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September 08, 2005
Return of the Press
Nikki Finke has a blistering column lauding the heroes and assaulting the hacks from the last week or two of Katrina coverage. Her final question -- whether the media can sustain its new assertiveness -- seems to have been answered today, with the answer being No.
Sam Rosenfeld's been all over it, so I'll send you over to his posts on the subject. Suffice to say that the media, having attracted great plaudits for fighting the bullies at the bar, seems to have started swinging indiscriminately in the hopes of hitting another evildoer. We were praying that the pulsing anger Cooper and Smith and Rivera evinced would be coupled with a willingness to say exactly who is to blame. Unfortunately, it seems to have dissipated into a mere voice inflection, a tone in which you ask questions rather than an emotion that drives you to find answers. We'd hoped the press corps was changing, but it turned out the difference was merely decibel.
That's why watching Kyra Phillips get laid out by Nancy Pelosi didn't give me the normal voyeuristic thrill -- it's just regrettable. That the copper dye has sunk deep enough to leave Phillips unable to comprehend basic facts about the timeline, simple truths about the legislative process, or the stunning revelation that their may be a gap between Bush's words and Louisiana's reality is nothing to cheer over -- it's pathetic. Our press still can't wrap their minds around the destruction, still can't see that not only does this transcend the he-said/she-said template, but it proves how inadequate it is under all circumstance.
The head of FEMA is a horse-trainer.
The head of FEMA was the college roommate of a Bush buddy.
That's why he's the head of FEMA.
You can be fair and fucking balanced as you want. Not comprehending all that's wrong with that chain of events requires much more than bias, it requires a willful attempt to mentally retard yourself.
September 8, 2005 in Media | Permalink
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Comments
First off, Ezra, I was a jackass in a previous post. Apologies.
I saw it too. I'm just wondering what Krya Phillips' point *was*, actually?
Governmental officials should be held accountable -- just not the ones who actually have power and, ps, any governmental investigation is a waste of time.
She tried to ape Anderson Cooper -- she came off as completely incoherent.
And an additional question: isn't our lack of response due to Krya Phillips and her ilk, as well? For all the talk about the government not seeing New Orleans coming, what of CNN? How many times did they do a story concerning whether we were prepared? Now how many times did they talk about Aruba? Isn't that their JOB as journalists: to keep the public informed and the government honest?
Journalism isn't giving the public what they want. It is about informing them. Otherwise Kyra Phillips is nothing more than an actress playing a role in a television drama.
Posted by: Chris R | Sep 8, 2005 7:15:36 PM
"It's uncanny. FEMA is wholly owned, operated, and run as an extension of the Bush-Cheney campaign. From top to bottom."
This is getting tiresome. Maybe Brown was not hired because he was a college crony of Allbaugh, but because he was a talented, experienced campaign operative.
The "incompetence" explanation assumes that what you want FEMA to do or what the written mandate of FEMA outlines as their mission is the same as what the Bush administration wanted FEMA to do.
If the Bush administration wanted FEMA to be a Pavlovian educator of local disaster areas, handing out goodies when votes are in play (Florida) and electric shocks when it is useful that an area be destroyed (NOLA) then Brown was not only competent, but brilliant.
"Incompetence" is a chickenshit left wing escape route for liberals and Democrats, and some Republicans, to avoid confronting really dangerous and difficult facts.
It sometimes requires some really near psychotic denial, as in believing that Don Rumsfeld was a dewy-eyed idealist who thought "Iraq would be a cake-walk."
Posted by: bob mcmanus | Sep 8, 2005 7:49:05 PM
Oh the quote at the top is from Laura Rozen. I forgot to attribute.
Posted by: bob mcmanus | Sep 8, 2005 7:51:52 PM
One can only guess at the horrifying incompetence of those Bush administration-appointed hacks at FEMA who are further down the food chain of Bush patronage. I can understand why Brown's role in dealing with the Hurricane Katrina disaster has been subsumed by someone from the U.S. Coast Guard, where such graft is harder to pull off and people are promoted on the basis of actual, relevant, job performance. There's a reason why the concept of a U.S. Civil Service that's insulated from such petty patronage is a good idea, and we are sadly seeing that shown now.
Posted by: David W. | Sep 8, 2005 8:27:18 PM
One can only guess at the horrifying incompetence of those Bush administration-appointed hacks at FEMA who are further down the food chain of Bush patronage.
This has just about convinced me that the United States needs to switch to a City Manager (aka Council-Manager) form of government. The manager can make all of the hiring decisions, and if he screws up, the house and senate can fire him. The president (whoever he is) can concern himself with ribbon-cutting, speech-making, and ordering the military around to various adventures. The president's "cabinet," such as it is, would serve as "public faces" and trusted advisors, but not actually have that much day-to-day control of their various departments.
Really, there's no reason why the top 3-5 people at FEMA need to be appointed by each new incoming president. If Bush ever screws up, there are never going to be any consequences, so the answer could be to have a hiring manager who can be fired by the congress without political consequence if he really screws up, but is otherwise kept on as long as things run smoothly.
Posted by: Constantine | Sep 8, 2005 8:47:02 PM
Ezra on media: it requires a willful attempt to mentally retard yourself.
