Posted on 09/05/2005 2:02:41 AM PDT by F14 Pilot
As President Bush scurries back to the Gulf Coast, it is clear that this is the greatest challenge to politics-as-usual in America since the fall of Richard Nixon in the 1970s.
Then as now, good reporting lies at the heart of what is changing.
But unlike Watergate, "Katrinagate" was public service journalism ruthlessly exposing the truth on a live and continuous basis.
Instead of secretive "Deep Throat" meetings in car-parks, cameras captured the immediate reality of what was happening at the New Orleans Convention Center, making a mockery of the stalling and excuses being put forward by those in power.
Amidst the horror, American broadcast journalism just might have grown its spine back, thanks to Katrina.
National politics reporters and anchors here come largely from the same race and class as the people they are supposed to be holding to account.
They live in the same suburbs, go to the same parties, and they are in debt to the same huge business interests.
Giant corporations own the networks, and Washington politicians rely on them and their executives to fund their re-election campaigns across the 50 states.
It is a perfect recipe for a timid and self-censoring journalistic culture that is no match for the masterfully aggressive spin-surgeons of the Bush administration.
'Lies or ignorance'
But last week the complacency stopped, and the moral indignation against inadequate government began to flow, from slick anchors who spend most of their time glued to desks in New York and Washington.
The most spectacular example came last Friday night on Fox News, the cable network that has become the darling of the Republican heartland.
This highly successful Murdoch-owned station sets itself up in opposition to the "mainstream liberal media elite".
But with the sick and the dying forced to sit in their own excrement behind him in New Orleans, its early-evening anchor Shepard Smith declared civil war against the studio-driven notion that the biggest problem was still stopping the looters.
On other networks like NBC, CNN and ABC it was the authority figures, who are so used to an easy ride at press conferences, that felt the full force of reporters finally determined to ditch the deference.
As the heads of the Homeland Security department and the Federal Emergency Management Agency (Fema) appeared for network interviews, their defensive remarks about where aid was arriving to, and when, were exposed immediately as either downright lies or breath-taking ignorance.
And you did not need a degree in journalism to know it either. Just watching TV for the previous few hours would have sufficed.
Iraq concern
When the back-slapping president told the Fema boss on Friday morning that he was doing "a heck of a job" and spent most of his first live news conference in the stricken area praising all the politicians and chiefs who had failed so clearly, it beggared belief.
The president looked affronted when a reporter covering his Mississippi walkabout had the temerity to suggest that having a third of the National Guard from the affected states on duty in Iraq might be a factor.
It is something I suspect he is going to have to get used to from now on: the list of follow-up questions is too long to ignore or bury.
And it is not only on TV and radio where the gloves have come off.
The most artful supporter of the administration on the staff of the New York Times, columnist David Brooks, has also had enough.
He and others are calling the debacle the "anti 9-11": "The first rule of the social fabric - that in times of crisis you protect the vulnerable - was trampled," he wrote on Sunday.
"Leaving the poor in New Orleans was the moral equivalent of leaving the injured on the battlefield."
Media emboldened
It is way too early to tell whether this really will become "Katrinagate" for President Bush, but how he and his huge retinue of politically-appointed bureaucrats react in the weeks ahead will be decisive.
Government has been thrown into disrepute, and many Americans have realised, for the first time, that the collapsed, rotten flood defences of New Orleans are a symbol of failed infrastructure across the nation.
Blaming the state and city officials, as the president is already trying to do over Katrina, will not wash.
Black America will not forget the government failures, and nor will the Gulf Coast region
Viewpoint: US shamed Beyond the immediate challenge of re-housing the evacuees and getting 200,000-plus children into new schools, there will have to be a Katrina Commission, that a newly-emboldened media will scrutinise obsessively.
The dithering and incompetence that will be exposed will not spare the commander-in-chief, or the sunny, faith-based propaganda that he was still spouting as he left New Orleans airport last Friday, saying it was all going to turn out fine.
People were still trapped, hungry and dying on his watch, less than a mile away.
Black America will not forget the government failures, nor will the Gulf Coast region.
Tens of thousands of voters whose lives have been so devastated will cast their mid-term ballots in Texas next year - the president's adopted home state.
