Victor Davis Hanson on The MSM And Katrina
I must say, Prof. Hanson unleashes a pretty good Jeremiad when he wants to:
For all the media's efforts to turn the natural disaster of New Orleans into a racist nightmare, a death knell for one or the other political parties or an
indictment of American culture at large, it was none of that at all. What we did endure instead were slick but poorly educated journalists, worried not about truth but about pre-empting their rivals with an ever-more-hysterical story, all
in a fuzzy context of political correctness about race, the environment and the
war.
Let ghoulish CNN file suit against the government to film all the bloated corpses it can find. Let a pontificating PBS "News-Hour" conduct more televised roundtables with grim-faced elites searching out purported national racism. But few any longer trust a frenzied media whose reporters and commentators continually prove as incompetent as they are disingenuous.
Was it too much to ask reporters to look to history to judge this recovery against other past disasters here and abroad? Could they have strived for accuracy instead of ratings — and at least made sure that the images from their cameras did not refute their own predetermined scripts?
HT: Real Clear Politics via Power Line.
posted by Lowell Brown at 10:22 PM
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1 Comments:
As the Katrina disaster has been revealed to be a bit less horrific than earliest reports described, and the business of cleaning up has begun, I recalled that about the third day after the hurricane had struck — when the media hystrionics were at their most piercing — the report on U.N. corruption in the Oil-for-Food Scandal was released.
Interesting timing, eh? It would be mighty interesting to determine just exactly who made the decision for the timing of that release. The document seems to confirm, as acknowledged by even the New York Times, that the corruption and criminal abuse of the program was just as extensive and rotten as the worst accusations had warned.
It is a subject that will need to be revisited, and not allowed to fade from public consciousness.
In particular, it is fascinating to note that it was precisely the same people so loudly accusing the Bush administration of incompetence and racial bigotry, that have consistently defended the United Nations and denounced anyone attempting to criticize its incompetence and corruption.
Posted by The Mad Fiddler
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