Extreme Weather and Global Media

Julia Leyda, Diane Negra

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317630302
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

In the two decades bracketing the turn of the millennium, large-scale weather disasters have been inevitably constructed as media events. As such, they challenge the meaning of concepts such as identity and citizenship for both locally affected populations and widespread spectator communities. This timely collection pinpoints the features of an often overlooked yet rapidly expanding category of global media and analyzes both its forms and functions. Specifically, contributors argue that the intense promotion and consumption of 'extreme weather' events takes up the slack for the public conversations society is not having about the environment, and the feeling of powerlessness that accompanies the realization that anthropogenic climate change has now reached a point of no return. Incorporating a range of case studies of extreme weather mediation in India, the UK, Germany, Sweden, the US, and Japan, and exploring recent and ongoing disasters such as Superstorm Sandy, the Fukushima nuclear crisis, flooding in Germany, and heat waves in the UK, Extreme Weather and Global Media generates valuable inquiry into the representational and social characteristics of the new culture of extreme weather.

1 TELEVISING SUPERSTORM SANDY

New Configurations of Poverty and Neoliberalism in Extreme Weather Coverage

Jon Kraszewski

DOI: 10.4324/9781315756486-2

Extreme weather narratives often bring into focus the ways in which, as scholars such as Henry Giroux and Lisa Duggan have argued, neoliberal cultures that allow the rich to prosper in a deregulated economy are buttressed by images of the abject poor.¹ In his study of Hurricane Katrina, Giroux points out that the imaging of African Americans at the New Orleans Convention Center blamed those assembled there for lacking the self-reliance required for success in a neo-liberal age and quarantined them in bio-political zones marked for death. The poor become a disposable racialized class whose incarnation of deficient citizenship serves as a cautionary tale for the economically fortunate: be resourceful and maximize your efficiency in a privatized society or this could be your fate. Media images of the suffering of the poor help teach people neoliberal ideals of preparedness, resiliency, and self-reliance.²

Of course, the representation of the poor in neoliberal portrayals of extreme weather is not monolithic. Diane Negra finds that media after Katrina presented “certain instances [where] material challenged assumptions about the malfeasance of those in poverty and of an always already criminal blackness.”³ In this vein, Jane Elliot concludes that documentaries and television shows about Katrina present poor African Americans as neoliberal citizens surviving Katrina through self-reliance, and Brenda Weber propounds that home makeover shows about post-Katrina New Orleans defined poor African Americans as neoliberal subjects who learned self-management techniques from white experts.⁴ Thus, although the post-welfare-state basis of neoliberalism makes the poor particularly vulnerable, this population exists within a complex discursive field articulating extreme weather in relation to the social order.

This point becomes crucial when analyzing the cultural geographies of New York City television coverage immediately following Superstorm Sandy’s landfall in New Jersey and New York on October 30, 2012. Although mainstream television news carried updates on all five boroughs of New York City, Manhattan and Queens were the most closely tracked sites in storm coverage. More specifically, lower Manhattan and the Rockaways area of Queens, two distinctly differently classed areas of the city, dominated media reports. Lower Manhattan serves as a hub for the city’s plutocratic base. In contrast, the Rockaways, which sits on a small peninsula facing the Atlantic Ocean, is home to a white working-class population of the kind that is increasingly susceptible to marginalization in a neoliberal age.

The coverage of Sandy’s devastation to these two areas marks a new direction in the way neoliberalism shapes our understanding of extreme weather. Values of self-sufficiency, self-reliance, and preparedness are noticeably absent from the news coverage, but the televisual moment partook in a larger cultural process emerging from neoliberal urbanism—that of expulsion. Echoing Giroux’s argument that neoliberalism treats the poor as a disposable class, Saskia Sassen argues that the past two decades have witnessed a significant increase in the number of poor, working-class, and middle-class populations expelled from the social order. The current US economy no longer resembles the one in the decades following World War II where growth was distributed relatively equitably across all classes. Now deregulatory policies allow for capital to be concentrated among the elite in proportions unseen since the 1920s. Predatory formations render mortgages unpayable, land toxic, neighborhoods gentrified, and/or survival untenable for a growing majority of people. Select cities become centers of extreme wealth by serving as conduits in a global economy at the same time as extreme zones of economic poverty grow elsewhere by housing outsourced manufacturing, clerical, and service industry jobs with pay scales that fail to rise to the level of a living wage.⁵ Accompanying this process is a cultural belief and an economic reality that cities should operate as safe zones for their wealthy residents, with poorer classes being kept at bay. Scholarship on expulsions illuminates how a majority of nonwealthy people are now part of the disposable class in global cities, a process that has marked the age of neoliberalism and is only escalating in the twenty-first century.

