Times-Picayune managing editor lead Katrina coverage, fought false narratives

Peter Kovacs woke up at 5 a.m. in the newsroom of The Times-Picayune newspaper the day after Hurricane Katrina struck New Orleans. He’d overheard that flood water was about to enter the building.

Kovacs had slept on an air mattress on the newsroom floor with about 250 coworkers, family members and pets as part of the paper’s hurricane coverage plan. 

The storm had brought down trees, cut power, exploded car windshields and even burst a bulletproof window at their building. Water lapped against the top step in a pattern that indicated more was coming. Staying was futile. 

“Everyone’s together in the cafeteria,” Kovacs said. “The publisher, the head of the whole company, says, ‘We’re leaving, and everyone has five minutes to get in these trucks, and they’re leaving whether you’re in them or not.’”

Kovacs, then the paper’s managing editor, had covered his share of hurricanes throughout his 22 years at the paper. None were like this. He evacuated to Baton Rouge, working mostly from Louisiana State University, covering the fallout of what was then considered the greatest natural disaster in the country in a century. He, along with his team, documented it and, at times, debunked wild rumors about the happenings in the Crescent City in its darkest hour.

The Friday before the storm, Aug. 26, 2005, no one anticipated what was to come.

Returning to the office after a farewell lunch for one of his reporters, Kovacs found the latest projection of the hurricane’s path printed out on his desk.

“The Hurricane Center decided it was coming to Louisiana, and it was gonna be the nuclear version,” Kovacs said. “The day before, it was going to go to Florida.”

The next morning, Kovacs’ wife and two sons headed for Memphis, and he went to the newsroom. 

A hurricane plan was already in place.There was a designated room for pets, another for movie nights for the kids and volunteers were bringing food. The newspaper’s sturdy building had been constructed in the 1960s to be riot proof. It also had the advantage of sitting about three feet off the ground and was equipped with a generator on the roof.

When the storm hit, dozens of families witnessed the strength of Katrina at its peak. Kovacs was awakened by one of the bulletproof windows combusting.The flooding began the following afternoon, and precedents vanished. The levees had broken.

“I’ve done maybe a half dozen hurricanes, and there’s never been a levee breach,” Kovacs said. “Is it a Class A disaster or a Class F disaster? I don’t know.”

The plan to report on the storm from this building was being questioned.

“The building itself was surrounded by two to three feet of water,” Kovacs said. “The electricity wasn’t coming back in 48 or 72 hours; it wasn’t coming back for weeks.

“Because the water is so high, you can’t leave in your car,” Kovacs said. “Your car is either destroyed and submerged, or you got it onto an overpass.”

Paper delivery trucks were just tall enough to drive through the high water. One driver went to find a way out, and after cutting some chain-link fence near the interstate, he found it. So, the employees and family members who had spent the night at the paper, from babies to a 90-year-old grandparent, piled into the backs of the trucks. The top half of the back door remained open for ventilation.

Kovacs and the caravan traveled to Baton Rouge to work from Louisiana State University’s Manship School of Mass Communication. A one-bedroom apartment was split among 10 staff members. A block from the Manship building, the Pete Maravich Assembly Center had been converted into a medical facility.

“There’s helicopters landing 24/7. It was like the evacuation of Saigon,” Kovacs said. “People are running around. There’s people on stretchers and in wheelchairs. It eventually became an organized form of chaos.”

In the first days of coverage from Baton Rouge, Kovacs had to issue a missing person report for a reporter who had been sent to the Mississippi Gulf Coast to cover the storm.

“It was the biggest thing on my mind. It was distracting me from the other things I should’ve been paying attention to,” Kovacs said. “To me, that was one of the scarier parts. Like, is this guy dead?” He was later found helping his mother, whose house had been destroyed.

Kovacs ensured his staff was well-equipped with generators and gas. He maintained communication with the office in Houma, Louisiana, where papers were printed, all while committing to digital publication for the first time.

Beforehand, people mostly got information from print and radio. This was a kind of forced adaptation.

“The first 180-degree turn is to realize we’re a web news outlet, and printing isn’t important,” Kovacs said. “Moreover, the digital audiences are still the biggest we’ve ever had.”

With print newspapers inaccessible to those who relocated, the digital version became a point of access for people.

“They’re sitting at the Ramada hotel in Jackson [Mississippi] with five people in a hotel room and their dog and literally nothing to do,” Kovacs said. “What they’re doing is they’re looking at the internet to figure out what’s going on at home. And the most looked at thing was photos.”

As the storytellers of this moment in history, the Times-Picayune reporters held an especially consequential expectation of accuracy; false narratives were spreading.

“The Superdome was said to have been filled with rapists. People were being shot and killed,” former City Editor Jed Horne said. “The police were accused of loading corpses onto barges and shipping them out into the Gulf.”

Several of these rumors were perpetuated by the New Orleans police chief at that time, who ultimately resigned, Kovacs said. 

“We were probably the first people to publish a story saying that the chaos in the city, like gangs raping nuns and people shooting at helicopters … that was overblown, that that really wasn’t happening,” Kovacs said.

On Sept. 2, Horne reported that relief agencies, like the Federal Emergency Management Agency, had either pulled out or threatened to do so because of the dangers to their workers.

“The portrayal of New Orleans as a violent, lawless place where people were shooting at rescuers made the rescuing more difficult,” Kovacs said.

At one point, police reported a shootout with a gang on the Danziger Bridge, a drawbridge leading to an area known as New Orleans East. The paper would later uncover the truth — the police had instigated the violence and killed residents who had no gang involvement.

“They realized that they just shot a bunch of civilians and immediately set to covering it up,” Kovacs said. “That added to the paranoia of the city, and the police portrayed it as a shootout with violent gang members.”

Genuine, on-the-ground journalism made all the difference. 

“One of the things I thought we did the best job at was we were the first people to write a story saying maybe it’s not as true, maybe it’s not as bad as people say it is,” Kovacs said. “We did that by actually being there.”

Neighborhood groups eventually sprung up and were “wonderfully effective at organizing communities, particularly in the 9th Ward,” one of the hardest hit areas, Horne said. Volunteers began cooking free food at a hotel where reporters, police and guardsmen stayed. 

The Times-Picayune gave a voice to tens of thousands, all facing the worst devastation of their lives. The lack of outside support and detachment from the rest of the world instilled a heavy sense of helplessness.

“There was this feeling that they’re gonna forget us,” Kovacs said. “After two weeks they’re gonna forget us. We can’t afford to let them forget us.”

The paper earned Pulitzer Prizes for public service and breaking news in 2006 for its reporting on the hurricane.

“He was not going to let Katrina sideline him in any way, and he didn’t, and we needed that,” Horne said of Kovacs. “Peter really kicked ass and made the paper happen, made the coverage continue, even as it evolved in its formats and made the enormous transition to a digital product.”