BBC News: Viewpoint - Has Katrina saved US Media?

[Pachamama]

Great Article on BBC News - I put some of the best paragraphs down below, but its a must read in its entirety....We can only hope that this is true that out of the horror of Katrina has atleast come the saving of our media's soul and morals.
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Amidst the horror, American broadcast journalism just might have grown its spine back, thanks to Katrina.

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. 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.

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.

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.

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."

[Pachamama]

1. They refer to the coming storm as "Katrinagate" n/t

[Bernardo de La Paz]

2. Thank you. Posted previously and is on the Greatest page

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=104x4640022

[Pachamama]

3. Didn't see it since it's an editorial and you have it on GD...

Yeah, it is pretty powerful stuff....

[mwooldri]

4. It's not the only thing the BBC's talking about...

... I'd have put this here as a new post because I think it warrants its own thread (but since I'm new here I can't do that yet).

This is in the BBC News Magazine part of their website, mainly aimed at the UK audience. It's simply entitled "Why does the US need our money?".

The US Red Cross has asked its sister organisations to help it raise funds. The article goes on to state "The British Red Cross says the appeal is about getting money quickly to speed up the aid effort, but admits it does raise questions about measures the US Government has in place to deal with large-scale domestic disasters." This is what the article had to say when speaking with the British Red Cross:

"We have been asked for help by our sister organisation in the US," says a spokesman. "This is the biggest humanitarian operation in its 125-year history, we are looking at an area the size of Great Britain that has been devastated.

"But there are broader political questions about the response of the richest country in the world to such a disaster on its own soil. Hopefully they will be addressed in the fullness of time and lessons will be learned."

The article goes on to mention that three million UK pounds value worth of military rations have been shipped out - primarily because no-one in the world has that many rations in storage ready for a humanitarian crisis.

From what I read of the article, I think the British Red Cross spokesman was being quite diplomatic there. I believe that what he was thinking inside was that our government had screwed up big time and wanted to say it in plainer language on a personal level but because he was representing the Red Cross at that time he daren't in fear of endangering any "goodwill" that the Red Cross has towards this "US administration".

[JPZenger]

5. I Never Heard NPR's Anchor Get Angry Before

I never heard NPR's afternoon anchorman, Seigel, get angry before on the air. In an interview with Chertoff on Thursday afternoon, he laid into him for no doing anything about the people in the Convention Center. Chertoff then said he didn't know anything about the Convention Center and said he wouldn't respond to "rumors." Seigel was furious, saying these aren't rumors - we have reporters on the phone line right now who are there and who regularly cover wars, who are telling us about this crisis.
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At least the Katrina crisis has delayed the GOP's scheduled vote to get rid of the Federal inheritance tax. They decided it would look bad to reduce taxes on the very rich while the very poor are still suffering on international TV. The GOP decided to wait until people's indignation dies down.