Filling the Bowl The Social Construction of Flood Risk in Pre-Katrina New Orleans

Austin Brown

Date of Award

2007

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Bachelors

Department

Social Sciences

First Advisor

Brain, David

Keywords

Environmental Sociology, New Orleans, Sociology

Area of Concentration

Sociology

Abstract

The news media play a vital role in the social construction of reality. Some literature, however, suggests that the media's conservative tendency poses challenges for the construction of environmental problems. The two main challenges are that media tend to legitimize authority and that they are oriented towards covering events. To explore this, I use the example of New Orleans before Hurricane Katrina devastated the city. Some people, including reporters at the Times-Picayune, knew that the city was faced with the environmental problems of subsidence and erosion, both of which were making the city more vulnerable to flooding from hurricanes. A content analysis of articles in the Times-Picayune covering hurricane related events before Katrina shows that the media did indeed defer to authority, did indeed cover events, and did not construct an environmental problem, though awareness of these problems was evident in the paper on other occasions. It seems that the problems faced by the city were too deeply rooted in its history and its very existence to be fixed, let alone addressed at a time when that history and existence are being threatened by hurricanes.

Rights

This bibliographic record is available under the Creative Commons CC0 public domain dedication. The New College of Florida, as creator of this bibliographic record, has waived all rights to it worldwide under copyright law, including all related and neighboring rights, to the extent allowed by law.

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