Videographer Tony Zumbado Will Speak About Disaster Coverage at U of M on February 15

For release: February 10, 2012
For press information, contact Simone Notter Wilson (901) 678-2350 

Tony Zumbado is an independent videographer and photojournalist whose work during the last 30 years has frequently appeared on NBC and MSNBC. He came to international attention during the 2005 post-Katrina flooding of New Orleans, when he was the first journalist to discover the desperate condition of as many as 20,000 flood victims at the Convention Center. The lecture and panel discussion will be held on campus in room 145 of the University Center (Theatre) on February 15 at 7 p.m. The event is free and open to the public.

In his lecture, From Hurricane Katrina to the War in Gaza: Photojournalism in Disaster and Crisis-Ridden Environments, Zumbado will explore issues of censorship, the effects of censorship on viewers' understandings of the crisis, the ethical and professional conflicts that arose during his weeks of filming in the Gulf region after Katrina, and the gap between what American audiences saw at home and what journalists witnessed but were not allowed to broadcast. Zumbado's post-Katrina images and reports from the New Orleans Convention Center brought the inaction of Bush administration officials into stunning focus. A week later, he discovered and documented 45 corpses left behind in the belated evacuation of New Orleans' Memorial Hospital.

Zumbado has covered a wide range of breaking stories for both NBC and Al-Jazeera English, including the O. J. Simpson trial, the Elian Gonzalez controversy, the Casey Anthony trial and release, the Pope's visit to Cuba, uprisings in Gaza, the rescue of 33 Chilean miners in 2010, and the 2011 earthquake in Japan. In August 2011, working for NBC, he filed numerous stories from Afghanistan during the most violent month of US combat operations there; last October he covered the death of Muammar Qaddafi and subsequent liberation celebrations; and in November he once again reported on the war in Afghanistan.