Newscasters Going Medieval On Out Of Touch Politicians

[NATO AIR]

The political firestorm hasn't even started, but I can already tell you, I savor the hearings on this debacle. I will agree with others that the state government dropped the ball, especially the LO governor and NO mayor. Regardless, the federal government (with far superior capabilities and personnel) dropped it even farther. As Pres. Bush (who will be unfairly blamed for a lot of this) stated, the early relief effort has been completely unacceptable.

Notice the bipartisan anger seething from conservatives like Joe Scarborough and Sheppard Smith to liberals like Andrea Mitchell and Soledad O'Brien. They're on the ground, not us, not the politicians (except for their brief visits), watching the survivors, looking at the corpses, witnessing the suffering. Then these politicians come on there trying to bullshit them, and God bless these folks, they ain't having it.

I usually reserve my contempt for the mass media, but they have shined through on this disaster.

http://www.slate.com/id/2125581/?nav=tap3

The Rebellion of the Talking Heads
Newscasters, sick of official lies and stonewalling, finally start snarling.
By Jack Shafer
Posted Friday, Sept. 2, 2005, at 2:36 PM PT

A former deputy chief of FEMA told Knight Ridder Newspapers yesterday (Sept. 1) that there "are two kinds of levees—the ones that breached and the ones that will be breached." A similar aphorism applies to broadcasters: They come in two varieties, the ones that have gone stark, raving mad on air and the ones who will.

In the last couple of days, many of the broadcasters reporting from the bowl-shaped toxic waste dump that was once the city of New Orleans have stopped playing the role of wind-swept wet men facing down a big storm to become public advocates for the poor, the displaced, the starving, the dying, and the dead.

Last night, CNN's Anderson Cooper abandoned the old persona to throttle Sen. Mary Landrieu, D-La., in a live interview. (See the video or read the transcript.)

"Does the federal government bear responsibility for what is happening now? Should they apologize for what is happening now?" Cooper opened.

As if campaigning before the local Democratic Ladies' Club lunch, Landrieu sing-songed back, "Anderson, there will be plenty of time to discuss all of those issues, about why, and how, and what, and if." She went on to thank President Bush, President Clinton, former President Bush, Senators Frist and Reid, and "all leaders that are coming to Louisiana, and Mississippi, and Alabama, "for their help.

Her condescending filibuster continued: "Anderson, tonight, I don't know if you've heard—maybe you all have announced it—but Congress is going to an unprecedented session to pass a $10 billion supplemental bill tonight to keep FEMA and the Red Cross up and operating."

Cooper suspended the traditional TV rules of decorum and, approaching tears of fury, said:

Excuse me, Senator, I'm sorry for interrupting. I haven't heard that, because, for the last four days, I've been seeing dead bodies in the streets here in Mississippi. And to listen to politicians thanking each other and complimenting each other, you know, I got to tell you, there are a lot of people here who are very upset, and very angry, and very frustrated.

And when they hear politicians slap—you know, thanking one another, it just, you know, it kind of cuts them the wrong way right now, because literally there was a body on the streets of this town yesterday being eaten by rats because this woman had been laying in the street for 48 hours. And there's not enough facilities to take her up.

Do you get the anger that is out here? …

I mean, I know you say there's a time and a place for, kind of, you know, looking back, but this seems to be the time and the place. I mean, there are people who want answers, and there are people who want someone to stand up and say, "You know what? We should have done more. Are all the assets being brought to bear?"

Landrieu kept her cool, probably because she's in Baton Rouge, while the stink of corpses caused Cooper to tremble in rage all the way to the commercial break.

Yesterday, on NPR's All Things Considered, Robert Siegel didn't get medieval on Secretary of Homeland Security Michael Chertoff, in part because the microphones there are specially fabricated to decant all emotion from the voices of their reporters. But Siegel aggressively blocked every escape route that Chertoff took to evade hard questions about "corpses" and "human waste" piling up at the city's convention center, where thousands were stranded without provisions. (Siegel gets tough at about minute four in the audio clip.)

Siegel kept asking Chertoff how long it would take to serve or rescue these people, and a couple times Chertoff answered that the government was doing a great job at the Superdome.

When he cautioned Siegel about the danger of relying on "anecdotal" "rumors" of people in dire straits, Siegel said, no—these are facts presented by reporters who have covered war zones. There are 2,000 people at the convention center in need, he said. Having finally broken through the steel plate that is Chertoff's skull, the secretary confessed he hadn't heard those reports—reports that the television networks were documenting, live, with their cameras. Chertoff promised he'd look into the matter.

Several readers directed me to CNN reporter Miles O'Brien's hard-boiled interview with Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour in which he repeatedly invited the governor to agree with him that the federal government had "dropped the ball." When Barbour demurred on this and other points of culpability, O'Brien came back at him without the politesse reporters usually extend to dissembling pols.

