Downtown Davenport Flooded – Is there National Media Interest?

As noted previously on this blog, national news stations apparently do not see enough drama in the Midwest flooding that started in March. Eventually a few stories showed up on these sites, but they quickly disappeared. Yet the flooding continued. And it has continued to this day. Now downtown Davenport Iowa is inundated as the makeshift levy that was created to protect it from the rising Mississippi floodwaters has failed.

Yet is the flooding of this major Iowa community in the national news? It’s certainly not on their websites. A Google search found a few hour old story (when this post was written) on CNN. But upon a visual search of the main page, no link to the story could be found.

What’s not getting press are stories like those of the residents of Hamburg or Pacific Junction in southwest Iowa. The homeowners of Pacific Junction have only recently been allowed back in to start the heartbreaking recovery process. The roughly 200 structures in that small community were flooded for several weeks. Many of them had muddy Missouri River water up to their peaks, ruining everything inside.

But unless the story is about politics, someone famous, or a story that can conjure a negative reaction with the right headline, national media has little to no interest.

Read Local

Hence, it is important to check the local media around these flooded areas to get the real scoop. Check out the Omaha World Herald, Our Quad Cities.com, the Des Moines Register, or even TV station websites like KSHB Kansas City (Yes, Missouri is also suffering from the flooding). Each paper has interesting stories online about the flood. Stories about survival and recovery. What is even better is that most of the stories from these local outlets are relatively unbiased and not aimed to be critical to a person or group.

Read with a Purpose

The intention of this post is not just to scorn national media outlets. This post was also not intended to draw sympathy towards those impacted by the floods. The intention of this blog is overall is to be a source of information to help rural communities. That should be the intention for reading the articles from the local newspapers.

If you are paying attention, there’s bits and pieces that can be drawn from many of the articles that can help your community in times of crisis. Read with a purpose. There may be an unanticipated impact to another community that your community can learn from. There may be hurdles in the recovery process that other communities have dealt with, sometimes in unique ways.