Media Rising

Dan Froomkin:

The White House press corps is sensing a political sea change caused by Katrina. Bush and his aides are finding it impossible to wave off the incontrovertible facts and heart-rend[er]ing images emerging from the lake that was once a great American city. They're finding it harder to set the news agenda. And the scathing criticism is becoming increasingly bipartisan, freeing reporters from the obligation to make every White House story sound like one with two sides equally based in reality.

Bush may be paying the price for the years during which his rhetoric and reality have been at times irreconcilable. After all, this post-Katrina press awakening is not the result of reporters expressing their personal or political opinions so much as it is about their asking tough questions based on what they, and others, have seen with their own eyes.

As Margie says in Fargo, "I gotta disagree with your police work a bit there Dan"


Attack poodles is more like it. The media hasn't changed, but the context has.

First, Bush is a quacking duck...and getting quackier all the time. This is particularly crippling for a politician who started out crippled by less than stellar brain power, lousy ideology, lousy policy, lousy execution, and crooked tactics.

Next, why now? The Bushies have been screwing up everything they touch for five years. The media is "waking up" now? There has been plenty of corruption, lies and incompetence for the media to cook Bush long ago. Now they smell blood in water? Hell, they've been swimming in blood for years without most of them doing their jobs. My god, many of them (hello Judy Miller) have been complicit in the nonsense called the Bush administration!

Finally. Have any of the dynamics that screwed the media up in the first place really changed? Corporate-concentrated ownership, greed, lack of government oversight, and ratings driven reporting are all still in place. I don't know, but I guess we'll find out for sure via AmericaBlog:

Bob Brigham has just reported [from N.O.] - and this is why we need OUR folks on the ground, to report this stuff - the military is banning all reporters from New Orleans. Outrageous. If you kill a couple thousand people, you definitely want to keep the media and the public from finding out.

Bush is literally trying to hide the bodies. This is beyond outrageous.

[...]

Get a media helicopter, fly in, and let them shoot you down. Do you really think the Natl Guard is going to shoot down CNN? Especially if they have a few Democratic congressmen on board? Doubt it. And are they going to arrest those Democratic congressmen for taking photos of the recovery? Doubt it.

If this is any indication, I'm not hopeful.

To the degree it's changing, it's like so much else in our society, a fad. It's finally getting to be "cool" to dislike Bush. Popular culture is picking up the momentum of anti-Bush and the attack poodles simply follow along. While it's a welcome trend, I can't get too worked up in hoping that, "the media is rising" and that anything of substance will really change down the line. Karl Rove is no genius. He's just an astute observer of the superficiality of American culture.