I recall Andrea Mitchell all but editorializing on NBC the other night about Congress taking its sweet time to reconvene and pass a hurricane-relief bill … Fox News Channel's Shepard Smith chasing after a mute police officer down the New Orleans freeway overpass and asking in outrage when the stranded would get help … and MSNBC's Joe Scarborough in Biloxi transforming himself into the voice of the disenfranchised to put in a good word for the looters:

You got to understand that these are people who have young babies who haven't had water in four days, in some cases, haven't had formula, haven't had basic necessities. I just wonder what you would do, what I would do if we were in a situation where our 15-month-old child or our 2-year-old baby needed something to stay alive. I don't know what you would do. I know I would do anything it took to get what they needed.

Now, I should be getting it from the federal government if I am in New Orleans, from the state government. But I will tell you what. It is amateur hour, and it has been amateur hour over the past four or five days. This is completely different, friends, from the way the crises were handled in Florida last year, four hurricanes, two of them major, it was handled with ruthless efficiency. I know. I was there. That is not happening tonight in New Orleans.

This morning the discontent spread to the anchor booth at CNN, as Wonkette notes, when Soledad O'Brien openly mocked FEMA in an interview with its director, Michael Brown:

As you can tell, the situation clearly is deteriorating. You've got armed bandits roving the streets. They're heavily armed. You've got people living out on the streets with absolutely no protection, no help whatsoever, no food, no water. How many armed National Guardsmen do you have on the ground right now? …

How is it possible that we're getting better intel than you're getting? …

FEMA has been on the ground for four days, going into the fifth day. Why no massive airdrop of food and water? In Banda Aceh, in Indonesia, they got food dropped two days after the tsunami struck. …

It's five days that FEMA has been on the ground. The head of police says it's been five days that FEMA has been there. The mayor, the former mayor, putting out SOS's on Tuesday morning, crying on national television, saying please send in some troops. So the idea that, yes, I understand that you're feeding people and trying to get in there now, but it's Friday. It's Friday. …

CNN anchor Jack Cafferty growled about the media coverage of Katrina's victims yesterday on Wolf Blitzer's The Situation Room, name-checking me and citing my Wednesday column about the broadcasters' failure to acknowledge the race and economic class of the hardest-hit.

Said Cafferty:

We knew it was coming. And yet, the poorest and the neediest and the most helpless of those in New Orleans, well, they're still there, aren't they? Despite the many angles of this tragedy—and lord knows there've been a lot of them in New Orleans—there is a great big elephant in the living room that the media seems content to ignore.

That would be until now. Slate.com's Jack Shafer wrote today in his column that television coverage has shied away from talking about race and class. Shafer says that we in the media are ignoring the fact that almost all of the victims in New Orleans are black and poor. And he's right. Almost every person we've seen, from the families stranded on their rooftops waiting to be rescued, to the looters, to the people holed up in the Superdome, are black and poor.

Many of them didn't follow the evacuation orders because they didn't have the means to get out of town. They just couldn't do it. A lot of them are sick, a lot of them don't have cars, a lot of them just didn't have the means to leave "The Big Easy." And they're still there.

This gave the Washington-based Blitzer a perfect opening to comment on race and class, but he stumbled and fell into a "Campanis moment." While airing file footage of victims trudging through hip-deep water looking for help, Blitzer, no racist, said:

You simply get chills every time you see these poor individuals, as Jack Cafferty just pointed out, so tragically, so many of these people, almost all of them that we see, are so poor and they are so black, and this is going to raise lots of questions for people who are watching this story unfold. [Emphasis added.]

(Note to Blitzer: You might be one of those guys, like Campanis, who shouldn't talk about race extemporaneously. Next time, try channeling your outrage from the pages of a well-thought-out news script.)

The rebellion of the talking heads reached its culmination today as CNN.com contrasted "the official version" of events in New Orleans with its "in-the-trenches" account by its reporters and authoritative sources. Muted compared to the on-air growling, the Web story still portrays the government as a pack of liars, or worse, as bumbling idiots. The broadcasters' angry dispatches break with the "public face" they usually give their work: polite, patient, neutral, generous. A steady diet of such confrontational reporting would probably be as edifying as a Jerry Springer show. But when the going gets this tough—when government incompetence and lies become so insurmountable—sometimes the only way to get the story is by getting mad.

 

[green lantern]

The political firestorm hasn't even started, but I can already tell you, I savor the hearings on this debacle. I will agree with others that the state government dropped the ball, especially the LO governor and NO mayor. Regardless, the federal government (with far superior capabilities and personnel) dropped it even farther. As Pres. Bush (who will be unfairly blamed for a lot of this) stated, the early relief effort has been completely unacceptable.

Notice the bipartisan anger seething from conservatives like Joe Scarborough and Sheppard Smith to liberals like Andrea Mitchell and Soledad O'Brien. They're on the ground, not us, not the politicians (except for their brief visits), watching the survivors, looking at the corpses, witnessing the suffering. Then these politicians come on there trying to bullshit them, and God bless these folks, they ain't having it.

I usually reserve my contempt for the mass media, but they have shined through on this disaster.

i watched shep smith and geraldo reporting...what the hell is going on down their that the people they are with, arent being allowed to leave ??? what the fkuc???

 

[Democrat4Bush]

This whole relief effort is making me sick to my stomach.

