Another Slam at the MSM

One of my correspondents points me to a nice piece by Jon Ham in the Carolina Journal in which he takes the MSM to task for systematically misrepresenting the facts on Katrina.

RALEIGH — There is a fetid stink in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, and it’s not coming just from the fouled waters flooding New Orleans. It also wafts from the putrid reporting of the disaster by the mainstream media.

From the moment Katrina made landfall the media focused on anything that could redound to the detriment of President Bush or inflame race and class tensions. Reporters and commentators ignored the dismal performance of New Orleans’ Democratic mayor and Louisiana’s Democratic governor, blaming every problem that arose on the Bush administration.

Racial demagogues accused Bush and his administration of reacting slowly because most of the victims were black. Environmental activists said Bush’s refusal to sign the Kyoto Treaty caused Katrina’s severity. Democratic operatives said the administration’s decision to cut funding for a long-term study of flood control caused the levees to breach.

All of this is stuff and nonsense. The tragedy is that the media know it too, but they still printed it.

He concludes:

Polls show that, unlike the media, the public does not blame Bush for the hurricane, the rioting, the looting, the stranded pets, the drowning deaths or the levee breaks. That means that the public doesn’t believe what the media are reporting. That’s the real gathering storm.

He's right. The inadequacies of the MSM are becoming more apparent every day, and as I indicated in an earlier post they now operate on the fringes, rather than in the mainstream, of American culture. But he's wrong to see a storm of public resentment in the offing. The readers and viewers will just go away -- come to think of it, they already have started to.

RELATED:

And while we're on the subject of MSM perfidity, check out John Leo's TownHall collumn on the interesting lapses in coverage of Cindy Sheehan's anti-Bush campaign. [here]

Someone, I forget who but it might have been Jonah Goldberg, recently wrote that the Democrats have proven to be so inept as an opposition party that the MSM has decided to fill the role. It's starting to look that way.