Some of these media folks (especially on TV) are not the brightest bulbs in the hardware store. The selection criteria do not include measured intelligence, but do include personal appearance, vocal quality, and ability to sling smooth sounding but empty sentences (aka: bullshit).
Worse, the media figureheads spend lots of time making themselves look good - appearance-wise - instead of researching the issues (case in point: Rita Cosby). They are, as the British wisely call this group, "news readers". They are not journalists in any meaningful sense of that word. For the most part, some unknown staffer writes what they are to say. If a conversation interrupts the script, they are helpless.
All that said, the real culprits are the producers and media executives who set the story line. Fox was exposed on this on one occasion, but the listening/viewing public has no idea who these people are and what major control over message emphasis they have.
A mention also is in order of the occasionally talked about but everpresent smoozing between the media folk and public figures. The fact of these relationships - polite folks don't diss their personal friends - does more to color news in invisible ways than we will ever know.
Lastly: access to public figures. In a world of ruthless management of PR by the government, voices that critize are voices that will be denied access. All the media folks know this, as their futures depend on 'being nice' to maintain a portal into the political names that make the 'news'. .
A toxic brew this is. Almost as bad a N.O. flood water. An emetic and purgative sound like the right presciption, but we all know this is a recurring disease, immune to treatment, apparently.
Posted by: JimPortlandOR | Sep 8, 2005 9:24:33 PM
Don't insult horse trainers. It's honorable work. Brown was a horse lawyer.
Posted by: DonBoy | Sep 9, 2005 12:19:36 AM
What's awful is that the Bushies don't even really care if CNN is hard on them. So long as they're hard on Democrats too. So long as they're hard on government. If government is just inherently awful, you might as well keep supporting Bush, right? He's at least from the small-government party.
I cheered when I watched Pelosi on that Crooks and Liars video. She called the bluff: Kyra was doing exactly what the Republicans want -- "you're all disgraceful!" she says, meaning all politicians, pox-on-all-your-houses. Pelosi, to her vast, vast credit said, "fuck that". That's even more important than just being a partisan. If only all the Dems were that tough and that smart, all the time.
Posted by: tlaura | Sep 9, 2005 1:29:32 AM
The media are still the same folks they were before the disaster. They are just as easily cowed, spun and lead around as they ever were. It's just that for the first several days the spin machine had not been deplyed effectively to the Gulf Coast. The difference now is that the spin machine of Washington has realized that it has problems in that region, and has jumped in with both feet to control the situation.
Posted by: moonbiter | Sep 9, 2005 4:26:08 AM
We were praying that the pulsing anger Cooper and Smith and Rivera evinced would be coupled with a willingness to say exactly who is to blame.
Try this:
WASHINGTON, Sept. 8 - As New Orleans descended into chaos last week and Louisiana's governor asked for 40,000 soldiers, President Bush's senior advisers debated whether the president should speed the arrival of active-duty troops by seizing control of the hurricane relief mission from the governor.
For reasons of practicality and politics, officials at the Justice Department and the Pentagon, and then at the White House, decided not to urge Mr. Bush to take command of the effort. Instead, the Washington officials decided to rely on the growing number of National Guard personnel flowing into Louisiana, who were under Gov. Kathleen Babineaux Blanco's control.
The debate began after officials realized that Hurricane Katrina had exposed a critical flaw in the national disaster response plans created after the Sept. 11 attacks. According to the administration's senior domestic security officials, the plan failed to recognize that local police, fire and medical personnel might be incapacitated.
As criticism of the response to Hurricane Katrina has mounted, one of the most pointed questions has been why more troops were not available more quickly to restore order and offer aid. Interviews with officials in Washington and Louisiana show that as the situation grew worse, they were wrangling with questions of federal/state authority, weighing the realities of military logistics and perhaps talking past each other in the crisis.
"To seize control of the mission, Mr. Bush would have had to invoke the Insurrection Act, which allows the president in times of unrest to command active-duty forces into the states to perform law enforcement duties. But decision makers in Washington felt certain that Ms. Blanco would have resisted surrendering control, as Bush administration officials believe would have been required to deploy active-duty combat forces before law and order had been re-established."
Posted by: Fred Jones | Sep 9, 2005 10:10:14 AM
Shrug, the reactions are entirely proportional.
It's one thing to be upset that the government didn't do enough. It's another to be upset that the government ISNT doing enough RIGHT NOW. Our media heroes were exploding because back in those days, the government simply was not helping deal with the monumental catastrophe.
We've now come closer to a point where the government is at least doing what it should be doing at the moment, and the fire is over how they screwed up back then. Well, as burning and important as that may be, it's still not as important as getting the government to move when it has yet to do it's job.
Posted by: Tony Vila | Sep 9, 2005 10:31:40 AM
The reporters who were most outraged by the conditions, the rescue effort, and the political response were the ones that actually set foot in the affected areas. They are the only ones that got any kind of backbone going. The rest of them (like Kyra) have been engaging in mimicry but are only imitating the gestures. They can't imitate the impulses, the images, the sensations that Shep Smith and Brian Williams have done so well to communicate, but they can damn sure raise a ruckus, and so that's what they do: they raise a ruckus at anyone whom they encounter. This is as whorish as their usual kneel-and-bob routine.
Posted by: diddy | Sep 9, 2005 12:19:22 PM
