New Orleans: What the Media is Not Reporting & What the Bush Administraion & Congress are Ignoring

Monday, two New Orleans journalists, Jason Berry, who writes for New Orleans magazine, and Lolis Eric Elie, columnist for the New Orleans Times-Picayune, spoke at the National Press Club in Washington about the real nature of the situation in New Orleans and surrounding parishes.

The picture they painted of the city is sobering. Only some 100,000 people, out of a total population of 467,000, have returned to New Orleans, just a month and a half before the famous Mardi Gras celebrations. However, the national media and their corporate friends in the urban development business, will paint New Orleans during the next Mardi Gras celebration on February 28 as a city coming back from disaster. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Without regular telephones and dealing with unresponsive insurance companies, New Orleaneans and their neighbors in adjoining parishes are living in a "cell phone hell" and experiencing an insurance mudslide, according to Berry.

According to the two New Orleans journalists, post traumatic stress syndrome is taking its toll on people from all walks of life in the storm-ravaged area of the Gulf Coast. Filmmaker Stevenson Palfi, whose credits include, "Piano Players Rarely Play Together," committed suicide on Dec. 14, after having lost most of his property and possessions in Katrina.

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