As Jim Gabour seemed certain of all along, Hurricane Gustav spared New Orleans a return to the horrors and devastation of Katrina three years ago. Though eight people across the south of the United States died as a result of the storm's arrival, its impact has not been nearly as deadly as feared. The GOP now returns to the misfortune of staging a full convention that will pale in comparison to its Democratic counterpart. And national and international (particularly British) media will once again train their lenses on American political pageantry.
I'm unsettled by the media's total lack of interest in the reality of the storm. The story of Gustav was simply New Orleans. Of course, the city suffered dearly during Katrina. Journalists should investigate how well its refurbished defenses coped. But major media outlets paid disproportionate attention to New Orleans while ignoring the storm's real toll. The deaths of nearly one hundred people throughout the Caribbean passed without mention, or at best as a footnote. See, for instance, this distasteful article in The Telegraph which notes right at the end, as a one-line after-thought not worth dwelling upon, that "Gustav has already killed at least 94 people in the Caribbean".
Some reports claim that the death toll in the Caribbean has exceeded one hundred. Gustav killed at least 77 people in Haiti, while battering Jamaica, parts of Cuba, the Caymans and other islands. For more on the devastation of the storm read Global Voices Online's round-up of the Caribbean blogosphere.
The numbers are not that important; Gustav, after all, is certainly not the deadliest hurricane to sweep through the region. Rather, what is troubling is the absence of the Caribbean in the broadcasts and reports that build international consciousness. Over the weekend in the UK, Sky News transmitted live Mayor Ray Nagin's press conference from New Orleans. I wonder if the mayor knew that a British audience absorbed his dry traffic updates and announcements of road closures to Mississippi. We should never reject this immersion in a distant local experience - particularly one as brimming with human loss and endurance as New Orleans - but it is difficult to accept when its price is the elision of others. From the perspective of western TV, print and internet coverage, all roads lead to New Orleans; the Caribbean was but a path for the storm before it made its real landfall on our sense of what matters.