In a comment on the previous post about the AP and media neutrality, Harry Shearer makes an excellent point – that, in addition to the Iraq war runup and political coverage, the media also failed in its post-Katrina coverage:
Framing it as a natural disaster–as opposed to the ‘greatest engineering disaster since Chernobyl’–and further framing it as a basically black tragedy (because the black people in the Dome and Convention Center were easier to reach and tape than the white people stranded on their roofs in St. Bernard Parish–was compounded by media folks patting themselves on the back for their “ballsy’ coverage.
I agree. New Orleans’ post-Katrina trajectory could have been a lot different had the media taken a more aggressive role in reporting what actually happened (a civic/government failure to secure citizens’ safety) as opposed to the misleading shorthand version of it that emerged in the immediate aftermath of the storm (heckuva job, Brownie).
But I’d draw a distinction between the media treatment of post-Katrina New Orleans and the two other examples. Pre-Iraq reporting and campaign coverage are both examples of the successful co-optation and/or exploitation of the mainstream media’s “neutrality” by the Bush-Rove political project. That project turned out to be not just misleading, but substantively disastrous. So the media have deservedly lost credibility along with Bush. And, like Bush, many media outlets won’t acknowledge anything was or is amiss. You can’t be “neutral” if you’re living in a fantasy.
The failure to protect New Orleans is both more profound and literally more dangerous than the Iraq misadventure or the rise of Drudge-style politics. More profound because it was a breakdown at all levels of government that led to the levee failures, and those institutional problems haven’t been fixed. More dangerous because it killed a lot of people, and because more will likely die in the future – in New Orleans and elsewhere – as sea levels rise and storms likely grow more intense. But the media failure to “get” this isn’t so much an failure of neutrality undermined by ideology (though there is an element of that) as it is just general media stupidity and short-sightedness, reflecting American society’s stupidity and short-sightedness. Which is sad, and scary. But maybe some new political leadership can begin to address that problem.