 

[Annie]

At some point yesterday, I too thought it's way too long. People have been flooding the charities with money, why isn't it turning into food and potable water where it's needed?

 

[Hobbit]

As far as a delayed federal response, that can also be blamed on the state government, as the state must invite federal aid before the feds can do anything about it, and the ostrich-like state government didn't pull their heads out of the sand in time to call the feds in a timely manner.

 

[rtwngAvngr]

The political firestorm hasn't even started, but I can already tell you, I savor the hearings on this debacle. I will agree with others that the state government dropped the ball, especially the LO governor and NO mayor. Regardless, the federal government (with far superior capabilities and personnel) dropped it even farther. As Pres. Bush (who will be unfairly blamed for a lot of this) stated, the early relief effort has been completely unacceptable.

Notice the bipartisan anger seething from conservatives like Joe Scarborough and Sheppard Smith to liberals like Andrea Mitchell and Soledad O'Brien. They're on the ground, not us, not the politicians (except for their brief visits), watching the survivors, looking at the corpses, witnessing the suffering. Then these politicians come on there trying to bullshit them, and God bless these folks, they ain't having it.

I usually reserve my contempt for the mass media, but they have shined through on this disaster.

How did Bush drop it further, Nato? Because it's fashionable to say? You think Shep Smith is a conservative?

 

[Trigg]

As far as a delayed federal response, that can also be blamed on the state government, as the state must invite federal aid before the feds can do anything about it, and the ostrich-like state government didn't pull their heads out of the sand in time to call the feds in a timely manner.

MOST of the blaim can be layed firmly at the feet of the local gov. They didn't have an evacuation plan in place for getting the people out before the hurricane or after. That's where things began to go wrong. They didn't spend money on the up keep of the levees and now they are paying the price.

The media needs to stop blaiming the federal gov. and start with the MAYOR first for his lack of doing anything and then proceed to the governor.

They should have gone house to house evacuating residents before the hurricane hit, use those school buses for something usefull instead of letting them sit and fill with water.

All in all they have moved somwhere around 40,000 people in the last 3 days out of the city. That's impressive, but instead of giving every reporter in the world access they should have started moving people the 1st day. This kind of a pathetic response could have been prevented if the mayor and governor had called troops up BEFORE the storm instead of waiting 2 days.

 

[NATO AIR]

How did Bush drop it further, Nato? Because it's fashionable to say? You think Shep Smith is a conservative?

Notice I said Pres. Bush will be UNFAIRLY blamed for a lot of this. It was his subordinates at FEMA and Homeland Security who dropped the ball, as well as the miliary chain of command. They failed to prepare, irregardless of the devastating failure of the state and local governments, and the federal government's failure to prepare has been well-evident since this whole disaster started.

I think Shep Smith is a Republican/conservative, like most of the folks at Fox News... which is why I prefer Fox News to MSNBC or CNN. At the least, the folks at Fox News are the only ones who ever give Bush and the military a fair shake, and for that I am a grateful viewer.

We have personnel from this ship on the ground there (they were on leave in the area), and their popular view has been that the feds dropped the ball even worse than the state and local authorities did. Three of them are medical corpsmen who offered their assistance to FEMA reps in Biloxi and Baton Rouge and they were turned down, mainly because FEMA has no idea what to do with the resources it has available.

Why do you think mayors from LA to NY to Chicago to Miami have been bitching because they've offered FEMA everything emergency response related they have (paramedics, firefighters, police, specialists, helicopters, ambulances, etc etc) and FEMA has hardly responded or even considered their requests. That enough would make me (as a mayor of say Chicago or NYC) to give the President a call and tell him he needs to fire the idiots at FEMA and Homeland Security and bring in somebody like Tommy Franks or Rudy Guilani and save the day on this thing by getting the effort organized and effective.

The federal government has failed its people the last six days, because regardless of the state and local governments, this is still the United States of America, with a federal government that is a powerful behemoth, and it should have, a long time ago, started showing it knew what the hell it was doing and taken the proper actions.

One last question for all those geniuses out there who want to absolve the fed. government of its horrific failure... what if this was a nuclear attack and the majority of the local and state governments were wiped out? Would you wrongly claim the feds couldn't do anything and had no responsibilities then?

This is a fucking fiasco, from FEMA/Homeland Security on down,and it makes America look like shit to the rest of the world and also worries the hell out of any of us who wonder how the hell they could blow so badly something they had days to plan for! Next time we may not be so lucky to have days to plan.

 

[rtwngAvngr]

Nato- I disagree that the fed dropped it even further, as you stated. The local and state authorities are the first line of defense and they failed woefully.. I know it's fashionable though, to blame the fed. bush = the fed.

 

[NATO AIR]

Nato- I disagree that the fed dropped it even further, as you stated. The local and state authorities are the first line of defense and they failed woefully.. I know it's fashionable though, to blame the fed. bush = the fed.

Well I don't like that Bush will get blamed for this, but its going to happen. And the bipartisan rage is going to be overwhelming. If you thought the 9/11 hearings were bad, just wait till the Katrina hearings.

Needless to say, Bush is now fully involved, things will get better. He always manages to get things done, just like the military.