GMW: Has Katrina saved US media?

[Guest guest]

GMW: Has Katrina saved US media?

" GM WATCH " <info

Mon, 5 Sep 2005 23:24:28 +0100

 

 

 

 

GM WATCH daily

http://www.gmwatch.org

------

There's much here that perfectly captures American media coverage of a

whole range of issues, including GM.

 

EXCERPT: 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.

------

 

Has Katrina saved US media? (Of course not.)

By Matt Wells

BBC News, Los Angeles

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/4214516.stm

 

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.

 

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. "

 

 

 

----------------------------