On Sunday, the Star Tribune's reader representative, Kate Parry, ran an
excellent column that summarized the disgust we have been feeling over the government's bungling before, during and after Katrina:
I have never seen our readers so angry....
The Star Tribune, which for two weeks has offered stories and photos that have made us weep over the human toll of this catastrophe, must not fail these readers in holding government accountable for a massive failure of leadership that contributed to the death toll.
Stories that lay bare the flawed response before, during and after the hurricane must be put on equal footing with the wrenching stories of human catastrophe as the coverage moves forward...
More after the break...
The Parry article continues (ellipses added where text was removed):
The coverage these past two weeks has moved many of our readers, first to grief and then to indignation.....
The newspaper needs to tap into that conversation here in Minnesota, write about it and urge others to chime in. If there's a part of this story that has gone largely unreported, it is this fury from normally stoic Minnesotans. (emphasis mine)
"On Sunday [Sept. 4] we devoted more than a page to how it could have happened," noted Managing Editor Scott Gillespie, who has been faced daily with the tough decision of what to put on page one: more stories and photos illuminating the extent of the human tragedy or stories digging into the failures of leadership. "We've had a FEMA or government mismanagement story almost every day," he said, although they hadn't made it to page one. "We've been looking for a good page one candidate that answers a lot of questions."
On Thursday, this part of the story finally made page one as criticism of FEMA Director Michael Brown boiled over. That's where the story of government mismanagement should stay as the search for victims recedes and the search for answers intensifies. Holding the government accountable on behalf of our readers is a newspaper's core purpose in a democracy.
To me, this article is remarkably important because it underscores how we need to be able to hold the government accountable even as we work to solve the tragic problems at hand. I am glad to see another major MSM outlet incisively remind us that we don't have to put criticism on hold as so many Republicans would suggest (to tip the hat to a DKos writer's analogy, we can spend the beans in two places at the same time).
I heard Sen. Susan Collins lay down the party line yesterday as "we should be fixing problems instead of fixing blame." If she and her ilk are claiming that they can't be bothered to face righteous heat while they're busy cleaning up a mess significantly of their own making, then they really are in the wrong damned business.