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September 07, 2005
Salon on the New Media Backbone
In Salon Eric Boehlert analyzes the media's new willingness to ask the government hard questions and makes an obvious but important point:
"It's hard to decide which is more troubling: that it took the national press corps five years to summon up enough courage to report, without apology, that what the Bush administration says and does are often two different things, or that it took the sight of bodies floating facedown in the streets of New Orleans to trigger a change in the press's behavior.
"Think about it. It took the worst U.S. natural disaster in a century -- with a Civil War-like refugee crisis and undiluted chaos throughout New Orleans -- for the mainstream press to conquer, at least temporarily, its collective fear of offending Republicans and the White House and its trepidation toward the angry army of press haters complaining about liberal bias and report what it believed was the truth.
"The consensus among observers of this press phenomenon is that reporters in the besieged city experienced such a huge disconnect between what they were seeing up close and what they were hearing from relief officials (e.g., Brown's early assertion that the federal relief effort was 'going relatively well') that they couldn't help boiling over on the air. No doubt that's true. But for how many months (years?) have reporters in Iraq been witnessing the disconnect between the often burgeoning, bloody insurgency and rhetoric from White House officials who insist the insurgents are actually in their 'final throes'? Why have so little anger and passion about Iraq appeared on TV screens? One answer: There's a powerful conservative push-back against the press when it hits hard on Iraq -- which so far has not occurred regarding Katrina."
Posted by Deborah Branscum at September 7, 2005 11:50 PM