Historian Jonathan Soffer explains that Manhattan began transitioning to a luxury economy in the late 1970s when the borough embraced a neoliberal urbanism as it moved away from its manufacturing roots based in a welfare-state mentality. Starting with Mayor Edward Koch’s administration and then continuing with Mayor David Dinkins, Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, and Mayor Michael Bloomberg, New York City officials deregulated the economy to allow for the unrestrained private accumulation of capital at the same time as they diminished their administrations’ roles in redistributing wealth to the financially less fortunate.⁶ Gross inequities of income in the borough emerged, with, for example, the securities trade accounting for only 4% of the jobs but 14% of the total income.⁷ Robert Fritch argues that, during this period, developers turned the downtown business district into a “kind of high-rise command center” that catered to a wealthy lifestyle.⁸ Moreover, lower Manhattan neighborhoods such as SoHo and the East Village, once known for their art scenes, became increasingly gentrified.⁹ The attempt to craft Manhattan into a lifestyle headquarters for the city’s elite came into sharp focus in a recent controversy over “poor doors” being built in the borough’s new condo buildings. As public housing becomes obsolete, cities now offer substantial tax breaks, subsidies, and incentives for developers to include affordable housing units in luxury high rises. In Manhattan, developers are seizing this money and creating separate entrances so that the rich and the poor who live in the same building will not interact with each other, a form of modern-day segregation that relegates the less fortunate to the margins to preserve the elitist nature of the area.¹⁰

In representing at-risk populations in neoliberal urban cultures, the expulsive imagination does not always use victims to illustrate cautionary tales or define them as objects of scorn; sometimes cultural practices celebrate disposable populations as being crucial to the city’s identity in an effort to obfuscate the brutal forces removing them. Cultural studies scholarship on gentrification explains that, as disenfranchised groups are driven from urban areas that are transforming into leisure and residential zones for the wealthy, urban planners, real estate developers, business owners, and realtors often lionize the very populations they are displacing by creating monuments to them. Rather than being understood as complex social groups, displaced populations are characterized through one-dimensional portraits that both stereotype their identities and make them seem foundational to the city itself. Sports historian Daniel Rosensweig’s study of race and the creation of Cleveland baseball stadium Jacobs Field notes, for instance, that the city expelled poor African American residents to build the stadium and then erected memorials to African American athletes to be enjoyed by the white middle- and upper-class patrons who attend Indians games.¹¹ Likewise, sociologist Christopher Mele’s work on New York City’s Lower East Side shows how real estate developers, in the process of expelling the area’s ethnic minorities, avant-garde artists, and marginalized subcultures, packaged the identities of those same groups to sell a safe and commercially viable version of alternative life styling to young affluent whites.¹²

The televised coverage of Superstorm Sandy constitutes a moment when the expulsive imagination shapes our understanding of extreme weather in order to make claims about who has the right to live in the neoliberal city. News stories distanced residents of the Rockaways from contemporary urban problems through appeals to nostalgia, sentiment, and emotion, making it seem that abstract nature, rather than social and economic forces, threatened salt-of-the-earth working-class neighborhoods. As I will show, however, spreading gentrification and a soaring housing market were expelling people from the Rockaways before Sandy hit; the storm intensified the force behind the social evictions. Extreme weather coverage of New York’s cultures of expulsion obscures the harshness of the social system through depictions of warmth, love, and simplicity, a key ideological move that asks us to accept the removal of destitute populations by overlooking their vulnerability and trauma. The residents of the Rockaways were represented lovingly as members of a tribal Irish American community whose deep roots anchor it against any threat from nature. At the same time, televisual reporting of Sandy’s effects on lower Manhattan appealed to reason, science, and urban planning to display the privileged residents of the area as either innocent victims in need of protection from climate change disasters or as capable plutocrats who should lead the government and society to create urban structures that will withstand the problems of a warmer future. Both types of extreme weather stories are part of a larger cultural process that defines cities as safe zones for the elite and celebrates the destitute as they are evicted from urban areas—two crucial components in the neoliberal political economy of expulsions.

This chapter explores representations of the Rockaways and Lower Manhattan in mainstream media texts. I choose to analyze only those news accounts of communities dealing with the aftermath of the storm; this phase of coverage focused intensely on how we understand an extreme weather event as a cultural phenomenon that impacts people’s long-term plans to inhabit a city—a critical issue to consider in the era of expulsions. Many of the segments I scrutinize in what follows originally aired on a specific program, such as 60 Minutes, 20/20, or ABC World News Tonight, but were replayed numerous times on other programs on their networks to satisfy the demand for round-the-clock coverage immediately following the hurricane. I watched many of the stories I analyze in this chapter while they initially aired in the wake of Superstorm Sandy, but YouTube served as the main archive for this chapter, as ABC, CBS, and NBC posted many of their segments about the storm on that site.

