"The press has jumped the shark"

Jeff Goldstein nails it as he reminds the Legacy Press of how they bungled the Katrina disaster reporting.  He does so by dissecting Jonah Goldberg's column in National Review which, although trying to criticize the press for its rumor-mongering, actually misses most of the points that need to be made, and rationalizes away some of the press' failing to verify their facts before publishing them.

I typically like Jonah Goldberg’s columns, but today’s effort, “Gale-Force Exaggeration:  Katrina’s other consequence,” is a feel-good porridge of glancing recrimination and affected, world-weary “realism”—one that inadvertantly points up the media culture’s complicity in driving news rather than reporting it, as well as its tendency to circle the wagons and appear circumspect in the face of public dissatisfaction, when what it should be doing is taking a good, hard, honest look at itself.

...Were Goldberg really interested in being “fair,” he wouldn’t suggest any kind of equivalency between the media (from a narrative standpoint, the “first responders") and “almost everyone else” in order to suggest that there is plenty of blame to go around—a trope of marked intellectual laziness that, sadly, has been the fallback position of too many of those presuming to comment on the storm and its (political and cultural) fallout.

How many times have you heard someone say "there's plenty of blame to go around" when discussing the failures of emergency management in NOLA after Katrina?  That's your cue that they really don't want to explore the issue.  It's "intellectual laziness," as Jeff said.

Goldberg knows that blogs feed off of mainstream media reports, and that many of them (including this one), were cautioning against buying into the hysteria and hyperbole being pumped at us by on-the-scene reporters like Shepard Smith or Anderson Cooper, and by print reports that were poorly sourced and hastily written.  That the majority of the Cornerites (you there, Rod Dreher?) lost their sh[*]t and began screaming and wringing their hands is not proof, however, of a wider failure by the secondary responders in the blogosphere to view those reports critically—though there were certainly plenty who did buy into the hype, largely (consciously or unconsciously) out of some degree of political opportunism:  many on the left, for instance, seized on the reports to beat up on the administration and to use the supposed “horrors” to advance longstanding ideological and policy arguments, from environmental reform to race and poverty initiatives; and many on the right, fearing that the spectacle of 10,000 mostly black bodies found in the waterlogged wreckage of New Orleans might be used to bludgeon them as uncaring capitalist warmongers, rushed to show their outrage, as well—though they rejected “progressive” political critiques and concentrated their ire on bureaucratic delays and local mismanagements.

The Legacy Media have been congratulating themselves a great deal lately about how wonderfully they have handled Katrina reporting.  The truth is that rather than great reporting, we got great rumor-mongering instead.  That's nothing to feel so good about.

I heartily recommend that you read the whole thing.

(Hat tip to Glenn Reynolds.)

UPDATE:  Thanks to Dougie Pundit for the link.  That's a new blog, to me.