by Pat Lang


“They Shoot News Anchors, Don’t They? – Media moguls, not looters, killed Katrina’s truth tellers,” by Nikki Finke, Los Angeles Weekly, Sept. 16-22, 2005


People need to read this article. I have been around the national media enough in the last few years to recognize the essential truth of much of what this man has to say.


I found the quality of reporting in the Katrina crisis to be very good, amazingly good, but I suspected that once the shock of the disaster wore off, television news would be back to “softballing” criticism of the White House and repeating the “talking points” of the day.


With a few exceptions we no longer have a press/media in this country that functions as a “fourth estate.” Instead, we have an industry that functions as all industries function. In business the Bottom Line is all, and advantage must be sought where it can be found. If that means that you have to muzzle your reporters, then, from the point of view of corporate “rulers” of the media, so be it!

Excerpt below:

At first, only CNN appeared not to have thoroughly read the proverbial memo. It was the only network, on air and on its Web site, to compare and contrast the wildly contradictory statements by federal, state and local officials, sometimes within hours, but often within minutes of each other. It was CNN that posted the first full transcript of New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin’s profanity- and passion-filled September 2 interview on local radio. It was also CNN that first exposed the gruesome nature of the conditions at the Superdome, at the convention center and in the hospital corridors. Its broadcasters were the first to keep a heart-wrenching online blog during Katrina. Even as late as September 6, political correspondent Ed Henry was the first to counter the claims by House Majority Leader Tom DeLay that local officials and not the feds were to blame, by reporting that congressional Republicans, in a secret confab, were giving the Bush administration a big fat F.


Then the fix was in.


On September 8, CNN anchorette Kyra Phillips was chewing into House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi for “continuing to criticize the administration, and criticize the director of FEMA. …


Read all of this article at the Los Angeles Weekly.



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“Drinking the Kool-Aid,” Middle East Policy Council Journal, Vol. XI, Summer 2004, No. 2