[Marxism] Revolt of the Hacks

["David Altman" <altman_d@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

> From Slate.com

The Rebellion of the Talking Heads
Newscasters, sick of official lies and stonewalling, finally start snarling.
By Jack Shafer
Posted Friday, Sept. 2, 2005, at 2:36 PM PT

A former deputy chief of FEMA told Knight Ridder Newspapers yesterday (Sept.
1) that there "are two kinds of levees?the ones that breached and the ones
that will be breached." A similar aphorism applies to broadcasters: They
come in two varieties, the ones that have gone stark, raving mad on air and
the ones who will.

In the last couple of days, many of the broadcasters reporting from the
bowl-shaped toxic waste dump that was once the city of New Orleans have
stopped playing the role of wind-swept wet men facing down a big storm to
become public advocates for the poor, the displaced, the starving, the
dying, and the dead.

Last night, CNN's Anderson Cooper abandoned the old persona to throttle Sen.
Mary Landrieu, D-La., in a live interview. (See the video or read the
transcript.)

"Does the federal government bear responsibility for what is happening now?
Should they apologize for what is happening now?" Cooper opened.

As if campaigning before the local Democratic Ladies' Club lunch, Landrieu
sing-songed back, "Anderson, there will be plenty of time to discuss all of
those issues, about why, and how, and what, and if." She went on to thank
President Bush, President Clinton, former President Bush, Senators Frist and
Reid, and "all leaders that are coming to Louisiana, and Mississippi, and
Alabama, "for their help.

Her condescending filibuster continued: "Anderson, tonight, I don't know if
you've heard?maybe you all have announced it?but Congress is going to an
unprecedented session to pass a $10 billion supplemental bill tonight to
keep FEMA and the Red Cross up and operating."

Cooper suspended the traditional TV rules of decorum and, approaching tears
of fury, said:

Excuse me, Senator, I'm sorry for interrupting. I haven't heard that,
because, for the last four days, I've been seeing dead bodies in the streets
here in Mississippi. And to listen to politicians thanking each other and
complimenting each other, you know, I got to tell you, there are a lot of
people here who are very upset, and very angry, and very frustrated.

And when they hear politicians slap?you know, thanking one another, it just,
you know, it kind of cuts them the wrong way right now, because literally
there was a body on the streets of this town yesterday being eaten by rats
because this woman had been laying in the street for 48 hours. And there's
not enough facilities to take her up.

Do you get the anger that is out here? ?

I mean, I know you say there's a time and a place for, kind of, you know,
looking back, but this seems to be the time and the place. I mean, there are
people who want answers, and there are people who want someone to stand up
and say, "You know what? We should have done more. Are all the assets being
brought to bear?"

Landrieu kept her cool, probably because she's in Baton Rouge, while the
stink of corpses caused Cooper to tremble in rage all the way to the
commercial break.

Yesterday, on NPR's All Things Considered, Robert Siegel didn't get medieval
on Secretary of Homeland Security Michael Chertoff, in part because the
microphones there are specially fabricated to decant all emotion from the
voices of their reporters. But Siegel aggressively blocked every escape
route that Chertoff took to evade hard questions about "corpses" and "human
waste" piling up at the city's convention center, where thousands were
stranded without provisions. (Siegel gets tough at about minute four in the
audio clip.)

Siegel kept asking Chertoff how long it would take to serve or rescue these
people, and a couple times Chertoff answered that the government was doing a
great job at the Superdome.

When he cautioned Siegel about the danger of relying on "anecdotal" "rumors"
of people in dire straits, Siegel said, no?these are facts presented by
reporters who have covered war zones. There are 2,000 people at the
convention center in need, he said. Having finally broken through the steel
plate that is Chertoff's skull, the secretary confessed he hadn't heard
those reports?reports that the television networks were documenting, live,
with their cameras. Chertoff promised he'd look into the matter.

Several readers directed me to CNN reporter Miles O'Brien's hard-boiled
interview with Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour in which he repeatedly invited
the governor to agree with him that the federal government had "dropped the
ball." When Barbour demurred on this and other points of culpability,
O'Brien came back at him without the politesse reporters usually extend to
dissembling pols.

