By Pepper of the Daily Pepper
Has anyone else noticed the sudden burst of "the media exaggerated Hurricane Katrina conditions" stories? On Thursday, "The NewsHour With Jim Lehrer" wasted a large chunk of time debating whether or not journalists made too much hay out of the chaos at the Superdome and Convention Center.
The repugnant Hugh Hewitt was invited as a panelist, which is an indication that PBS is rolling right over in response to those who are saying they're too liberal. Among the many gems of the show, Hewitt said that the week of Katrina coverage "was one of the worst weeks of reporting in the American media.... How can we trust the American media in Iraq? We really can't." (Powerline absolutely adored those kinds of statements and huzzahed Hewitt's comments.)
A message to anyone who says, "The media exaggerated the death toll. It's not so bad": Try telling that to a relative of someone who wasn't injured by Katrina but who went hungry waiting for help. Try telling that to someone who slipped on excrement and had to breathe the foul air of the Superdome. Those people didn't have to suffer, and they didn't have to die. Given the chaos of the situation, of course exaggerations and confusion would result, as Hewitt's fellow panelists, Carl Quintanilla and Keith Woods, tried to explain. Reporters were reporting. Hugh Hewitt shouldn't be sitting on his tuffet and tut-tutting the reporters wading in the muck. As far as I'm concerned, 1,000 is a pretty dadgummed high death toll for a hurricane in a civilized society. And what all the apologies say is that some people don't want to think about the fact that a large number of American citizens - maybe not as high as reported, but still significant - were treated like animals in the wake of Katrina.