FIGURE 1.1 60 Minutes broadcast this image of a damaged welcome sign after Super-storm Sandy: a somber and sentimental reminder of community amidst the destruction in Belle Harbor, Queens

Celebrating the Evicted: Understanding Extreme Weather as a Form of Expulsion

The Irishness of the Rockaways, a coastal community sometimes dubbed “The Irish Riviera,” offered a useful reservoir of ethnic images for television news coverage to celebrate residents through the imagination of gentrification. Diane Negra argues that American culture largely represents Irishness as an ethnicity based in a state of innocence, nostalgia, and white working-class legitimacy. Prior to 9/11, Irishness predominantly signified a retreat to innocence in American culture, with an array of cultural forms ranging from Thomas Kinkade paintings to Bennigan’s commercials to television movies such as Yesterday’s Children displaying Irishness as a traditional, stable identity category. After 9/11, Irishness served as a psychic defense against national trauma, representing “an anachronistic experience of peace, serenity, and innocence,” albeit often cloaked in hyper-masculinity and dysfunction.¹³ The news stories about Sandy deployed similar ethnic tropes to portray the Irish American residents of the Rockaways as completely self-sufficient. While self-sufficiency and entrepreneurship are the keynotes of neoliberal response to extreme weather, the way these traits became associated with nostalgia for a “simpler” time in America allowed tropes of self-reliance to function not as an anxiety-provoking response to contemporary problems but as a soothing recollection of yesteryear’s joys.

To illustrate these dynamics, I analyze an ABC news piece about Breezy Point and a CBS 60 Minutes story about Belle Harbor, two beach communities in the Rockaways. The ABC story became an iconic one during Sandy coverage. 20/20 producers Jim DuBreuil and Ketruah Gray along with reporter Elizabeth Vargas were in Breezy Point to do a story about residents who ignored Mayor Bloom-berg’s mandatory evacuation orders for the neighborhood when a large fire broke out and destroyed over 100 homes. The team’s on-the-ground reporting captured the national imagination and visualized for many the shock of Sandy’s devastation. The complete loss of a significant part of a New York City neighborhood was almost as unbelievable as when the levees broke in New Orleans. The fact that ABC was the only network with reporters and a camera crew there when the fire erupted gave the story additional resonance. Likewise, the CBS 60 Minutes story on Belle Harbor carried weight because the neighborhood had been the site of two other catastrophes in the twenty-first century. Many of its residents were firefighters who lost their lives when the Twin Towers at the World Trade Center collapsed on 9/11, and a few months later American Airlines Flight 587 took off from nearby JFK Airport and crashed into the streets of Belle Harbor, killing everyone on board and five residents on the street. CBS made Belle Harbor a story of national interest by packaging it as a place of pastoral innocence devastated by unexpected twenty-first-century tragedies.

Both news stories open with sketches of life in these neighborhoods before Sandy hit, a narrative strategy that uses Irishness to sentimentalize locales. In the ABC story, Elizabeth Vargas talks about the evacuation order with Michael O’Hanlon, a homeowner in his late 50s, who says, “We built this house, and we aren’t going anywhere.” O’Hanlon presents himself as a figure from a different time when people constructed their own homes. It is implied that this ensures that the quality of construction is superior to current building standards and sturdy enough to stand up to a threat from nature. Moreover, this statement removes O’Hanlon from the brutal economic forces expelling people in urban areas and places him in a nostalgic state of social innocence when anyone in the working class could live in an American city. He believes his hard work and manual skills grant him an inalienable right to reside in New York. The hyper-masculine nature of O’Hanlon’s presentation references a white working-class legitimacy through defiance, making him an almost mythic Irish figure and a quintessential American citizen. O’Hanlon speaks to a belief that homeownership offers access to the American Dream. As Negra argues, “[a]ggressive American machismo and sentimentalized Irishness are utterly uncontradictory.”¹⁴ Thus, not only does the news story celebrate a rowdy Irish American man who readies himself to battle with nature, but it also defines the same person in an American context of nineteenth-century Thoreauvian ideals of self-reliance and civil disobedience. Be...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Extreme Weather and Global Media
• 1 Televising Superstorm Sandy: New Configurations of Poverty and Neoliberalism in Extreme Weather Coverage
• 2 The Eye of the Storm: CCTV, Surveillance, and Media Representations of Extreme Weather
• 3 Picturing High Water: The 2013 Floods in Southeastern Germany and Colorado
• 4 “Blowtorch Britain”: Labor, Heat, and Neo-Victorian Values in Contemporary UK Media
• 5 Post-Political Crisis Management: Representations of Extreme Weather in Swedish Media
• 6 Disaster Data, Data Activism: Grassroots Responses to Representing Superstorm Sandy
• 7 Mangoes and Monsoons: South Asian Media Coverage of Environmental Spectacles
• 8 Rain with a Chance of Radiation: Forecasting Local and Global Risk after Fukushima
• Contributors
• Index