Tom Joyner - The voice of Hurricane Katrina. By Bryan Curtis

Tom Joyner - The voice of Hurricane Katrina. By Bryan Curtis: "Who was the voice of Hurricane Katrina? Not CNN's Anderson Cooper, who met the floodwaters with a commensurate response from his own tear ducts. And not Kanye West, the hip-hop mogul, whose anti-Bush tirade was bush-league. Allow me to nominate Tom Joyner, the self-proclaimed 'hardest working man in radio,' who has out-hustled Cooper and out-sloganeered West. On The Tom Joyner Morning Show, which has 8 million listeners, Joyner has styled himself as the newsman, altruist, and social conscience of the hurricane. In the morning hours of Tuesday, Aug. 30, Joyner summoned reporters from black-radio affiliates across the South for an on-air debriefing. They described the early casualties while the TV networks stumbled into action. Joyner's verdict, reached instantly, was that Katrina's victims were mostly African-American. That morning, Joyner and Tavis Smiley, a longtime collaborator, dubbed the hurricane the 'black folks' tsunami'—a phrase so catchy and wildly overheated that Al Sharpton was repeating it a day later."