Katrina Made TV See the Underclass

NEW YORK - For three weeks, television news has done something it almost never does: it has shown America its poor.

The images from New Orleans — tens of thousands of mostly black, mostly poor residents stranded on rooftops and outside the Superdome, waiting for help that took days to come — filled screens without relief and pushed poverty to the center of a national conversation it rarely enters.

"Television discovered that there are people in America who don't have cars, who can't check into a hotel when trouble comes," said a University of Southern California media scholar. "The question is whether it stays discovered."

The coverage broke conventions. Correspondents wept on camera, anchors demanded answers of officials in real time, and a rapper's telethon outburst — "George Bush doesn't care about black people" — became the disaster's most replayed clip.

News executives say the experience has already changed assignment desks. Networks that had largely folded their poverty beats into crime coverage now have reporters on housing, health care and the displaced full-time — for now.

Skeptics note the economics: the underclass made compelling television this month because the pictures were dramatic and the stakes were life and death. "Poverty as a beat competes with stories that are faster and cheaper to cover," a former network producer said. "The test is whether anyone covers it next spring."

The coverage also drew complaints — from critics who said some reporting trafficked in rumor, and from others who said the toughest question, whether race shaped the response, was raised on camera but rarely answered.

What is certain is the audience: the Katrina aftermath produced the largest sustained news viewership since the Iraq war's start, a reminder that television, for all its fragmentation, can still hold a common lens.