Kansas Tornado
The Washington Post
Rescuers Seek Tornado Survivors
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/05/06/AR2007050600397.html
The New York Times
An Empty Place Where a Kansas School Once Stood
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/07/us/07tornado.html?ref=us
Both The New York Times and The Washington Post covered the tornado of a small Kansas town that ripped through Friday night, reducing homes and buildings to rubble.
Both of the articles contained moving information about the tragedy of the event and the current plight of the town and rescue workers to search for survivors.
In my opinion, The Washington Post did a better job in covering this story because, unlike the New York Times, it included information about the who, what, where, and when from the beginning. The reader immediately knows what happened, who died, who was injured, why the buildings that were ruined were significant and what the people of the town plan to do next. Also, it included the effect of the tornado on a national level, and how President Bush declared it a disaster area and how the town would be receiving relief aid. Further, the article specified that the tornado had been classified as an F5, which logistically gives the reader an idea of the impact this type of tornado could have on any town or city, even if they cannot relate to the damage of a town of 1,500.
The New York Times, in my opinion, took entirely too much artistic and melodramatic license with this article. It led with the foreboding and symbolic crow-cawing, and described in painful detail for about three or four paragraphs the exact damage of every detail and every room of the entire town. The article didn’t get into the amount of people injured or dead until the middle of the article, and took too long to begin to get a human perspective as well, oftentimes quoting citizens with the same type of “I-don’t-think-people-get-how-big-of-a-deal-this-is� quote. The imagery of people “clawing� their way through the darkness of their basements to survive wasn’t even mentioned until about three fourths of the way through as well. In my opinion, the author got too caught up in the tragedy and did the people of the town and the readers a disservice by neglecting important national and logistic details, and putting their own artistic imagery before the plight of the people.