I’ve sensed anger from some who are upset over the negative tone the mass media have taken toward the federal government in the Hurricane Katrina aftermath. Some are asking why we couldn’t all come together the way we did after the September 11 terrorist attacks. Why has this become a left/right political issue that is dividing the country?

My personal belief is that it is because there has been poor leadership from our government at all levels — federal, state and local. The media, for the most part, report what they see and hear and then provide historical context and analysis. There are exceptions, of course, that go both ways.

Columbia Journalism Review has published one of those exceptions by photojournalist Bill Putnam, who does not merely report what he sees and hears:

Army journalism is really public relations. We tell the Army’s story from its perspective. We learned very early during the twelve-week course at the Defense Information School that objectivity, while sought by individual journalists, isn’t encouraged in military journalism. On the first day of class at the all-services school, the instructors told us we weren’t “First Amendment” journalists. In other words, we had to make whatever branch we represented look not good but golden.

Is that the type of journalism these critics of the media would prefer? I would hope not. I believe the harsh criticism currently coming from mainstream media outlets is a form of tough love. It’s the same criticism various media outlets have heaped upon themselves when they goof, with some exceptions, of course. Some folks in the media are probably thrilled that the Bush administration now has egg on its face because it bungled the disaster recovery efforts, but those types do not represent the majority.

In the meantime, I highly recommend this piece by Putnam, who has served admirably as a photographer in the National Guard and will return to Iraq as a freelance journalist.

Let me offer a follow-up remark or two about the Newsweek “Pray For Us” cover story on Hurricane Katrina. I’ll put this in a separate post, so that readers don’t confuse my take on this with Doug’s piece. It’s not that I disagree with Doug. But something nagged me as I read the lead article through twice.

So here goes. Did I miss it or is the following, literally, the only direct reference in the main Newsweek article to Katrina victims outside of New Orleans?

The storm steered just to the east of New Orleans and blew away much of Biloxi, Miss. One Biloxi survivor, a Navy vet named Kevin Miller, described clinging to a tree as people floated by, “some dead.” Miller told Newsweek of grabbing a desperate woman by the hair — and losing her. “I just lost my grip,” he said, choking up. The suffering all along the Gulf Coast, where homes and whole islands vanished, has been terrible, with people’s whole lives falling into ruin.

I think that was it — between four or five sentences, depending on how one does the counting. By the way, I realize that there was a sidebar story on the impact of the storm on the oil industry up and down the coat and that it featured an astonishing feature photograph from Biloxi, Miss.

Does that seem a bit thin to anyone else, in terms of coverage of the area that was actually hit the hardest? One half of one paragraph? Did I miss anything else? Why focus so exclusively on New Orleans?

I do realize that New Orleans is turning into a much bigger disaster. I realize that it is the larger city and that, as far as we know, the relief efforts there have been a much bigger fiasco. I realize that the Big Easy is the cultural center that matters more to the national audience.

In effect, I am asking this: Is covering New Orleans such a singular priority because that story has political implications at a crucial time for the White House? In other words, I suspect that this offers more proof that in journalism politics trumps everything. It’s the highest value. Period.

I must stress that the main Newsweek article does a tremendous job of covering the personal and even political chaos in and around New Orleans. I know that’s the main story, for the national audience. But I still think that the magazine’s priorities are on clear display.

Come on. One half of one paragraph? There are towns elsewhere that are, literally, missing. They are gone. People need prayers there, too.

To take a long, sobering look at the stories that Newsweek blew past, check out Eugene Robinson’s poignant column in The Washington Post titled “Hard Path to Salvation.” It’s all about the tensions in the Gulf Coast between the Bibles and the gambling barges. I especially liked this passage about Biloxi, near the start of the article:

This is a town where people go to church on Sunday and mean it, but for material sustenance, Biloxi leads others unto temptation. Casino gambling has transformed this coastline, lifting thousands out of poverty. Now much of the industry is in ruins. . . .

Katrina’s strongest winds hit the Mississippi coast, and Biloxi is appallingly damaged. The Hard Rock Cafe’s iconic giant guitar still stands defiant, but the building behind it was smashed. Just about everything along the beach will have to be rebuilt, after the search dogs and the bulldozers and the huge military hovercraft complete their rescue-and-recovery mission. Even well inland, there are streets where most houses are missing a roof, or were bisected by a falling tree or simply have been reduced to rubble.

And then at the end, the local clergy are having to think hard about life after the storm and the casino boats.

“If people left, would they ever come back? And come back to what? The business of temptation was ruined in Biloxi. What was the right path to salvation?”

People are asking questions like that all up and down the Gulf Coast, not just in the great lost city of New Orleans.

Maybe it’s because I’ve written more for magazines than for newspapers since the late 1980s, but I often find newsweeklies more helpful than other media for making sense of broad-sweep stories, such as Hurricane Katrina’s devastation of New Orleans.

Both Newsweek and Time deliver the goods this week — dramatic photos from the miseries along New Orleans’ streets; long-form reporting rich with human-interest details; and aerial photos that show the flooding within the context of New Orleans’ neighborhoods and landmarks.

The strongest feature in Time is a one-page essay by Sonja Steptoe demonstrating that there was plenty of suffering — and plenty of blame to go around — long before Hurricane Katrina slammed into the Gulf Coast:

While I understand the temptation to wax nostalgic about the architecture of the Ninth Ward homes, the beauty of the Garden District, the charm of the French Quarter and so on, such musings perpetuate a romantic notion of the place that doesn’t track with reality. Sure, there are isolated spots dotting the tourist maps that are well stocked with pristine prettiness and antebellum hospitality, but like A Streetcar Named Desire‘s Blanche DuBois, the real New Orleans hasn’t possessed much beauty or charm for nearly 30 years. The deep wealth and class divisions, the decayed infrastructure, the lax civil-engineering management, the depleted city coffers, the lawless depravity, the history of political corruption by a long line of city and state officials, and the incompetent governance that television viewers are discovering are, to use the local vernacular, the roux of a long-simmering pot of gumbo that finally boiled over when Hurricane Katrina turned up the heat last week. Now the city is drowning in it.

. . . Those cheery tourists need only have peered out of their French Quarter hotel-room windows to see the ugly and abject poverty on full display at the squalid Iberville housing projects (average annual income of its 833 households: $7,279), sitting just next door to the Vieux Carré off Canal Street. If the visitors had taken a few steps beyond Tulane University and the nearby Garden District mansions, they would have found themselves smack-dab in the middle of a ghetto choked with rudimentary shotgun houses, dilapidated housing projects and living conditions that seem only slightly better than those in Port-au-Prince, Bangladesh or Baghdad.

About the photo: “We know the suffering . . . VIII,” posted on Flickr by carf (Creative Commons Deed).