The Discerning Texan

All that is necessary for evil to triumph, is for good men to do nothing.
-- Edmund Burke
Monday, September 12, 2005

Are American journalists finally beginning to wake up to the damage they have caused to our nation?

I'm about up to here with this Katrina coverage. Not because there isn't a great human tragedy out there that needs to be addressed; but rather because we are being served by politicians and media that would rather destroy the reputation of a lame-duck President than to help those people.

And this race-baiting crap is making me genuinely ANGRY. But I am not angry at the President; I am not angry at FEMA or its now-resigned leader; I am not even angry at the incompetent Governor of Louisiana or the impotent Mayor of New Orleans. However I am mad as hell at elected officials who are sworn to serve the public good, and at their willing accomplices in our news media, who have spent the last 10 days doing very little besides fanning the flames of blame, division, hatred, and false claims of bigotry, in a country that already has far too much of all of the above.

So when I came across this Hugh Hewitt piece this afternoon, it could not have come at a better time for me, because I was more than ready to come across something...anything besides the preposterous, disgraceful, outrageous crap I've been seeing in both the print and electronic media lately.

Hewitt points us to two superb essays by journalists with a conscience; a very rare breed these days. As usual bold emphases are mine.

First there are these excerpts from Jack Kelley of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette:

It is settled wisdom among journalists that the federal response to the devastation wrought by Hurricane Katrina was unconscionably slow.

"Mr. Bush's performance last week will rank as one of the worst ever during a dire national emergency," wrote New York Times columnist Bob Herbert in a somewhat more strident expression of the conventional wisdom."

But the conventional wisdom is the opposite of the truth.

Jason van Steenwyk is a Florida Army National Guardsman who has been mobilized six times for hurricane relief. He notes that:

"The federal government pretty much met its standard time lines, but the volume of support provided during the 72-96 hour was unprecedented. The federal response here was faster than Hugo, faster than Andrew, faster than Iniki, faster than Francine and Jeanne."

For instance, it took five days for National Guard troops to arrive in strength on the scene in Homestead, Fla. after Hurricane Andrew hit in 1992. But after Katrina, there was a significant National Guard presence in the afflicted region in three.

Journalists who are long on opinions and short on knowledge have no idea what is involved in moving hundreds of tons of relief supplies into an area the size of England in which power lines are down, telecommunications are out, no gasoline is available, bridges are damaged, roads and airports are covered with debris, and apparently have little interest in finding out.

So they libel as a "national disgrace" the most monumental and successful disaster relief operation in world history.


I write this column a week and a day after the main levee protecting New Orleans breached. In the course of that week:

More than 32,000 people have been rescued, many plucked from rooftops by Coast Guard helicopters.

The Army Corps of Engineers has all but repaired the breaches and begun pumping water out of New Orleans.

Shelter, food and medical care have been provided to more than 180,000 refugees.

Journalists complain that it took a whole week to do this. A former Air Force logistics officer had some words of advice for us in the Fourth Estate on his blog, Moltenthought:

"We do not yet have teleporter or replicator technology like you saw on 'Star Trek' in college between hookah hits and waiting to pick up your worthless communications degree while the grown-ups actually engaged in the recovery effort were studying engineering.

"The United States military can wipe out the Taliban and the Iraqi Republican Guard far more swiftly than they can bring 3 million Swanson dinners to an underwater city through an area the size of Great Britain which has no power, no working ports or airports, and a devastated and impassable road network.

"You cannot speed recovery and relief efforts up by prepositioning assets (in the affected areas) since the assets are endangered by the very storm which destroyed the region.


"No amount of yelling, crying and mustering of moral indignation will change any of the facts above."

"You cannot just snap your fingers and make the military appear somewhere," van Steenwyk said.

Guardsmen need to receive mobilization orders; report to their armories; draw equipment; receive orders and convoy to the disaster area. Guardsmen driving down from Pennsylvania or Navy ships sailing from Norfolk can't be on the scene immediately.


There is more, but those particular passages really struck me powerfully.

Next Hewitt points us to a very long and heartfelt ode to a lost city, from the highly left-leaning New Yorker (of all places), written by Nicholas Lehmann, a native of "the Big Easy"; and although it it way too lengthy to include here, it is also definitely worth the read. As a representative portion, I have chosen these paragraphs:

But it’s also true that, after the levees broke, we watched every single system associated with the life of a city fail: the electric grid, the water system, the sewer system, the transportation system, the telephone system, the police force, the fire department, the hospitals, even the system for disposing of corpses. Perhaps it is all the fault of the force of the storm; I suspect that, as we move into the yearned-for realm of reliable information, we will find out that society and nature were co-conspirators in the tragedy. And the societal fault won’t all have been the federal government’s.

