A Media Matters review of national TV news coverage of the 20th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina from August 22-29 found:

• Collectively, corporate broadcast and cable news shows aired 5 hours and 28 minutes of coverage across 77 segments about the anniversary. 40 segments mentioned the FEMA “Katrina Declaration,” while only 6 segments mentioned climate change.
• Cable news networks — CNN, Fox News, and MSNBC — aired a combined 4 hours and 53 minutes across 65 segments about the anniversary. 
  • CNN aired 3 hours and 46 minutes of coverage about the anniversary across 48 segments, with 24 segments mentioning the “Katrina Declaration” and 3 segments mentioning climate change.
  • MSNBC aired 1 hour and 5 minutes of coverage about the anniversary across 15 segments, with 14 segments mentioning the “Katrina Declaration” and 2 segments mentioning climate change.
  • Fox News aired 3 minutes of coverage about the anniversary across 2 segments, with no segments mentioning the “Katrina Declaration” or climate change.
• Corporate broadcast networks — ABC, CBS, and NBC — aired a combined 34 minutes across 12 segments about the anniversary. 
  • CBS aired 17 minutes of coverage about the anniversary across 7 segments,  with 2 segments mentioning the “Katrina Declaration” and no segments mentioning climate change.
  • NBC aired 10 minutes of coverage about the anniversary across 3 segments, with no segments mentioning the “Katrina Declaration” and 1 segment mentioning climate change.
  • ABC aired 8 minutes of coverage about the anniversary across 2 segments, with no segments mentioning either the “Katrina Declaration” or climate change.

Hurricane Katrina was a defining moment not only because of the storm’s destructive power, but also because of what it revealed. The hurricane made landfall as a Category 3 storm, but the true disaster came after: when the levees broke, floodwaters poured into the neighborhoods where Black New Orleanians had long been pushed into the lowest, most vulnerable ground. More than 1,800 people died, and hundreds of thousands were displaced — many of whom never returned. Katrina was the product of multiple failures: a brittle flood protection system, decades of disinvestment, and a national emergency response that stranded the poor, the elderly, and the medically vulnerable without basic support.

The storm’s intensity was amplified by a warming Gulf, a now well-documented driver of rapid intensification — the same dynamic seen in storms such as Ida, Helene, and Milton. But media coverage at the time was at best inconsistent, and anniversary coverage two decades later mostly followed the same pattern. In a majority of segments, the FEMA “Katrina Declaration” served as the dominant news hook. The letter, authored by former FEMA officials, warned that the Trump administration is “enacting processes and leadership structures that echo the conditions [the Post-Katrina Emergency Management Reform Act of 2006] was designed to prevent” and petitioned Congress to help the agency prevent “not only another national catastrophe like Hurricane Katrina, but the effective dissolution of FEMA itself and the abandonment of the American people such an event would represent.”   

The declaration was a pointed intervention, timed to reinsert institutional memory into a moment of reflection. And in many national TV news segments, the warning resonated. The letter shaped coverage, generated headlines, and gave newscasts a clear reason for revisiting Katrina’s legacy. But even though the comparison was effective, the coverage was still too often focused on FEMA’s capacity or Trump’s record, while failing to ask the harder questions about evacuation and recovery during extreme weather events such as Katrina.

Many of the anniversary-specific segments were warm and respectful. Survivors were humanized, and anchors, correspondents, and guests often spoke with real admiration for New Orleans — for its culture, its resilience, and the people who stayed and rebuilt. But those moments of commemoration didn’t always lead to deeper questions. The emotional tone was right; the structural follow-through was missing.

That gap matters — because Katrina’s most urgent questions were never just about damage, but about who was left behind and why.

That question has answers. Roughly 100,000 to 150,000 people could not evacuate before Katrina made landfall. They were disproportionately Black, elderly, and poor — people without cars or savings, people who had no way out. Among those stranded, more than half said they lacked access to a vehicle. These realities were not a consistent part of anniversary coverage, and that omission reflects a broader pattern. 

National TV news rarely centers the people most affected by extreme weather. A Media Matters analysis of coverage of seven hurricanes and one tropical storm that occurred between 2017 to 2019 found that none of the 669 corporate broadcast evening news segments about these storms explicitly discussed their outsized impact on low-income communities or communities of color. 

During Hurricane Ida’s rapid intensification, only 4% of national TV news segments connected the storm to climate change, and coverage gave little airtime to why evacuation is financially impossible for many. Coverage of Hurricane Helene followed the same pattern: extensive reporting on devastation and rapid intensification, but only 3% of segments connected it to global warming, and interviews often leaned on people who chose to stay rather than those who could not afford to leave, tacitly moralizing survival while omitting evacuation economics. 

