Networks Ignore Gulf Coast in Presidential Debates

CNN, MSNBC, FOX News and the other networks that have hosted this primary season's 30 presidential debates have yet to ask each candidate how they plan to help rebuild communities in New Orleans and along the Gulf Coast. Though media attention for their struggles has faded more than two years after the 2005 hurricanes and levee failures, many of these communities have not been able to rebuild their schools, police stations, roads and other critical infrastructure as hundreds of thousands of residents remain displaced. The result is an American human rights crisis certainly worthy of being addressed as Americans choose their next president.

Through 14 Republican debates, no moderator has asked any Republican presidential candidates a single question about rebuilding New Orleans and the Gulf Coast. Moderators of the 16 Democratic events have not done much better, directing only a fraction of their debates, less than 1 percent, to Gulf Coast recovery.

In an interview with the Sun News before the Jan. 21 South Carolina debate, Rep. James Clyburn, the state's most senior member of the Congressional Black Caucus, which sponsored the debate, even named rebuilding infrastructure, specifically in the Gulf Coast, as a top issue he hoped would be addressed in the debate. Still the topic was never touched on.

Top candidates from both parties have characterized the government's response to Hurricane Katrina as a failure during their respective debates. Still only once this primary season, at PBS's Democratic Debate at Howard University, did the debate questioners ask each candidate a question related to Gulf Coast recovery. NPR's Michelle Norris asked whether each candidate would support a federal law guaranteeing a human right to return home after Hurricane Katrina, based on international law. Though candidates hinted at their rebuilding plans, they were not pressed to explain the steps they would take to create the economic and social conditions necessary for residents to realize their rights. Gulf Coast residents fear that important questions about the future of their communities and the hundreds of thousands of their friends and families who are still displaced will continue to go unasked and unanswered this primary season.

Things are not looking much better for the general election debates.

Despite letters of support from a bipartisan list of seven presidential candidates and supportive editorials from USA Today, the New York Times, Time magazine, and the Washington Post, New Orleans' application to host one of four scheduled general election presidential debates was recently denied. With New Orleans successfully hosting such large-scale events in 2008 as the Sugar Bowl and the NCAA Championship Game and set to host the NBA All-Star Game, city leaders found the snub shocking. Anne Milling, founder of Women of the Storm, the group that led the application effort with a consortium of local universities including Dillard, Loyola, Tulane and Xavier, called it, "a case of politics trumping the clear moral choice."

"A defining moment in American history"

Debates are a time to make candidates take a stand on the most important issues facing American voters. National polling data indicates that Gulf Coast rebuilding is still important to Americans nationwide, not just those living in the region.

John Zogby, one of the top minds in the polling industry, wrote recently in Campaigns and Elections magazine that polling data on domestic issues facing candidates in the 2008 elections indicates, "Katrina, over the long haul, will prove to be more of a defining moment in American history than the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001." He went on to note that after witnessing the failed federal response to Gulf Coast recovery, American voters "hunger nationwide for a new model for the federal government."