Blame the media

The real reason FEMA couldn't get troops down to New Orleans, provide necessary food and water to hundreds of people stranded at the Superdome and the Convention Center, sent trucks of ice on a nationwide tour rather than deploying them to storm stricken areas, or even figure out the difference between Charleston, West Virginia and Charleston, South Carolina?

It's the media's fault, of course.

Hugh claims the media failed to "capture the true story" that took place in New Orleans. I'm not sure what story he means. If he means the story of thousands of people suffering after having their homes destroyed and their lives torn apart, I guess he's right. If he's referring to the story of those people having no food or water, sometimes for as long as five days, he's right there, too. Maybe he meant the story of those survivors begging and pleading for help from the only people who showed up for them - the news media. He's right.

The real story wasn't the fact that America seemed to abandon these thousands of people and the federal government looked clueless in it's response.

The real story in Hugh's eyes must be the fact that the media reported stories it heard from those on the ground as fact and truth and did not spend the requisite days and weeks verifying them as true.

And where did the media get these stories from? From the people who were on the ground in New Orleans, who claimed to witness these things happening. They were citizens who reported their stories to journalists, who then passed along these stories to the public. Citizen reporters gave the media these stories. The same sort of citizen reporters that the right is frequently apt to praise when they are called bloggers.

Clearly this has become an opportunity for the right bloggers to jump on the media as biased and untrustworthy. But it's important to remember that bloggers are little more than overtly biased journalists. They find stories that support their end. Their worldview guides how they read the news. Those that report the story try not to let that interfere. Sometimes it does, and that's when either side pounces.

Think the media is slanted right? Check out the righty blogs. Think it's slanted left? Media Matters leads the charge agianst that. But to see how far the right is willing to go, check out this snippet from a comment in a post at Blogs for Bush about this very topic:

Here's a story about the broken levees in NOLA at MSNBC by Lisa Meyers the the MSM is ignoring...

See it? MSNBC is reporting a story, yet the "MSM" is ignoring it. Meaning MSNBC is not a part of the MSM, a claim I think most people would have a serious problem with. But so it goes on the right side of the blogs.

The MSM is not dying because of bloggers, or because it is untrustworthy. Blogging stories mostly are based on these MSM accounts. The problem for media outlets is how they capitalize on the advent of new technology. How they decide to adapt to the web.

The L.A. Times called the other day to offer me a subscription, and I told the woman who called that I didn't need to subscribe because I read it for free on the web. Does it mean that I don't read the L.A. Times? No, I do. It's just that I'm not paying for it in a traditional way. And I imagine you find a growing number of people saving themselves a few dollars a month by reading online what they used to have to read in black and white.

The right has been sounding the death knell of media for a year and a half now, yet it still seems that media is an important part of everyday life. I seriously doubt it's going anywhere.

And as for the right? Well, I've argued before that their problem isn't media bias, but rather the fact they the truth is not on their side when it comes to policy. And I see no reason at this point to retract that statement.