re: Katrina and the media

It has been a cry of Bush supporters since the disaster of Katrina unfolded and now the LA times (and Matt Drudge) have an Army Major saying much the same thing: the national media was hyping the amounto of disaster present at place like the superdome and local politicians like Ray Nagin could have played a part. The problem was both created and exacerbated, according to the story, by the breakdown of communications in the aftermath.

This seems completely ridiculous on some level. The mass media were there reporting on national TV so someone certainly had mass communications. But there weren't reliable telephones and no way to confirm some of the more horrendous stories being told so it made accurate reporting difficult to perform. On the other hand, according to the article, race played a part in people (i.e. reporters and anchors') ability to believe and then report some of the more outstanding claims of violence.

I know that articles like this--which Matt Drudge ran with a huge photo montage on his front page today--are supposed to prove something for the right. But they don't really prove anything except that when there is a vacuum of power, leadership, and information people will make do. I know that bodies were definitely laying in the street and that some reporters saw some awful things for themselves. Though these may well have been fairly isolated incedents, they are not the kinds of incedents we are accustomed to seeing in the present day, urban united states.

In fact, if nothing else, the right should realize that this is what it looks like when the media is free to report without a government filter guiding them. It is still a filter--and its concern for property damage was just as strong as its concern for people's lives so if it is liberal, it is a very centrist sort of liberalism, quite mainstream in fact, and doing little other than holding the government accountable for the things the government said it was going to do. It is quite ideological to fault the media for expecting the government to protect its citizens. Although the right wing would like to be able to drown the government in a bathtub, this is far from being an idea that has national consensus in theory much less in practice--in other words, though people may agree, over cocktails or dessert, that the government should be very small and people should have individal initiative, when your friends, family or compatriots are drowning in toxic sludge it is a bit harder to hold to your principles--or even see how they apply.

All of us are hypocritical on some level and it is in those desparate, frightened moments that we are most willing to be so. This has been something that the Bush administration has long used to its advantage: the Patriot Act is only the most visible of this sort of policy which they have enacted in a moment of crisis which is basically contradictory to an agreed upon value - privacy and individual freedoms of movement, speech, etc. - that is overlooked in deference to what seems to be a more urgent goal. Now, ironically, instead of responding to the current crisis, exacerbated by the institutions meant to respond being crippled by previous funding cuts, Republicans in congress are using this moment to push through almost $1 trillion in cuts to the federal budget over the next ten years--all from various federal programs; none from a reduction of the next round of tax cuts to the most wealthy in the country.

I am rarely a defender of the national media because I think they are always overzealous and distracting from the real issues people should be concerned with. And I will admit that, during Katrina any hyperbole that existed went right beneath my radar: I bought all of it (except for Geraldo and his weeping for the babies). I also believe that the media likely made more out of certain stories and am very interested in the part that race played in the reporting of the aftermath: if they were more willing to believe outlandish claims simply because they were being made about poor and black people in America--two populations that (obviously) few national correspondents have much experience with in the least. That is a very important cultural problem.

But to accuse the media of a liberal bias because they got worked up when the Federal Government failed to perform what honest conservatives usually say is the most important function of government: to protect the people, this is just moronic and pedantic. When it is done at the very moment that the GOP is planning to gut the federal government further, making many other national tragedies more likely and working against that ethos that the media represented because it assumes--rightly, I think--most Americans share is, well, inexcusably hypocritical.

UPDATE: new story on this subject says that "media re[presentations may have slowed aid."