Lights, camera…Vicksburg flooded with media hotshots
Published 12:18 pm Wednesday, May 18, 2011
“The Mississippi allowed Vicksburg to become a center for commerce and agriculture for the country in the 1800s, and now the river is drowning parts of it,” Fox News anchor Shepard Smith said live on nightly news Tuesday as he stood on Washington Street with the swollen Yazoo Diversion Canal in the background.
Vicksburg and points north and south along the Mississippi River have caught the nation’s eye, and the attention has come with the work of Smith and other well-known national journalists and television faces.
The Fox crew was in Vicksburg Tuesday shooting live segments of the New York City-based “Fox Report,” for which Smith, a native of Holly Springs and graduate of the University of Mississippi, is the host.
They broadcast Tuesday afternoon from Falk Steel Road, sharing stories of displaced residents.
Later that evening, they were east of the historic Levee Street Depot that looks as if it has risen from the floodwaters.
“For people from all over the country, the river is a big, meandering, confusing thing and it’s our sense from talking to viewers and hearing from them that sometimes they don’t know the difference between Tunica and Greenville and Natchez and Vicksburg,” Smith said in a short interview following the live segment of his program. “Part of our goal is to help people understand who these individuals are. This isn’t just a big soup of people from Memphis down to Louisiana. They are individuals and individual towns with rich histories and we want to tell part of that history.”
Smith and his crew are reporting from Natchez today. Many news crews — local, regional and national — have set up in various places around town and have taken boat rides in major flooded areas and flown above. The country has seen photos and scenes of homes on Falk Steel Road and downtown Vicksburg inundated with river water. Aerial views of the mainline levee covered in a plastic tarp near Eagle Lake also have been seen around the nation.
NBC meteorologist Al Roker stood in floodwater last week when a segment of his “Today” show was broadcast from Vicksburg, as did producers from NBC’s “Nightly News.”
Also Tuesday, Washington D.C.-based Bloomberg News correspondent Lizzie O’Leary and her TV crew set up just off U.S. 61 South near Yokena.
“We wanted to go places where people were actually affected,” said O’Leary, a veteran of Deep South disaster reporting.
Last year, she reported on the Gulf oil spill and, five years ago, she covered Hurricane Katrina.
“Having friends from Greenville and knowing enough about the ’27 flood, and just seeing is astonishing,” she said.
Warren County Sheriff Martin Pace has been a regular on TV news shows, including CNN and all Jackson-based TV news programs, as he and deputies have ferried news reporters and federal officials.
“It’s a media event,” he said. “It’s a record-setting event.”
Televangelist Jim Bakker and U.S. Department of Homeland Security Under Secretary Leslie Davis were just a couple of passengers on Pace’s boat.
Gov. Haley Barbour, who vowed to work on this flooding issue until he leaves office in January, toured last week the Steele Bayou Control Structure to Grand Gulf by helicopter and held a press conference at the Vicksburg Municipal Airport. He will return to Vicksburg this week, he said, and during cleanup after the water recedes.
Mayor Paul Winfield also has been seen on national television giving interviews about the city’s process in handling the flood crisis.
“Most of what I’ve been talking about is the process,” he said. “Now, we’re in the stages of implementation. I want to tell people to get their information from official sources.”