"There are a lot of good stories out there" on the right-wing cable channel. And did we mention President Bush is pouring out relief?
By Farhad Manjoo
News "After the storm, a storm -- and I mean a storm! -- of aid!" Fox News anchor Neil Cavuto began his broadcast on Friday afternoon, as the screen flashed with images of National Guard convoys motoring in to the broken city of New Orleans, and troops doling out food and water to victims of Hurricane Katrina. To watch a few hours of Fox on Friday was to experience reassurance, some relief that things were getting better on the Gulf Coast. While the situation may have been bleak this week, Fox's anchors and reporters acknowledged, and while there still were some pockets where "law and order" -- a Fox obsession -- had not been restored, help was on the way. Or as Cavuto put it, police were "attempting to take back the city of New Orleans ... as the resident of the United States takes in the damage and pours out the relief."
On other networks -- and, more important, in reality -- the president's visit to the affected areas didn't merit the same measure of optimism. While Guard troops were finally making their way to New Orleans, thousands of people remained stranded at the city's convention center. Ray Nagin, New Orleans' mayor, took to the radio to angrily denounce what he saw as the abandonment of his city by the federal authorities, an audio clip that CNN played repeatedly. And fatalities in Louisiana, some officials suggested, may reach 10,000 unless the relief effort was improved. Watching a rescue worker being lowered from a Coast Guard helicopter to rescue a woman trapped in a flooded neighborhood, CNN's Wolf Blitzer characterized the situation this way: "One story after another, it simply doesn't end, the horror that we're seeing. Even though it's the general sense today that the cavalry has arrived, in much of New Orleans the cavalry certainly has not arrived."
Flip over to Fox, though, and the picture was sunnier. "Yeah, without a doubt the story of the day is restoring law and order here in New Orleans," field reporter David Lee Miller said at one point. "During the past few hours we have witnessed a great number of National Guard troops literally pouring into this city. Also now an increasing number of people are being bussed and/or flown out of New Orleans. So the situation is improving, it has improved during the last 12 hours." But facts are stubborn things. Just after Miller described this orderly mass exodus from New Orleans, he showed a taped interview he'd conducted with a middle-aged black man at the city's convention center.
"What have they told you about when you might be able to leave?" Miller asked the man.
"They've been telling us we've been leaving since the day we got here," the man said angrily. He described a state of complete neglect -- people at the convention center were without food and water, and busses had passed by and not stopped.
"How much longer can you last here?" Miller asked.
"Not much longer at all," the man said. "If I don't leave today, something's gotta give." Miller assured the man that help was on the way. Guard troops were on the highways coming into the city, Miller told him; they'd be at the convention center soon. The man stared back blankly.
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http://salon.com/news/feature/2005/09/03/fox/index.html
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