The final word belongs to the historic newspaper at the centre of the hurricane - The New Orleans Times-Picayune. At the weekend, this now-homeless institution published an open letter: "We're angry, Mr President, and we'll be angry long after our beloved city and surrounding parishes have been pumped dry.
"Our people deserved rescuing. Many who could have been, were not. That's to the government's shame."
Absolutely not. They should be trying to bring the people together instead of using the democrat divide and conquer technique that's going on, blaming every one for a deadly unforeseeable oversight.
If they say it was foreseeable then why were they not exploiting it prior to the disaster? Let us hear from these naysayers...Where is the next natural disaster going to occur in the US, and what do you propose be done about it now.
Let's put the blame where it belongs. The politicians and the courts, failed the people in NO, and the United States with their political correctness that does not serve all tne people properly.
Da Mayor's buses never made that 1.2 mile trip, and they never will!
I posted my reply to the BBC..I am sure they will post it when Hell freezes over.
"...and the moral indignation against inadequate government began to flow..."
BwwaaahahahaHA. Written like a true British socialist, and also race baiting....
"Black America will not forget the government failures, and nor will the Gulf Coast region" (he felt obliged to repeat the same sentence 6 lilnes later)
Brit.
I guess we don't spend enough money on government yet.
http://www.babylontoday.com/
http://www.babylontoday.com/prescription_drug_benefit.htm
(Denny Crane: "Sometimes you can only look for answers from God and failing that... and Fox News".)
Media has shown it is so over the line with this hurricane. The unprofessional behavior of the media cost lives. Most I have talked to recognize what a mess they made of this story. They can pat themselves on the back all they want but their reputation has lowered.
There were no shots at rescue helicopters but because of that report rescues and evacuations stopped. FOX is now reporting that AP was wrong in their report last night about a gunfight at the canal repair site. St. Bernard firefighters never were under gunfire.
The sensationalism and reporting of rumors did much damage to the relief effort.
Have you ever wondered why the ground is "BLUE"?
"Saved" the U.S. media from what? Scrutiny by FreeRepublic and other sites? I doubt it very much.
"Have you ever wondered why the ground is "BLUE"?"
You are seeing the flood waters and not the ground.
Don't put your comments here put them on the BBC web site as I did.
Typical. The BBC is run by a bunch of frustrated Stalinists.
Somebody should ask Shep at FNC about New Orleans "dodging the bullet" just as the hurricane was making landfall...
Incredibly foolish.
May well have cost lives.
People that could have left may have stayed or even gone back because "New Orleans dodged the bullet"... Shep said so...
"Tens of thousands of voters whose lives have been so devastated will cast their mid-term ballots in Texas next year - the president's adopted home state."
Yeah, and this is the population that never voted for George Bush to begin with. Doesn't the BBC know that welfare recipients, criminals, etc., vote Democrat. This isn't going to touch President Bush at all. Just the BBC trying to sway public opinion - again. The National Enquirer has more credibility.
I am looking at the first bus picture and beginning to realize that the flooding isn't deep. These buses could have made it to the Superdome the day after Katrina.
Can you imagine the effect on someone trapped on a rooftop with a transister radio listening to CNN hour after hour telling them their President and Military had failed them and they were doomed to death.
Imagine how hard it would be to hang on and stay alive while trapped in New Orleans with CNN preaching gloom, doom, and no chance of rescue for hour after terrible hour.
If I were a tort lawyer I would find someone who died clutching a transister radio tuned to CNN and get their family to sue Time Warner for every penny they have.
That's all I have seen is more coverups of Blanco, the mayor and Bush bashing. The MSM will rise again.
The new media will get the news out because the old media is too busy patting themselves on the back to figure out the mistake they made. The few honest ones who have begun getting the truth out will survive, but the others will be flushed down the toilet as they should be.
The damage to this country's reputation is incalculable. If this encourages the terrorists to think we as a country are not prepared and decide to hit us, it will be directly at the feet of the US media.
Truer words were never written except for the 'changing'.
The writer and the quoted sources all ignore the fact that in disaster planning the local and state authorities are in charge. Not the Feds, until the local and state people choose to hand authority over to the Feds.
Of course, socialists always think the central authority runs everything and can't conceive that the world works in a different way.
That's some bad reporting. Not objective.
I just sent them a little lesson on the US Constitution and explained how most Americans know and understand it. It seems our painfully ignorant media does not.
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