After more than four years of Bush's greed and incompetence, it is suddenly acceptable for
the MSM to report and criticize his photo-op approach to complex problems. Most notable was Anderson Cooper yelling at Senator Landrieu, "Don't you get it yet?" when she sucked up to Bush while rats nibbled on dead Americans.
Last night Faux News reporters (Shepard Smith?) on the ground in New Orleans would not allow O'Reilly to interrupt his report with excuses. Mr. "Shut Up" himself got shut up by his people.
But I knew the rules had changed when Bush-enabler Lou Dobbs questioned 3 of the usual talking heads on his panel...
The participants represented what passes for a balanced panel of Big News celebrities. Dobbs encouraged them with comments like "This disaster response has been, by nearly every measure, a disaster.", then "I think the American people may be getting tired of these so-called press conferences imposing on issues without being able to back up a reality". Reality-based reporting... the new trend?
Time's Karen Tumulty: ...today he [Bush] began by saying that the effect has been unacceptable, but by midday he was praising the head of FEMA... ...as having done a terrific job. You don't get a sense that, you know, anybody is willing to sort of wrap their arms around this even yet.
LA Times Ron Brownstein: ...it has been one of the worst weeks for the federal government in my adult lifetime.
Look, reality bites, and in this case the president would be better served to be the one out there, the first one out there acknowledging what Americans are seeing every day. This has not been adequate. It's been far from adequate... we are not ready for this, a catastrophe which was among the most studied and anticipated of anything on the books...
US News & World Report's Roger Simon: ...it shows how unprepared we are for a national attack. This is one medium-sized city, 489,000 people, and we couldn't handle the problem there. The federal response was inadequate, and it remains inadequate.
Dobbs even asserted as fact that race and class discrimination determined who evacuated and who died. Egads! Could this attitude seep into coverage of the bankruptcy and energy bills?
The anchors and editors can no longer ignore their own on-site reporters' bitter description of the human devastation; many anchors and editors are joining them. This is a slippery slope which could lead to... MSM reports that Iraq is a quagmire grounded on lies.
MSM still reports which Governors or Senators had circle jerks with Bush, but now they note that self-love does not alleviate the devastation or excuse the incompetence.
I've yet to see any reporter interrupt a politician's praise of National Guardsman to point out that the issue is how many National Guardsman were out-of-country. But at this rate, some politician may soon concede that, yes, maybe the National Guard troops and equipment in Iraq might have saved thousands of lives here at home.