A year on, FAIR's Neil deMause takes CNN's Anderson Cooper to task for his Hurricane Katrina follow-up:
...Cooper was never part of the groundswell urging a longer look at poverty in general, and in fact downplayed the role played by class and race when it was raised. When Rev. Jesse Jackson accused the U.S. of having “an amazing tolerance for black pain” (9/2/05), Cooper retorted: “Reverend Jackson, you call that indifference. Others might just call that incompetence, and we’ve seen incompetence in plenty of places.” And when the question of whether to rebuild the Lower Ninth Ward was raised, Cooper implied (11/28/05) that the determining factor should be not its elevation but its tax base, declaring that “the economic contribution of a neighborhood has to be weighed against the cost of protecting it.”
While Cooper deserves credit for keeping FEMA’s feet to the fire on the trailer issue, on other topics he exhibited the same disdain for follow-up stories that was endemic to post-Katrina coverage. On the six-month anniversary of the hurricane (2/27/06), for example, Cooper spoke to the lawyer for a group of displaced residents who had been living on a cruise ship docked in St. Bernard Parish and were facing imminent eviction once FEMA cut off their housing funds. (Perhaps searching for an appropriate example of pathos, Cooper gasped: “And you said that they didn’t even know this was Mardi Gras weekend?”)
In signing off, Cooper promised, “We’ll be following that story.” Yet on March 3, when a federal judge okayed the eviction of cruise ship residents, the only mention on 360° came when CNN anchor Erica Hill gave a two-sentence summary of the ruling during a newsbreak; Cooper never mentioned the story again.