The wetlands that protected the city on the south and west have been deteriorating from commercial exploitation for years, thanks to inaction by Louisiana as well as by the United States. It isn’t Washington that decided it’s O.K. to let retail establishments in New Orleans sell firearms—which are now being extensively stolen and turned to the service of increasing the chaos in the city. It seems like a million years ago that President Bush had admirers who saw in him a Churchillian ability to rally a nation in crisis; last week, as both the President and Michael Brown, the director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, offered bland, undignified, and ill-timed restatements of the obvious about the direness of the situation, you could practically see them thinking, I’m not getting blamed for this! But they were positively helpful next to Louisiana’s governor, who cried and said that we should all pray, and New Orleans’ mayor, who told citizens they should evacuate but didn’t say how, predicted a second major flood, which didn’t materialize, sniped at the federal authorities, and kept reminding everyone that the situation was desperate.


It is gratifying to see this type of reporting from reporters and publications not known for their pro-Republican views. It is a glimmer, a small glimmer, but a glimmer nevertheless--that some people out there actually still do care about exposing its readers the truth instead of merely searching for ways to pour gasoline on the fires of nation's pent-up tensions. What good does that do to our country and our society--when the truth is that there are people in need right now; yet all anyone seems to be able to do is to write and broadcast over-the-top rhetoric that borders on insanity and complete fabrications born of an ugly marriage between partisanship and uncontrolled rage. Here is my words to you in the media who are tearing at the very foundations of our society: GET OVER YOURSELVES AND WAKE UP! Before the fires you stoke consume us all.

This embarrassingly obvious disintegration of American media brings to mind one question and one question only: can these veterans of the 60's revolutionary movement and sit-ins ever get past their hatred of this President (exceeding even its hatred of Nixon) to the point where they can finally report TRUTH, even when that means that it wasn't "Bush's fault"?

Because from where I sit, this media has done more damage to its credibility--and to the public's perception of its televised and printed news as a fair and balanced presentation of the whole truth and nothing but the truth--in the last 2-3 years, than has anything the media has done or said since the days of yellow journalism in the 1870's. They are literally destroying our country.

A free society cannot survive and make informed decisions when the people it trusts to bring news of the events of the world to them are fed only propaganda that is tied to only one (incredibly skewed) view of the world. In a sense that imbalance is what many bloggers are trying to overcome. But it is a crime that those who we once respected to tell us the truth can no longer be trusted. If that doesn't change, and soon, it is difficult to be optimistic about the future of this country I love so much.

UPDATE: When Micheal Kinsley, no friend of the right, exposes the CNN network for ordering its personnel to both overtly downplay the successes and nobility of the American military in the Iraq war, and to feign false emotions on its "news" programming: all in a quest to turn the American people against the war on terror, it is time for the people to begin to consider whether CNN is anymore worthy of its time than is The Jerrry Springer Show. FrauBudgie has found the story of the day:

From Drudge, title link: After weeks of intense Katrina coverage from the main press, LA TIMES guru and former CNN host Michael Kinsley divulges that CNN was coaching guests to artificially enhance emotions!

Kinsley writes:

"The TV news networks, which only a few months ago were piously suppressing emotional fireworks by their pundits, are now piously encouraging their news anchors to break out of the emotional straitjackets and express outrage. A Los Angeles Times colleague of mine, appearing on CNN last week to talk about Katrina, was told by a producer to 'get angry.'It's not just CNN, though .... and some reporters don't need to fabricate emotion."

I'm watching Shephard Smith on Fox right now ... reporting that there have been 45 dead people found in a hospital in which the staff had no water, no food and no supplies. His voice shakes with emotion ... he was there last week. Now he's back in NYC, in the studio ... in his suit, and apparently back into his tranquilized state.

I think it has to be tough to be in a situation of tragedy, and stay non-emotional amid human misery. The reporters of all networks physically present in New Orleans last week were affected, and reaching to anything they could to ameliorate the tragedy. That meant the federal government, because sure as heck, the state and locals weren't going to do anything.US Congressional Democrats, ever eager to make hay when the sun shines, jumped on the bandwagon to bash Bush, and we're observing the outcome.And so it goes ...

It is interesting, though, that CNN instructed the embedded reporters not to be biased towards the US military during the Iraqi war. Al Jazeera had, and has never had, such strictures. They emote all over the place, fairly or not.
But then, remember. Presenting facts is not Al Jazeera's long suit. They exist for the stated purpose of allowing folks to express themselves who would otherwise be persecuted by third world governments.Fox's goal is "We report, you decide." At CNN, they say they're the most "trusted" news source ... although according to their falling ratings, I kind of wonder who they're most trusted by ...

I watch CNN less and less, but always tuned into Wolf Blitzer, because I remember him, Bernie Goldberg and Peter Arnette trapped in a hotel room in Baghdad during the first Gulf War.I still respected Wolf Blitzer, fairly balanced reporting ... until the New Orleans flooding, when he got teamed up with Jack Cafferty, who pointed out how Bush was a failure every five minutes.At which point ... I turned CNN off of my own radar. If I want to experience Bush bashing, I'll read the DailyKos.
DiscerningTexan, 9/12/2005 05:08:00 PM |