The Role of Journalists: The Story of the Storm

Image by Mark Vitosh/Iowa Department of Natural Resources, downloaded from Iowa Public Radio “Talk of Iowa” web page: Vehicle in Linn County crushed by a broken tree from the August 10 derecho.

A friend on Facebook, whose political leanings I don’t really know, posted an anti-media rant after people in Iowa complained about the national press not paying enough attention to the huge natural disaster that befell our state last week.

NPR just reported this morning, Aug. 19, that the National Weather Service now is saying winds in Linn County were sustained at over 100 mph for over half an hour on Aug. 10, a date that will live in infamy in Iowa. The initial stories in national media about the storm covered a key topic—crop losses—which in an agricultural state are not trivial.

But the derecho drenched cities and people, too. And in the days following the storm, frustration grew that American news media were not paying attention.

The friend on Facebook? “Defund the media,” she wrote in her rant. She added a hashtag: #socialmedia.

I found the post to be almost exactly backwards. Social media has a role to play—a helpful Facebook page for local people to share questions and answers post-storm quickly sprang up—but as we should know by now, social media is the uncontrolled child mind of our collective intellect—a pouty toddler that spouts, unfiltered, whatever is on top of lazy consciousness. It’s often erratic, hurtful, and lacks any scientific or historic context.

Meanwhile, we have already defunded the media, and that’s a huge part of our national problem. Our democracy is dysfunctional and seems unequal to any crisis—whether caused by weather or a virus—due partly to the noise and fury of social media and our collective contempt for “mainstream” media. The fourth estate has become the freak out estate.

Newspapers have been cutting staffs and closing. National news outlets have not been immune to the cutback trend. For a generation, the big three broadcast networks have been gutting their news operations. Congress and the state have pulled back from public broadcasting, leaving PBS and NPR to panhandle for dollars from foundations, corporations and viewers/listeners.

There are lots of reasons why the storm and its tragic aftermath were not the Big Story in the national media that it deserved to be:

• The news telling tribe is smaller and different. Cable TV news has always been more niche oriented and attempts to cater to ideological identities to build the loyal audience that will trust only Fox or MSNBC. We tend of think of the “news media” as an it, when it’s always been a they, and the nature of the they is shifting. “Media” is not a thing, it’s still a large, dynamic system, and the old-school, Joe Friday, just-the-facts reporters are not as easy to find.

• The news audience is shrinking. The internet made information and disinformation available for free. Audiences for news programs and readership levels for local newspapers have plunged. The audience for “news” is still large—the internet means many stories get many eyeballs—but we’ve been trained for 25 years to think of news as a free commodity, not, as it was in the past, a service that was paid for via subscription and/or ads. The Gazette managed to get a paper out Tuesday after the storm, but fewer of us read it than would have in the past, not just because of delivery issues (all streets blocked by felled trees—ironic that dead trees kept a newspaper from being distributed) but also because readership penetration has been eroding for years. It’s long been true in America that we are suspicious of the media for manipulating the audience, and we ignore the reality that the opposite is even more true. The audience builds the media. It’s even more so in this internet era, but always was a key fact: What gets paid attention to in the media environment flourishes; what gets ignored withers. If we pay attention to “The Epoch Times” or other such media outlets, we the audience are building a nonsense media system to replace news media.

• The derecho story doesn’t fit media paradigms. A hurricane doesn’t sneak up on anybody, and there is an information infrastructure built around tracking and reporting such a storm. This derecho was a summer thunderstorm—an everyday occurrence—but on steroids. Derechos have happened before, just not like this. This was a monster storm that formed in South Dakota and Nebraska and swept across the Midwest almost to Ohio. Nobody expected it. Good Morning America didn’t have a reporter on the beach somewhere in a yellow poncho to show that, yes, wind is blowing. It didn’t hit major, known cities on the East Coast or Gulf Coast—no New Orleans, Miami or New York City were in its path. Chicago felt it, but not like Des Moines or Cedar Rapids (or Marshalltown or Vinton). And so, it came, it went, and the suffering it left in its wake was mostly uncovered in the days that followed the devastation.

I am not here to offer simple “solutions.” Franky, I think I’ve only begun to identify the multiple roots of a complex problem. And my delusional Facebook friend at least does have a point: Social media does democratize information. That can be a bad thing when Russian trolls can derail American democracy, but our modern media environment does give voice to the formerly voiceless.

And, to play devil’s advocate, its inevitable that this won’t be the Big Story of 2020. For those of us in Cedar Rapids, we’re obsessed with the derecho and its aftermath—and it is a big story that deserves more national coverage. Yet, this is 2020. An unchecked global pandemic rages and our country is the epicenter because of a totally botched government lack of response. Our dysfunctional political system lurches into another dangerous, dark-money dominated election season, with no adult leadership attempting to rationally protect our sick body politic. The Trump administration is successfully tossing sand into the gears of government at many levels, crippling or hurting the EPA, the Postal Service, the CDC, the Justice Department—it’s a draining of the swamp that is creating a government derecho that will take years to clean up from.

2020: The Democrats nominate Joe Biden this week, the Republicans will crown King Donald I next week. The election seems a world away—a week can be an eternity in 2020—but it sucks up media attention.

The derecho? Yesterday’s news. Well, not really, the suffering is real and continues. Local journalists Beth Malichi and Lyz Lenz have both brought some attention to the storm in the national media, which is good, although on “Talk of Iowa” Aug. 19 on NPR, Lenz bemoaned that it takes an op/ed in the Washington Post to get some national media attention.

“Talk of Iowa” had a show this morning about covering the derecho storm, and it featured some key Cedar Rapids journalists. One was Andy Abeyta, a Gazette photographer, who was out on Interstate 380 when the derecho hit, and he saw multiple trucks that had been blown over. He used his cell phone to make some images of one rescue of a trucker (he had his camera in his car but did not grab it because he ran up to the truck to assist in the rescue, but thankfully others were able to come to the trucker’s aid first).

Besides Andy, it was an all X chromosome show, featuring host Charity Nebbe; Michaela Ramm, a Gazette reporter; Lyz Lenz, a Gazette columnist; and Beth Malicki, a local TV news anchor on KCRG. Here are just three quotes from those journalists that stood out to me:

• “It’s astounding, the level of devastation.” Michaela Ramm, Gazette reporter. She is based in Iowa City and was talking about driving into Cedar Rapids the day after the storm.

• “We’re still struggling here on the ground to get the reality of the devastation—that story—told.” Liz Lenz, Gazette columnist.

• “It (help) came so late that people were truly suffering,” Beth Malicki, KCRG TV anchor. Later, more from Malicki: “It is immoral how the response has not met the need.” She wasn’t pointing a finger at any agency, and was grateful for the many people who have gone out of their way to help, but rightfully bemoaning the lack of coordination.

The country needs to hear our story because aid follows narrative. Which is, in itself, also part of the problem—it should not take tears form Malicki on national TV (reference to her appearance on an ABC program, not the video from PBS I embedded) to draw coverage to Iowa.

I would rather that FEMA be able to find a disaster without having to see it on Good Morning America, a Washington Post op/ed or hearing about it as a trending Twitter hashtag.

Defund the media? I say, put the P back into PBS and NPR. Fund the media. Not because they are popular, but because telling the story is necessary.

If nothing else, the derecho is another example of how starving credible media leads to an information desert that social media does not fill.