[IP] Viewpoint: Has Katrina saved US media?
-----Original Message-----
From: "Kelley Greenman"<greenman.k@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: 06/09/05 12:12:14 PM
To: "dave@xxxxxxxxxx"<dave@xxxxxxxxxx>
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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