BOB GARFIELD: From WNYC in New York, this is NPR's On the Media. I'm Bob Garfield.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: And I'm Brooke Gladstone. At first it was a run-of-the-mill disaster. Whenever Mother Nature has a fit of indigestion, reporters are dispatched to stand in her mouth.

KIMBERLY CURTH: Guys! We're in store for one nasty storm! Stay inside!

BROOKE GLADSTONE: That was Kimberly Curth of WKRG-TV reporting Monday from Mobile. She could have filed that same report last year or the year before, from North Carolina or Florida. There’s a script for hurricanes. As the winds gather, so do reporters. Then the hurricane hits or it doesn't. The media move on with the eye of the storm, leaving reports of clean-ups and damage estimates in their wake. Monday night, CNN’s Aaron Brown was following that script.

AARON BROWN: Good evening, everyone. When Katrina finally slammed onto land it wasn't quite the monster everyone feared. Not quite. But it was fierce by any measure. A Category Four hurricane that pummeled three states has done an extraordinary amount of damage.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: But the script blew away with the storm. Katrina moved on, but in her wake rising water overwhelmed the levees of New Orleans, filling the city like a bowl of soup. Fox’s Shepard Smith on Tuesday.

SHEPARD SMITH: The city has no power, no water, no stores, no restaurants, no food, no sanitary services and no prospects for any of those things for weeks or months to come.

JACK CAFFERTY: It's, it’s mind-boggling.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: CNN's Jack Cafferty on Wednesday.

JACK CAFFERTY: You find out every day that the story is bigger, much bigger, much sadder, much more tragic than you thought it was the day before. Monday we sat here while the winds blew and the rains came down and we saw pieces of flying debris and reporters standing up, you know, out in, in the high winds, and we thought to ourselves, or at least I did, okay, it's another hurricane. We've seen shots like this a hundred times before.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: But as New Orleans was inundated and overwhelmed, so were the reporters.

JACK CAFFERTY: And by today the death toll is beginning to approach something in the thousands. And I'm almost afraid to come to work tomorrow.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: On ABC's Good Morning America, anchor Charles Gibson asked his colleague Robin Roberts, reporting Tuesday from her home state of Mississippi, about her family.

CHARLES GIBSON: Is Moms okay, sisters okay?

ROBIN ROBERTS: They're all right. [BREAKING UP]

CHARLES GIBSON: And the house?

ROBIN ROBERTS: Not so good, but it's okay. They're fine. And just so many people [CRYING] Excuse me. [PAUSE] So many people affected by this storm who can't get to the loved ones.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: But the reporters' personal stories seemed of a piece with the coverage. For a moment, everyone seemed to be related. True, as the waters continued to rise, media critics wondered why reporters seemed to shun the obvious observations about race and class, the multitude of black faces who lacked the means to get out in time, why there was so little comment on measures not taken to protect the region since a catastrophe of this scale had long been predicted; why there was so little consideration of politics.

By week's end, reporters were just beginning to broach some of those risky questions. But the safer route for the TV news outlets, if not for the reporters, was to sidestep the crucial question of whether it had to happen this way and focus on the evacuees, the chaos in the city and, as in this interview broadcast early this week on CBS, the unbearable sadness of it all.

REPORTER: Who was at your house with you?

HARVEY JACKSON: My wife.

REPORTER: And where is she now?

HARVEY JACKSON: I can't find her body. She gone.

REPORTER: You can’t find your wife?

HARVEY JACKSON: No. She told me – what she told me I try - I, I – I hold her hand tight as I could, and she told me, "You can't hold me." She said, "Take care of the kids and the grandkids" and – and my kids are --

REPORTER: What’s your wife’s name, in case we can put this out there?

HARVEY JACKSON: Tonette Jackson. [SOBS]

REPORTER: Okay. And what’s your name?

HARVEY JACKSON: Harvey Jackson.

REPORTER: Where are you guys going?

HARVEY JACKSON: We ain't got nowhere to go. I don't know where I'm goin'. I'm, I'm lost. That's all I had. That's all I had. [CRYING]

BOB GARFIELD: The first criticisms of the coverage, especially in the treatment of race, were, unsurprisingly, on the Web. Early in the week two newswire photos started showing up all over the Net, one of them captioned, "A Young Man Walks Through Chest-Deep Flood Water After Looting Grocery Store" and the other, "Two Residents Wade Through Chest-Deep Water After Finding Bread and Water from a Local Grocery Store."

The pictures were nearly identical except that the subject in the first photo, the supposed "looter," was black, and the couple in the second the "finders," were white. Meanwhile on Wednesday, Slate media critic Jack Shafer, among others, accused TV of skirting one of the most obvious aspects of the story, that blacks in New Orleans were more directly hurt than were whites. "In fact," wrote Shafer, "nearly every rescued person, temporary resident of the Superdome, looter or loiterer on the high ground, of the freeway seen on TV was black, with no questions about race asked or answered."

Boston Phoenix media critic Mark Jurkowitz has been following the coverage, and he agrees.

MARK JURKOWITZ: Shafer’s own assertion here and his own theory is that they're afraid of making a comment that might be seen as politically incorrect or too candid or too controversial that could actually do damage to their career.

My own theory here is the racial piece of this is still not the most important piece of the story right now. The first priority is to still essentially gather the facts on this evolving and geometrically expanding disaster. And to the extent that broadcasters seem squeamish about dealing with these issues, I would just say that it evinces the obvious, which is that 40 years after the passage of the Civil Rights Act, that race is still the third rail in American culture and society, and we are not comfortable talking about it, even in obvious situations.