Katrina’s devastation was amplified by climate change. So were the impacts of Ida, Helene, and Milton. Yet climate was largely absent from the anniversary coverage, even though the FEMA letter — the very frame many outlets leaned on — itself warned about what happens when climate risk collides with institutional collapse. According to the authors:

If national TV news wants to cover extreme weather responsibly, outlets can’t keep ignoring structural risks.

Across cable and broadcast, many Katrina anniversary segments relied on familiar imagery and themes: stories about resilience in the face of devastating trauma, personal stories of survival, and reflections on New Orleans’ culture. A few segments, however, stood out for going further and discussing structural risk, long-term displacement, racialized recovery gaps, or climate-driven intensification. 

For example, during the August 24 episode of CNN Newsroom, anchor Erica Hill interviewed Brown University professor Elizabeth Fussell about Katrina’s long-term displacement. Fussell explained that tens of thousands of mostly Black residents never returned, in part because the lowest-lying, most flood-prone neighborhoods were also the poorest. She noted that homeowners with insurance rebuilt faster, while renters and the uninsured faced delays or permanent loss. Fussell also warned that rising insurance costs and intensifying storms are making the city more vulnerable today — and called for policies that recognize how inequality shapes disaster recovery.

During the August 24 airing of CNN Special Report: Katrina 20 Years Later, Victor Blackwell spoke with academic and author Michael Eric Dyson about how Katrina revealed — and reinforced — systems of racial and economic abandonment. Dyson argued that poverty and race had already determined who was most vulnerable, long before the levees broke. He pointed to the government’s ongoing neglect of and attacks on FEMA and disaster infrastructure as an extension of that same failure. The conversation covered displacement, delayed recovery, and how structural inequality continues to shape the city’s future.

During the August 29 episode of The Briefing with Jen Psaki, journalist Trymaine Lee discussed his documentary Hope in High Water, which focuses on grassroots recovery in post-Katrina New Orleans. Lee emphasized the limits of the “resilience” narrative and highlighted community efforts to reclaim land and build food security. He described how segregation, insurance abandonment, and underinvestment still shape who remains at risk. Lee also warned that if a storm like Katrina hit again under the current administration, the consequences would likely be worse.

Hurricane Katrina was supposed to be a turning point. It revealed how structural racism, poverty, and disinvestment compound disaster — and how media coverage can either illuminate that reality or obscure it. Katrina coverage reported on sensationalized crime, recycled rumor as fact, and portrayed Black survivors as threats, causing material harm to thousands of people still stranded in the drowning city and obscuring structural realities. 

Twenty years later, national TV news has avoided some of its worst mistakes such as pathologizing and stigmatizing disaster victims as “looters” and “refugees,” for example. But the deeper problem remains, because extreme weather is still covered without context. Equity is treated as a side issue. Structural risk is rarely framed as the reason some people can evacuate and others can’t.

That pattern is clearest during anniversaries. News outlets often return for round-number milestones like Katrina’s 20th anniversary, but they rarely stay long enough or return often enough during the aftermath of a devastating event to ask what’s changed — or what hasn’t. Hurricane Maria offers a stark case. From October 3, 2017, the day the president visited Puerto Rico, to November 3, 2017, prime-time cable coverage of recovery collapsed from 22 segments in a single day to just one a month later. This drop came even as residents faced dire public-health threats — including people forced to drink from a hazardous-waste site for lack of clean water. 

Coverage of Hurricane Ian demonstrated a similar pattern. National TV news aired more than a thousand segments before and during the storm and another 583 in the two weeks after landfall. But 533 of those segments came in the first week alone. By the second week, coverage collapsed to just 50 segments, even as the scale of damage and recovery needs became clear. 

Recovery coverage is where systemic failure becomes visible. That’s where the story actually is — and where national television still too often pulls away.

Race, class, and climate don’t just shape how people recover. They shape who is in danger in the first place. That’s the truth Katrina made undeniable. And it’s the one national television still hasn’t fully learned to tell.

Media Matters searched transcripts in the SnapStream video database for all original episodes of ABC's Good Morning America, World News Tonight, and This Week; CBS' Mornings, Evening News, and Face the Nation; and NBC's Today, Nightly News, and Meet the Press, as well as all original programming on CNN, Fox News Channel, and MSNBC for the term “Katrina” from August 22, 2025, through August 29, 2025, the week leading into the 20th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina's landfall.

We included segments, which we defined as instances when Hurricane Katrina was the stated topic of discussion or when we found significant discussion of the storm. We defined significant discussion as instances when two or more speakers in a multitopic segment discussed the hurricane with one another.

We did not include passing mentions, which we defined as instances when a single speaker in a segment on another topic mentioned the storm without another speaker engaging with the comment, or teasers, which we defined as instances when the host or anchor promoted a segment about the hurricane scheduled to air later in the broadcast.

We then reviewed the identified segments for mentions of the “Katrina Declaration,” climate change, or global warming.

We rounded all times to the nearest minute.