KATRINA HYSTERIA: Michael Novak Delivers a Meaty Slap to Blubbering Media Blabbermouths
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by Richard Poe Thursday, September 15, 2005 1:10 pm Eastern Time |
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Regarding the hysterical reportage of Hurricane Katrina, columnist Michael Novak remarks that, “most of our television reporters may possibly be too highly educated, hothouse protected, delicate, and inexperienced in the horrors of our world, to maintain a hardened eye on dreadful events. They are too easily shocked, too easily blown away.”
Indeed. In a National Review column of September 14, Novak describes the flash flood that struck his native Johnstown, Pennsylvania in 1889, killing 2,280 of the town’s 12,000 people.
by Richard Poe
September 15, 2005 01:10 PM ET
Cross-posted from MoonbatCentral.com 09.15.05
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6 Responses to “KATRINA HYSTERIA: Michael Novak Delivers a Meaty Slap to Blubbering Media Blabbermouths”Trackbacks
Check out what others are saying about this post...I was also deeply suspicious that some of the horror stories reported breathlessly in the first few days, especially from within the Superdome, never happened. Five-year-old girls raped, the throat of a little boy slit, dead babies stacked in refrigerator units, a hundred dead bodies stuffed under stadium seats. The reporting from the first five days or so will soon deserve a thorough going-over. No evidence of the worst stories has afterwards emerged, so far as I can see.
Novak’s spot on. Well, that’s the way of cable news coverage: Hey, there’s air time to fill –say anything. Unfairly (but what the heck), I hold print journalists to a higher standard because they have more time to reflect and have (or should have) editors who ask what their backup is on key assertions.
I have had to reconsider too: After querying here and elsewhere for days why an incident of national significance wasn’t declared before the hurricane hit the Gulf, I learned that such a declaration was automatically concurrent with the president’s emergency declaration.
Which means, more or less, that the federal response to Katrina was pretty much as good as it gets. (And one can extrapolate accordingly to a surprise attack by terrorists.) Paraphrasing Novak: people die, people will die; Americans die, Americans will die — we’re not exempt.
I was embarrassed by Fox. Geraldo is a grandstanding pussy (and always has been) and Shep is just a softhearted guy. Neither should have been there.
I expect the other networks to exploit everything for impact moments, but I thought Fox was above it. I guess they’ve gotten too comfortable with their total domination of the commie networks and are starting to get cheesy. They need to stop.
I think Shepard Smith’s reporting was damning… of Mayor Nagin and Governess Blanco. Reporting from a designated city disaster shelter that was never stocked with food and water, ever, can’t be spun into a positive for city management. The belated mandatory evacuation order and the even more belated activation of the Louisiana Guard is no one’s fault but Blanco’s.
On a wider scale, CNN was hyperbolizing that state police were preventing people from leaving a bridge. It was Fox that told me these people were prisoners evacuated from a New Orleans jailhouse.
Fox ain’t bad, not like the rest.
True. I just think they’re gettin’ complacent in their success.
As for Nagin and Blanco, they will remain untouched and in power. Then they will force the rest of the state to pay for the return of their voting blocs to the projects and everything will be as before.
As far as I’m concerned, Fox is the best but I was disappointed when they hired Geraldo and also Greta. These two are nothing more than Clinton apologists. And I agree with Rightwingmac about geraldo– I never could stand that little grandstanding punk. Bill O’Reilly really puts the heat on the liars and the crooks and I really like him except he pisses me off when he gives a soap-box to that lying,racist S.O.B. Al axle grease hair Sharpton! Nobody wants to hear his crap! I think Bill is hurting himself and Fox by doing this. Still, he does expose a lot of chicanery to the public!
“most of our television reporters may possibly be too highly educated, hothouse protected, delicate, and inexperienced in the horrors of our world, to maintain a hardened eye on dreadful events. They are too easily shocked, too easily blown away.”
How can this alleged isolation explain the blatant dishonesty of these same tv reporters? Is lying and fabricate news also a part of their ‘protected’ learning experience?