Drawing The Line Newsman Bob Woodruff calls it as he sees it Dave Walker Times-Picayune
Though there's been some revisionist reporting lately on the degree to which New Orleans was plundered by its own residents during the lawless days after Hurricane Katrina, vivid scenes of such will always stay with Bob Woodruff, who covered the aftermath for ABC News. "It was a 'Mad Max' world," he said. "I've never before seen such open looting. We can all understand people taking water and food, the basic necessities. "But bags of shoes?" Like many journalists in the outlaw zone, Woodruff witnessed open ransacking. He did so by walking into besieged stores with a camera running and talking to the perpetrators. "There seemed to be no shame," he said. "They had no fear, either, of us documenting them doing it. "One looter came out of a store and I asked, 'Do you realize that's wrong? To steal things like bags of shoes?' He said he didn't speak English." Woodruff has had a piece of pretty much every big news story for ABC in recent years, and is often mentioned as one of the squadron of correspondents in line to replace the late Peter Jennings as anchor of the flagship evening newscast "World News Tonight." He got into the globetrotting-correspondent game via an unusual route. Holding a law degree from the University of Michigan Law School, Woodruff was teaching law in Beijing when the Tiananmen Square uprising caught the world's attention. Hired by CBS News as an interpreter, he caught the broadcast-news bug. The presence of news crews at Tiananmen Square documented a moment in history that might've otherwise been cloaked in cover-up by the Chinese government. Many of the electronic journalists who worked in New Orleans last month have mentioned that the reaction they got from suffering stay-behinders was gratitude for providing a similar service, by documenting their plight and the aftereffects of inept relief efforts. "One of the most amazing things was when we went into the convention center on Thursday," Woodruff said. "People were so desperate for someone from the outside, someone even remotely of authority, to come in there and listen to them. "When we walked in we were given a standing ovation, my crew and me." . Woodruff said that's only happened once before in his career, when he was covering ethnic cleansing in Yugoslavia. "It was a very frustrating moment," he said. "All we could really do was get word out, put their pictures on TV and maybe somebody would respond." Commentary in recent weeks has recognized a flowering of passionate reportage in much of the post-Katrina coverage. Woodruff said the nature of the story made for simple line-drawing. "I think people in journalism felt good about the mission," he said. "It's not waking up to take an advocacy position. "Most stories are complex, with many sides. This is one of those stories that was essentially one-sided people were in dire need of help. "To me it was almost like covering a forest fire. There is evil a fire that needs to be put out. The good guys have hoses. "This is not the Iraq invasion. There's a lot of complexity to a story like that." Woodruff, who was embedded with a Marine recon division during the invasion of Iraq, has worked in ABC's London bureau covering various crises in Europe and Asia, and as ABC's reporter covering the U.S. Justice Department. Like many of the national correspondents who came to New Orleans, he'd also seen the devastation wrought by the Asian tsunami. Though the scope of the big wave's hit was much wider, what Woodruff saw in New Orleans reminded him in many ways of what he saw in Indonesia. "The similarities were striking," he said. "I remember being struck in Indonesia during the tsunami coverage by seeing a body on the street corner underneath a traffic lamp. It was two and a half weeks after the tsunami came through, and I was shocked by the body still being there. "I never thought in a million years that I'd see that in the U.S. A week and a half after the hurricane, there were still bodies lying around." On Jackson Avenue, Woodruff said, he saw one neighbor bury another after the body had been left untouched for several days. "And you realized that people of this town just wanted some dignity at a time when they were denied the very basics of human dignity." Reply with a "Thank you" if you liked this post. _______________________________________________ MEDIANEWS mailing list medianews@twiar.org To unsubscribe send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
