Saturday, September 03, 2005
Katrina: The television coverage
For some reason, I have been without a television during the first few days of the three most widely-publicized disasters of recent years -- September 11, the Asian tsunami of last Christmas and Hurricaine Katrina. In all three cases, the web and radio were my only sources for news. Absorbing my news without the emotional disruption of television probably influenced my thinking about all three events. In the case of Katrina, my first contribution to the American Red Cross was less than it should have been, which condition I will remedy when I get in the office on Tuesday.
I did watch roughly three hours of cable news last night and found myself thinking that it was very oriented around hunting for the guilty and very short on coherent substantive explanations of the rescue operations. From the perspective of cable news (mostly Fox, in my case), the dire straits of the people still stuck in New Orleans were in and of itself proof of incompetence, with almost no exploration of the challenges facing the agencies and organizations leading the rescue and relief. There was no way to know whether the rescuers were doing a good job under the circumstances -- or not.
Bill Clinton was, in fact, quite a bit more illuminating than any of the coverage I saw last night. And this post from Instapundit (including thoughtful comments by Mickey Kaus and one of Glenn's readers) precisely captures my feelings about the little television coverage that I have seen.
I did watch roughly three hours of cable news last night and found myself thinking that it was very oriented around hunting for the guilty and very short on coherent substantive explanations of the rescue operations. From the perspective of cable news (mostly Fox, in my case), the dire straits of the people still stuck in New Orleans were in and of itself proof of incompetence, with almost no exploration of the challenges facing the agencies and organizations leading the rescue and relief. There was no way to know whether the rescuers were doing a good job under the circumstances -- or not.
Bill Clinton was, in fact, quite a bit more illuminating than any of the coverage I saw last night. And this post from Instapundit (including thoughtful comments by Mickey Kaus and one of Glenn's readers) precisely captures my feelings about the little television coverage that I have seen.
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