Viewpoint: Has Katrina saved US media?

["David Farber" <dave () farber net>]

-----Original Message-----
From: "Kelley Greenman"<greenman.k () inkworkswell com>
Sent: 06/09/05 12:12:14 PM
To: "dave () farber net"<dave () farber net>
Subject: Viewpoint: Has Katrina saved US media?

Hi Dave,

Will the fourth estate arise, finally? Maybe? This is an opinion piece on 
the role of the media. I shudder to think what would have happened if 
they'd toed the conventional line they've been toeing. Maybe this will 
remind them of the role they play, one that's essential to a healthy 
representative democracy.

Viewpoint: Has Katrina saved US media?
By Matt Wells
Los Angeles

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

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."


http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/1/hi/world/americas/4214516.stm



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