The real story of Katrina is the mainstream media riot:
What is the real story of Katrina is (I suggest) not so much that nature wrought fury on land, water, people, property, and animals, not at all anything about racism, not much about federal government incompetence. The real story is that the mainstream media rioted.
They used the storm and its attendant sorrows to continue their endless attack on George W. Bush. Wildly inflated stories about the number of dead and missing, totally made up old wives’ tales of racism, breathless accounts of Bush’s neglect that are utterly devoid of truth and of historical context — this is what the mainstream media gave us. The use of floating corpses, of horror stories of plagues, the sad faces of refugees, the long-faced phony accusations of intentional neglect and racism — anything is grist for the media’s endless attempts to undermine the electorate’s choice last November. It is sad, but true that the media will use even the most heart breaking truths — and then add total inventions — to try to weaken and then evict from office a man who has done nothing wrong, but has instead turned himself inside out to help the real victims.
Let’s hope this narrative replaces the official one in the days to come.
See related observations by Jeff Goldstein, Jim Pinkerton, John Cole, and Knoxville’s answer to Lewis and Clark professor Jack Bogdanski, Glenn Reynolds.
It’s a nice try, but when Fox News and Joe Scarborough are saying the same things, this is a little more than the “get Bush” crowd. Ben Stein should have quit when he was ahead with “Ferris Bueller.”
The Mainstream Media reaction to Katrina wasn’t exactly a riot, because it had a purpose; it was more like an rebellion against the blogs, and Fox News and Scarborough weren’t immune.