and we're back at our hotel And C for those who think I'm too old to be doing this try and keep up I'll record defiant to those who say he should not be in the eye of the storm Also somebody tweeted in a reply to him Al Roker will kick Hurricane Ida right in its stupid face so Al Roker is

entering the Chuck Norris stage of his career in meteorology. All right, David, I've got an only in journalism word for you. All right. I think this feature is on its last legs. We got at least one comment to that effect this week, so.

We did. But you know, you know the thing about it is it's because of the success of the feature. Yeah. People have sent in so many words that we are running out of only in journalism words. It's true. But I got a great one this week from Kunjali Padhaja that I just have to tell you about. Are you ready? Please, yeah. Only in journalism word, you see it printed, but you never really

use it in real life. Tenter hooks. Yes. Tenter hooks. I don't think I've ever heard anybody say that. Did you know, and I found this out from Merriam-Webster, that Tentor hooks are what you hang laundry on? No. Like, where are you hanging this laundry? Well, I'm not quite sure about that. It's like a hook that fastens onto clothes according to it, and it stretches it out. And according to Merriam-Webster, see, it's stretched, meaning it's stressed or uneasy. So like the, you know, the cloth is pulled tight, and that is when you are on tenter hooks, you are yourself, anxious, uneasy. That's the idea here.

Okay, that makes sense. Used it to kill a mockingbird. Did not know that. Well, that's not journalism, but it's the written, that's where a lot of these get, like a lot of this tension here is, right? I mean, it's the things that only exist in the written word. And by the way, do you think that some of these only in journalism or only in the written word words are going to fade out because of audio books? I mean, I know audiobooks aren't a new thing, but I definitely heard some words. You're saying that's the disqualifier as soon as it's spoken on audible.com? I just think some of these words, some of these words you're put off by the lack of use.

don't know how that sounds in a sentence, like whatever. And now, you know, like some of our favorite writers use some of these words all the time in the written word. And now that you hear, you know, some great gravelly voice narrator saying them out loud, maybe you're more likely to say tenter hooks. Yeah. Tenter hooks. I'll tell you what's remarkable about this is that this was the front page above the fold

headline of the Seattle Times on Thursday, August 26th, long-term care facilities on tenter hooks over vaccine rule. So not only did they use tenor hooks, they got tenter hooks into a headline. That is an incredibly long headline word. That is a very long headline word. 11 letters. Tenter hooks. And after alienate a portion of your readership too.

I'm not. You and I were not totally sure what tenter hooks meant if we understood the sentiment behind it. So yes. I can imagine. It's time for David Schuemaker, guess is the strain pun headline. All right. Friday's headline about the Broncos

choosing Teddy Bridgewater as their starting quarterback was better off Ted. I've got another quarterback-based pun for you. It's from Will. It appeared as a segment title on first take. It's about the Bears potentially having two quarterbacks. Andy Dalton and rookie Justin Fields. Uh-huh.

So the bears have two quarterbacks who can throw that football. What was first take, strain pun segment title? Oh my gosh. If we're going to get into first take pun segment titles, this feature is taking a real turn. Two bears, a pair of bears, three little bears. You throw the football with your arm Arms race arm to

Don't forget who they throw up more Bear oh the right to bear arms The bear so yeah but the right the right Right oh the right number two Animal Bear arms Right to bear arms All right I'll accept that I'm not sure what the I'm not sure what the right part of that is

I guess it is. I guess it's the question, right? Right to bear arms? Are you questioning, like, did they pick the right two quarterbacks? Right, two bear arms? Yeah, it's a question mark. Right to bear arms. He is David Chewaker. I'm Brian Curtis production magic by Erica Zervantes.

The 20th anniversary, David, of the 9-11 terrorist attacks is coming up. We are back Friday with the first of our shows to look back at some of the memorable writing about that day in its aftermath. Plus more lukewarm takes about the media. See you then, David. See you later, Brian.