KATRINA AND ANARCHY: A CONTENT ANALYSIS OF A NEW DISASTER MYTH

Abstract

Hurricane Katrina ranks among the worst natural catastrophes in United States history. In addition to the physical damage to the city and the levees, Katrina will also be remembered for the posthurricane suffering, the lack of coordinated government response, and memorable reporting in the media. The media, here characterized as newspaper coverage, utilized anarchy to frame the reported postdisaster lack of government presence, the perceived threat of, and actual violence and looting in the immediate wake of the catastrophe. Ethnographic content analysis of 59 newspaper articles yielded a typology of the three different connotations of anarchy. Finally, a comparison is offered between the media's use of anarchy in the post-Katrina coverage and the sociopolitical theory of anarchy. The article concludes that although the media mischaracterized the postdisaster reality by using an anarchy frame, their coverage is consistent with the disaster mythology literature, while conflating typical disaster myths within the anarchy frame.

My sincere thanks to Michael Carolan and Lori Peek for reading drafts of this paper. Additional thanks are extended to the editors and the anonymous reviewers. Finally, this article is dedicated to all victims of Hurricane Katrina, many of whom are still suffering.

Notes

Undefined: 16, 22, 24, 43, 45—no context offered. Those in bold indicate the subsample initally used to construct this typology.

¹A similar search using “war zone” instead of “anarchy” yielded only 45 articles within the same time limitations as my sample.