BOB GARFIELD: Well, if there's an indictment, then wouldn't it be that we spend so little time really trying to get to the root of these issues in our ordinary course of coverage that when we see a disaster scenario, when the nature of urban black poverty and all of its ramifications, you know, hits us right between the eyes, we somehow are awakened from our comfortable slumber to want to scream into the heavens about it? But, for heaven’s sakes, this isn't the time because there's people under water and there’s much more urgent life or death issues to deal with as reporters right now.

Isn't the right thing to pay attention to the natural catastrophe and its consequences and try to do a better job of dealing with the race issue under normal circumstances?

MARK JURKOWITZ: Well, there's no prohibition about – and here's where I think journalism falls a little short – about folding in what we should know about urban America and poverty and places like New Orleans, folding that into some of the 24/7 coverage. I mean, for all the importance that’s placed on the developing story, let's face it, the cable networks are going 24/7. Somewhere in those 24 hours there’s time to talk about this issue. The great newspapers of America have a lot of space and many of them are giving four or five pages every day to this story. Somewhere there's time for a sidebar or an analysis piece about this.

All it would take, frankly, would be for news organizations to be confident enough, you know, both of their facts and of their politics to be able to sort of give some of the social context to what people are constantly seeing, as they are watching the tens of thousands of people in the Superdome or leaving the Superdome, a discussion of why they tend to be so predominantly black, as they're looking at looting scenes, a discussion of the racial makeup of the city, of the Police Department, you know, some kind of perhaps delineation between people trying to feed their families and people who are actually criminals.

That could all be part and parcel of the ongoing coverage, not the lead story, but part of what we should be talking about because people are seeing images now that I think in their own minds are starting to cement perceptions that are not being dealt with very adequately by the ongoing coverage.

BOB GARFIELD: There have been some observers on the political right who've argued that the press is actually paying too much attention to class. Jonah Goldberg in his National Review blog called "A Corner" – he calls this "the reflexive playing of the class card," and writes, "Whatever happened to the idea that unity in the face of calamity is an important value? We're all in it together, I guess, except for the poor, who are 'extra-special.'"

MARK JURKOWITZ:Yeah. I mean, I think that’s sort of a, you know, a conservative polemic by people who – I mean, everybody here is trying to figure out what do I write about this [CHUCKLES]. And I think ideologues on the left and the right have sort of been scraping the bottom of the barrel a little bit.

I don't think there was anybody who walked into coverage of this story – all these reporters deployed - with a sense that we are going to see a story that's largely going to be about the poor, about the disenfranchised, about African-Americans. They went down to cover a natural disaster.

This is fundamentally a story about race and class for one reason, as far as I can tell, and that is that certain people were able to heed the warnings and get out of the city ahead of time because they had the ways and the means and the wherewithal, and a number of people were unable to get out of the city because they didn't have the ways and the means and the wherewithal. And that’s essentially the story we're looking at.

Suddenly a natural disaster seems to be disproportionately affecting people who, I would say, don't get their share of day-in and day-out news coverage. And I think that’s what’s particularly unusual.

BOB GARFIELD: Have you discerned a divide in the way this story has been covered between TV and print?

MARK JURKOWITZ: You know, not as large a divide as you would get on most stories of this magnitude, I think. I mean, normally you basically get the quote, unquote "breaking stuff" on television, you know, the powerful pictures of what's happening right now. And newspapers, which are no longer in the breaking news business fundamentally, are there to do analysis, interpretation, take you deeper.

You know, on Thursday I read stories that started showing up in places like the Washington Post and the New York Times that started talking about some of the political implications of this disaster and whether there would be a political backlash for President Bush, and whether or not this could call into question, for example, his priorities, you know, too much money being spent on the war in Iraq, what happened to the National Guardsmen, all that sort of stuff.

Now, that’s the kind of sort of split-off story that you would expect sort of the print press to get involved with earlier on. And I think you’re seeing some of that that you’re not necessarily seeing on television.

But right now the enormity of this catastrophe, the fact that it’s still incredibly fluid I think has basically the ink-stained wretches and the guys with the microphones, you know, chasing the same fundamental story, which is just trying to figure out the breadth and the width of this disaster.

BOB GARFIELD: How about highlights and lowlights? Have you seen anything particularly appalling to you or particularly heroic by reporters on TV?

MARK JURKOWITZ: I, you know, I, I think there's been tremendous heroism on the part of journalists down there who have literally put themselves in harm's way.

It’s interesting. The photographer and the photo editor who was responsible for writing the caption that said the white or lighter-skinned people who were coming away with the groceries had "found" those groceries, as opposed to the black men who "looted" it was on a blog today essentially reacting to all this sort of criticism that he was getting.

What he said to his critics was, "Please talk to me later." He said, "I haven't had solid food for three days. I can't find my family. Everything I have down here is destroyed. I've never been in such hellish personal conditions in my entire life. And I wrote that caption, and I'll be happy to talk about it in the future, but right now I'm just trying to survive and hope that my city is trying to survive."

I think everybody that’s been involved in covering this story has put themselves at risk, even if it means just wading around in that filthy water. I mean, that’s a different life than the people who are sitting back in newsrooms in Washington, New York and Boston and analyzing what’s going on, which includes myself.

BOB GARFIELD: Okay, Mark. Thanks very much.

MARK JURKOWITZ: Hey, Bob, my pleasure.

BOB GARFIELD: Mark Jurkowitz writes about media for the Boston Phoenix.