GayPatriot

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Just like the Shinbone Star, MSM neglects the facts, prints the legend

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Last night, I watched a movie which instantly joined Shane and Clint Eastwood‘s Unforgiven as one of my favorite Westerns. In The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, James Stewart plays Ransom Stoddard, a lawyer who thinks he can deal with Liberty Valance, a bloodthirsty bandit, through the law, but ends up facing him in a gun battle. Legend has it that he shot Liberty Valance (Lee Marvin), but in reality, hiding in the shadows, Tom Doniphon (John Wayne) fires the bullet that finishes off the villain. When, years later, Stoddard returns to the town for Doniphon’s funeral, he tells the press the true story, the editor of the Shinbone Star refuses to use it, saying “When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.”

It seems in the wake of the Hurricane Katrina, the MSM is not much different from its fictional counterpart. In this case, the media made the legend–that President Bush and the federal government failed miserably in response to this once-in-a-century catastrophe. As the resignation earlier today of FEMA head Michael Brown indicates, the federal response was far from perfect, but as this blog (e.g., here, here and here) and others have shown, local agencies made the lion’s share of mistakes in the evacuation and recovery efforts.

But, despite this evidence, the MSM continues to report the legend. In an AP article today, Jennifer Loven notes that the president visited New Orleans today with “New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin and Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Blanco — both of whom have criticized the federal response.” Ms. Loven focuses only on criticism of the president and neglects to mention that many have criticized those two individuals for flawed city and state responses (respectively) to the disaster.

Mainstream broadcast media report a similar legend as well. In a post last Thursday (final UPDATE), Polipundit’s Lorie Byrd observed that when she was watching CNN’s coverage of the disaster

it has been all about Washington and Bush and politics. No act of God. No worst natural disaster in the history of America. No heroes helping their neighbors. No mayor failing to evacuate his constituents, and then putting his Hyatt friends in front of those taking refuge at the Superdome in line for a bus out of town. No governor hemming and hawing and sobbing and failing to take action. Nope. I have only been watching for 30 minutes now. I admit that if I watched long enough maybe I would see some of those stories as well. But who can stand to watch CNN for that long?

It seems the MSM has chosen its theme–its legend, if you will–and insists on reporting on the criticism leveled against President Bush and federal authorities. For the media, the legend of the president’s failure has already become fact.

Just look again at Loven’s AP piece where she address only the criticism leveled against the president and federal officials while ignoring that leveled against local officials. In its coverage of the federal response to Hurricane Katrina, the MSM show themselves to be the real world equivalent of the Shinbone Star. By and large, they’re not interested in reporting the facts, but in spinning their own legends, particularly those which paint the president, his supporters and policies in a negative light.

-Dan (AKA GayPatriotWest): GayPatriotWest@aol.com

UPDATE: Michelle Malkin has more on CNN’s bias here (and that of other Shinbone Star MSM outlets. (HT: Instapundit).

Comments

  1. Dan:

    As I’ve written Bruce earlier, this isn’t necessarily a political phenomenon as much as a cultural one. To the Left in America (to include the MSM), the solution to every problem is the federal government. When there’s a problem, there simply is no local or state solution. All that is good and decent comes from the centralized, federal government. They’re not critical of Blanco or Nagin because it hasn’t ever occured to them to do so. It’s not in their nature.

    By contrast, George W. Bush, a successful and highly-praised governor himself, is of the school of thought wherein first responders and even to an extent strategic planning is done at the state and local level. To hold him to the standard that he should, as president, solve every problem facing every locality and county in the nation is fruitless because that’s not the way he operates.

    For what it’s worth, if everything had gone right, they’d probably be praising Bush. Okay, well maybe that’s when the politics would come into the picture.

  3. You’re both wrong. If everything had gone right, the liberals would still be bitching. There’s no way in hell that liberals would EVER swallow their arrogance and praise Bush for anything.

    BTW, I suspect Loven is terrified of getting beat up by Landrieu. Somebody needs to take her out to the woodshed. Talk about “photo ops”? What has she been doing since the storm passed?

  6. Constanine I got. I’m still trying to figure out the final scene of Sin City though.

    It’s interesting that you link movies with the Hurricane Katrina response. I think the MSM spinning the Hurricane Katrina response into an anti-Bush propaganda crusade is part of what happened, but the other part is after all the crime shows and disaster movies they’ve seen, people have an unrealistic expectation that an hour after disaster strikes, everything will be well-in-hand. Since the left largely inhabits a Hollywood-fantasyland, they are much more susceptible to this unrealistc expectation.

    The Federal response could have been better… and the local response could have been much, much, much better. But, taking into consideration the scope of the damage and comparing the response to Katrina to other hurricanes, the response was not nearly as terrible as the media would have one believe. And the “funding for the levees” canard was totally bogus, but nevertheless seems destined to join the Pantheon of Leftist Urban Mythology. The Bush’s Administration didn’t botch the response so much as they botched the PR. Once again, they were naive enough to expect that the media would be fair in its coverage, and so naive that they didn’t think their political opposition would politicize a major disaster this way… to score political points from the suffering of people. That, and the Bushies said some stupid things, and Michael Brown had no business running anything more complicated than a Pony Ride concession. But a reasonable person can only conclude that the media and the left’s treatment of this disaster has been a three-ring propaganda circus. And if you think the MSM have been bad, just wait until the Michael Moore movie comes out.

  8. Oh, and about the levees:

    I was flipping through last night at the gym (yes, I looked hot on the treadmill!) and saw that the History Channel had already made a documentary in which they mention about how Bush had underfunded the levees.

    What was that about the writers of history?

  11. I’d still like to hear from people about how they feel about conservatives attempting to clamp down on showing the dead bodies in New Orleans, while you actively promote video links to to the devastation of the 9/11 tragedy.

  16. I don’t think it’s the sight of dead bodies that troubles me as much as the context. The media stopped showing 9/11 footage becuase it was playing against their tableau of America sucking and instead put emphasis on how we were attacked. If we saw 9/11 footage more often, more people may recall why we’re fighting, and that would be detremental to the MSM’s hope that people turn against the war.
    On the other hand, photos of flag-draped coffins fit perfectly with the MSM’s desire to focus only on the costs of the war. Wonder why the MSM with all that free time on their hands (what, with not being allowed into funerals and all) hasn’t been to a single newly-opened school or hospital in Iraq. Oh, that’s right, they want to see blood there (just not in NYC on 9/11).
    And as far as Katrina is concerned, bring on those pics if you like, too, but keep it in the context of the hundreds of empty busses that could have carried those people out of town to safety.