Another Man’s “Story of the Year”
According to Michael Medved, it’s the “crash of confidence in media”, best exemplified in the ‘reporting’ in Katrina’s aftermath. Writing in yesterday’s Jewish World Review, Medved says:
Hysterical news accounts, initially exaggerating dead victims by a factor of more than 10 to one, demonstrated the irresponsible nature of U.S. media. Similarly, news coverage of the Iraq war always emphasizes the negative, downplaying all positive developments. More and more in 2005, the public distrusted mainstream media, with opinion surveys showing journalists even less trusted than politicians.
That’s a devastating paragraph when you consider how low people think of politicians, especially congressional Democrats, whose approval ratings are in the 20’s. I could cite a number of examples of how irresponsible they’ve been but one that leaps to mind is Michael Isikoff’s line from Hardball:
Isikoff proudly said the following:
But also, Senator Warner had a press conference about this today and wasn’t very conclusive. He said, look, he went to this briefing with other people at the pentagon who said we have to get the word out that schools are opening and hospitals are opening and nobody is covering that. Sounds like every politician is complaining about the press. Well, welcome to the news biz. We don’t cover hospital and school openings. We cover bombings.
Mr. Isikoff, don’t you think it’s time you did? Or don’t you think this is something that the public “has a right to know”? After all, every story on a politician’s personal life is justified with the media mantra of “The public has a right to know.” If that applies to personal lives, why doesn’t it apply to information that would inform the public on the most serious issues of the day?
As for Katrina’s ‘reporting’, I’d call that the worst black eye the Agenda Media’s ever gotten. And they think it was their shining moment. Witness this exchange between Hugh Hewitt and his other panelists on the “Newshour with Jim Lehrer”:
JEFFREY BROWN: Keith Woods in terms of telling the whole story, what did you like & what did you dislike?
KEITH WOODS: Well, I did like the aggressiveness of the journalists throughout, I liked the fact that for a good part of this reporting the journalists brought themselves to the reporting a sense of passion, a sense of empathy, a sense of understanding that they were not telling an ordinary story any more than the Sept. 11 attacks were an ordinary story. So I like the fact that journalism understood the size of this story from the very beginning & brought to bear the kinds of resources and the kind of passion in the coverage that we saw.
JEFFREY BROWN: And, Mr. Hewitt, same question, what did you like & what did you dislike?
HUGH HEWITT: Well, Keith just said they didn’t report an ordinary story; in fact they were reporting lies. The central part of this story, what went on at the convention center & the Superdome was wrong. American media threw everything they had at this story, all the bureaus, all the networks, all the newspapers, everything went to New Orleans, & yet they couldn’t get inside the convention center, they couldn’t get inside the Superdome to dispel the lurid, the hysterical, the salaciousness of the reporting.
I have in mind especially the throat-slashed seven-year-old girl who had been gang-raped at the convention center, didn’t happen. In fact, there were no rapes at the convention center or the Superdome that have yet been corroborated in any way.
There weren’t stacks of bodies in the freezer. But America was riveted by this reporting, wholesale collapse of the media’s own levees they let in all the rumors, and all the innuendo, all the first-person story because they were caught up in this own emotionalism. Exactly what Keith was praising I think led to one of the worst weeks of reporting in the history of American media…
I think that sums things up perfectly. The Agenda Media: They just can’t be trusted.
Cross-posted at LetFreedomRing