ABC, Wash. Post failed to report Bush's omission of Katrina, New Orleans in State of the Union address

Written by Sarah Pavlus

Published

Neither ABC's World News with Charles Gibson nor The Washington Post, in their January 24 coverage of President Bush's State of the Union address, noted Bush's failure to make a single reference to Hurricane Katrina or ongoing recovery efforts in New Orleans and the Gulf Coast, despite his August 2006 pledge to “stay until the job is done” in the Gulf Coast. Bush only briefly mentioned Hurricane Katrina in his 2006 State of the Union address, which he gave five months after the disaster took place. According to the most recent polling, taken at the one-year anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, a majority of Americans do not think Bush has followed through on this promise to rebuild New Orleans and the Gulf Coast.

On January 24, ABC was the only broadcast network whose evening news report failed to note that Bush did not mention Hurricane Katrina in his speech. As the weblog Think Progress noted, the January 24 edition of the CBS Evening News with Katie Couric included a report on Katrina victims' reactions to Bush's omission. The January 24 edition of NBC's Nightly News with Brian Williams noted there was “not a word” about Katrina in the speech and that “the omission was headline news.”

Likewise, The Washington Post's failure to report Bush's omission stands in contrast to the coverage of other major newspapers, including The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and USA Today.

  • The January 24 edition of The New York Times reported that there was “no mention of rebuilding New Orleans” in Bush's speech and editorialized: “Mr. Bush promised bipartisanship after his re-election in 2004, and again after Hurricane Katrina. Always, he failed to deliver. He did not even mention New Orleans last night.”
  • The January 24 edition of the Los Angeles Times reported that while Sen. Jim Webb (D-VA) made reference to New Orleans in the Democratic response to the State of the Union address, “Bush made no mention of New Orleans or Hurricane Katrina, which devastated the city in 2005.”
  • The January 24 edition of USA Today reported, “Not all big problems were addressed by Bush on Tuesday. Sen. Mary Landrieu, D-La., criticized the president for uttering 'not one word about the recovery from Hurricanes Katrina and Rita.'”

In the January 24 edition of washingtonpost.com's “Post Politics Hour” online discussion, White House reporter Peter Baker did note it was “striking” that Bush had failed to mention Hurricane Katrina or New Orleans. But a January 24 front-page report with his byline and that of national editor Michael Abramowitz did not mention Bush's omission. Baker said, “Aides said he [Bush] wanted a more streamlined speech that didn't cover each and every important topic but focused on a handful. In this case, he picked health care, energy, immigration, education, the deficit, Iraq and terrorism. The idea of focusing the speech so it sounds less like a laundry list has a certain appeal, but when you do that, you invariably leave out some awfully important issues, in this case the continuing recovery of New Orleans and the Gulf Coast.” Baker later added that he “wouldn't be surprised” if Bush's failure to mention Katrina in his speech would be questioned by reporters in an upcoming White House press briefing.

A January 24 Post editorial on Bush's State of the Union address criticized his failure to address in detail several domestic issues, including climate change, Social Security, and trade policy, but did not note his failure to mention Hurricane Katrina. From the Post editorial:

There are more opportunities for bipartisan cooperation domestically, but here what was most significant -- and disappointing -- was what Mr. Bush left off his agenda. Once again, he did not offer a sustained and broad-scale effort to address climate change, instead choosing to treat progress on the issue as just a fortuitous byproduct of his effort to cut gasoline consumption. Similarly, Mr. Bush -- having tried and failed to reform Social Security, having promised a commission on entitlements in last year's State of the Union that he never managed to convene -- referred only briefly, and without specifics, to the need to tackle the coming explosion in entitlement spending. And at a time when the country could benefit from a serious discussion of the importance of free trade and the parallel need to mitigate the disruptions of globalization, Mr. Bush referred just glancingly to trade.

Three different Associated Press reports on Bush's failure to mention Hurricane Katrina have been posted on washingtonpost.com (here, here, and here), but none of them appeared in the January 24 print edition of the Post.

The January 25 edition of Post media writer Howard Kurtz's online column included a reference to Bush's omission in which Kurtz quoted Philadelphia Inquirer national political columnist Dick Polman, who wrote that Bush did not “say a single word about post-Katrina New Orleans.” Kurtz added, “I find the failure to mention NOLA hard to fathom.”