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September 10, 2005

Media and Politics Clash in the Wake of Katrina

Tim Rutten has a very perceptive piece in today's Los Angeles Times. He deals with the clash, sometimes at gunpoint, between politics and the media as it is unfolding in the wake of the Katrina debacle.

Here is a sample or two:

The electorate's popular genius always has been an aversion to ideology. That rejection of dogma historically has expressed itself in a preference for what Arthur Schlesinger termed "the politics of remedy." American people, in other words, want their government to solve the problems they can't solve for themselves — like vast, city-destroying natural catastrophes.

This inclination is a great inconvenience to the practitioners of our new paint-pot politics, who won't be satisfied until every inch of the country has been re-colored red or blue. To complete their makeover, they need the rest of the country to do what they do: demand news that comports with their politics rather than politics that accord with the facts. They want an electorate that puts political purity ahead of solutions.

These are the people, inside the administration and out, who have a stake in discrediting the independent reporting now coming out of Louisiana and the Gulf Coast as "ideologically biased," or "an attempt to play the blame game." These are the people who don't want you to see pictures of our dead.

Rutten's notes the staggering differences in perception between whites and blacks, as seen in a recent Pew poll, of the Government response after Katrina hit.

The survey found a yawning gap — 71% of blacks feel the disaster demonstrates that racial inequality remains a major problem, while 56% of whites do not agree; 66% of African Americans think the government would have responded more quickly if most of the victims had been white, a proposition with which 77% of whites disagree.

Are we really to believe that Blitzer and CNN created this disparity in attitudes?

Give the whole thing a read.

Posted by Duane Smith at September 10, 2005 10:57 AM | Read more on Current Events |

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