Hurricane Harvey has already circulated out of cable network mainstream media on to the next biggest thing.
For months, Katrina stayed in the news. Rice University's Dominic Boyer says the difference between Katrina 2005 and Harvey in 2017 is the rise of social media.
“Social media has had a profound effect on how the news cycles operate, it’s made them faster ,” said Boyer.
He said a lot of reporters are on now on Twitter.
Media took more interest nationally in Katrina because of FEMA’s involvement. Much of New Orleans evacuated to different states. For those who stayed in the “City That Care Forgot”, appalling and shocking scenes from the Superdome rocked the nation. New Orleans was out of commission for weeks and crime was rampant. Despite widespread devastation in Houston, it was for the most part back to business within a week. The crime level was low and there was no political controversy over how it was handled. Quick on its heels were Irma, Jose and Katia.
University of Houston's Lindita Camaj points out another difference 12 years ago. The mainstream media cable networks have stopped covering Harvey and are on to new stories.
“The networks were dominating the news cycle, they were the ones really driving the agenda. Nowadays in 2017 we have another aspect to the media ecology which is the social media,” said Camaj.
Camaj said Harvey didn't stay in the news as long as Katrina because of the way that disaster was handled and ongoing crime issues.
“That issue persisted a lot longer and then of course, there were lots of these side effects of Katrina which was devastating to itself, the aftermath, how it was dealt with,” said Camaj.
She said social media also plays a big role nowadays with constantly new information coming forward faster.
Nowadays, President Trump juices up the news cycle every day.