I recall Andrea Mitchell all but editorializing on NBC the other night about
Congress taking its sweet time to reconvene and pass a hurricane-relief bill
? Fox News Channel's Shepard Smith chasing after a mute police officer down
the New Orleans freeway overpass and asking in outrage when the stranded
would get help ? and MSNBC's Joe Scarborough in Biloxi transforming himself
into the voice of the disenfranchised to put in a good word for the looters:

You got to understand that these are people who have young babies who
haven't had water in four days, in some cases, haven't had formula, haven't
had basic necessities. I just wonder what you would do, what I would do if
we were in a situation where our 15-month-old child or our 2-year-old baby
needed something to stay alive. I don't know what you would do. I know I
would do anything it took to get what they needed.

Now, I should be getting it from the federal government if I am in New
Orleans, from the state government. But I will tell you what. It is amateur
hour, and it has been amateur hour over the past four or five days. This is
completely different, friends, from the way the crises were handled in
Florida last year, four hurricanes, two of them major, it was handled with
ruthless efficiency. I know. I was there. That is not happening tonight in
New Orleans.

This morning the discontent spread to the anchor booth at CNN, as Wonkette
notes, when Soledad O'Brien openly mocked FEMA in an interview with its
director, Michael Brown:

As you can tell, the situation clearly is deteriorating. You've got armed
bandits roving the streets. They're heavily armed. You've got people living
out on the streets with absolutely no protection, no help whatsoever, no
food, no water. How many armed National Guardsmen do you have on the ground
right now? ?

How is it possible that we're getting better intel than you're getting? ?

FEMA has been on the ground for four days, going into the fifth day. Why no
massive airdrop of food and water? In Banda Aceh, in Indonesia, they got
food dropped two days after the tsunami struck. ?

It's five days that FEMA has been on the ground. The head of police says
it's been five days that FEMA has been there. The mayor, the former mayor,
putting out SOS's on Tuesday morning, crying on national television, saying
please send in some troops. So the idea that, yes, I understand that you're
feeding people and trying to get in there now, but it's Friday. It's Friday.
?

CNN anchor Jack Cafferty growled about the media coverage of Katrina's
victims yesterday on Wolf Blitzer's The Situation Room, name-checking me and
citing my Wednesday column about the broadcasters' failure to acknowledge
the race and economic class of the hardest-hit.

Said Cafferty:

We knew it was coming. And yet, the poorest and the neediest and the most
helpless of those in New Orleans, well, they're still there, aren't they?
Despite the many angles of this tragedy?and lord knows there've been a lot
of them in New Orleans?there is a great big elephant in the living room that
the media seems content to ignore.

That would be until now. Slate.com's Jack Shafer wrote today in his column
that television coverage has shied away from talking about race and class.
Shafer says that we in the media are ignoring the fact that almost all of
the victims in New Orleans are black and poor. And he's right. Almost every
person we've seen, from the families stranded on their rooftops waiting to
be rescued, to the looters, to the people holed up in the Superdome, are
black and poor.

Many of them didn't follow the evacuation orders because they didn't have
the means to get out of town. They just couldn't do it. A lot of them are
sick, a lot of them don't have cars, a lot of them just didn't have the
means to leave "The Big Easy." And they're still there.

This gave the Washington-based Blitzer a perfect opening to comment on race
and class, but he stumbled and fell into a "Campanis moment." While airing
file footage of victims trudging through hip-deep water looking for help,
Blitzer, no racist, said:

You simply get chills every time you see these poor individuals, as Jack
Cafferty just pointed out, so tragically, so many of these people, almost
all of them that we see, are so poor and they are so black, and this is
going to raise lots of questions for people who are watching this story
unfold. [Emphasis added.]

(Note to Blitzer: You might be one of those guys, like Campanis, who
shouldn't talk about race extemporaneously. Next time, try channeling your
outrage from the pages of a well-thought-out news script.)

The rebellion of the talking heads reached its culmination today as CNN.com
contrasted "the official version" of events in New Orleans with its
"in-the-trenches" account by its reporters and authoritative sources. Muted
compared to the on-air growling, the Web story still portrays the government
as a pack of liars, or worse, as bumbling idiots. The broadcasters' angry
dispatches break with the "public face" they usually give their work:
polite, patient, neutral, generous. A steady diet of such confrontational
reporting would probably be as edifying as a Jerry Springer show. But when
the going gets this tough?when government incompetence and lies become so
insurmountable?sometimes the only way to get the story is by getting mad.

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