Fifteen years after Hurricane Katrina, Vann Newkirk shares lessons still being learned about an American disaster

Reliable Sources

CNN

News

3.4 • 1.4K Ratings

🗓️ 21 August 2020

⏱️ 33 minutes

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Summary

Vann Newkirk is the host of "Floodlines," The Atlantic's documentary podcast examining "mythmaking" and misinformation during and after Hurricane Katrina. Brian Stelter asks Newkirk about parallels between the U.S. response to the hurricane and the coronavirus pandemic; the role of the press; and the lessons that should be learned from both crises. He describes "the lag between the reality, the disaster dawning on us, and people actually moving to confront it," saying "we had that same kind of lag from every level of government" in response to the pandemic "that really cost us a whole lot in the long run."

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Transcript

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0:00.0	What will the story of the pandemic be in the final telling?
0:07.0	What can we learn from coverage, mistakes, and misinformation from a past American crisis.
0:17.0	Now those are some of the questions on this week's Reliable Sources Podcast.
0:21.0	So let's cue the music. I'm Brian Stelter and this is our weekly podcast
0:26.8	edition of Reliable Sources. Our chance to go in depth with media leaders and newsmakers talking about how the news gets made and
0:36.5	how it should be made differently. I've always been really really interested in how Hurricane
0:42.4	Katrina was covered by the media and how
0:47.5	different the story of the storm looks in the final telling. I'm borrowing that phrase the final telling from an
0:56.7	extraordinary podcast by the Atlantic called floodlines. The podcast was released earlier this year and now here we are in August.
1:10.0	Always toward the end of August I think about Katrina and the aftermath.
1:17.2	We are now the 15 year anniversary of the disaster.
1:22.4	One of the worst disasters in Americans lifetimes. Do people still think about it that way? What about the failures of government and society and the media? What does the final telling?
1:36.4	Tell us? Well Van Newhirk is a senior editor at The Atlantic. He's the host of floodlines and he is here to tell us.
1:44.0	Van, thanks for joining me.
1:45.0	Thanks for having me.
1:46.0	When I say it's been 15 years since the storm hit,
1:50.0	how does that land with you?
1:51.0	Well, we were reporting floodlines mostly throughout the summer of the
1:57.6	14th anniversary and we were always trying to think ahead of what it would be like of what the
2:05.3	commemorations would be. Obviously all of our considerations on that front have
2:11.8	kind of gone out the window in the middle of a pandemic.
2:15.0	But we always thought this show would be an opportunity
	...

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