A Media Scandal in the Making

I think it would be fair to posit that the recent conduct of the mainstream media with regard to the hurricane coverage borders on the scandalous. It’s such a huge panorama of folly and error that it’s difficult to know where to even begin. A connection can, without a doubt be drawn between the media’s coverage of Iraq and the situation in Louisiana. Both are similar in that the media has relentlessly tried to graft their slanted and skewed interpretation of what’s happening on the psyche of America. Both are aimed to portray the two situations (Iraq and Louisiana) as chaotic, and most importantly, that Bush is directly responsible, that he’s incompetent at best and a murderer at worst. I think the parallel between the media’s coverage of Iraq and Katrina is remarkable.

As time affords a more realistic perspective in assessing the aftermath of Katrina, it is becoming more and more clear that the situation was not nearly as dire as the media was reporting. There was no mass raping or murdering going on in the Superdome or at the Convention Center, as was reported. There were not piles of corpses stacked in the freezers of the above mentioned locales, as was reported, there were not the ten thousand dead that the media had been predicting from day one. And last but not least, black Americans in the Superdome were not being forced to cannibalizing the dead in order stay alive, as was reported. With regard to the criticism unleashed on Bush, the facts show that the Federal government gave more to Louisiana in the first five years of Bush’s administration than Clinton’s administration gave in his last five years in office. What Louisiana did with this money is anybody’s guess. Maybe someone should as the Democrat mayor and the Democrat governor. The race baiting calumnies are so foolish that they do not merit serious discussion. Those engaging in such speculation reveal their own frustration, desperation and lack of interest in reality. They are slowly sinking in the quicksand of ideology. In Iraq, of course, the reporting is virtually hysterical; “Civil war,” “chaos,” “What’s the pull out plan?” This is all meant to undermine the president’s plan, which he always stressed, would take time and cost lives. There’s room for criticism, of course, but the media’s downward spiral into outright inaccuracy and wild speculation is stunning. What we’re seeing is a subtle, or rather, not so subtle attempt to force the rest of the country to see reality through the media’s prism of the 1960s and anti-Bush hatred.