Democrat/media plan #2 on New Orleans fails; what about Iraq?
As we have said, we think that the deplorable Blanco was listening to Democratic consultants which caused her to delay getting the National Guard mobilized. You will recall that an early and absurd Democrat talking point was that the National Guard was not available because they were all in Iraq.
Then the Democrat/media theme became mismanagement: Bush in New Orleans equals Bush in Iraq. In advancing this template, the MSM became wild and reckless. Hugh Hewitt, explaining the template we should now be applying to the MSM in the wake of their scanalously biased and incompetent performance:
Everything that American media could throw at a story, it threw at New Orleans in the aftermath of Katrina. No expense was spared. All hands were on deck. And yet not one news organization produced anything like complete coverage of the events unfolding inside the city’s convention center or the Superdome. Horrific stories of murders and rapes spread like wildfire, reports of little girls with their throats slashed stunned Americans, and hysteria gripped many in the MSM. Weeks later the Los Angeles Times and others began to examine the collapse of the media’s own levees that traditionally hold back rumor and urban myth.
Given this failure to capture the true story in New Orleans even with all of the combined resources of all the MSM working around the clock, why would anyone believe that American media is accurately reporting on the events in Iraq from the Green Zone, in the course of a bloody insurgency fought in a language they don’t understand? If the combined forces of old media couldn’t get one accurate story out of the convention center, why for a moment believe it can get a story out of Mosul or Najaf?
If the MSM’s template has so superseded the facts that New Orleans becomes Fallujah or the Jenin massacre, in the utter absence of facts, is there anything to be done about the MSM except avoid them? If, given an entire year, Marvin Kalb can not figure out that the Rathergate memos are forgeries, is there anything that can be done about such willful ignorance except to avoid exposure to it?