It’s Not Just New Orleans That Needs Rebuilding

[graphixtech]

It’s Not Just New Orleans That Needs Rebuilding

By Bryan Sacks


So now, horribly, we know what it takes to stir disgust and outrage directed at the federal government, in the hearts of the corporate press corps. It takes a catastrophe of biblical proportions unfolding right before their eyes, right here in America, right in front of their cameras and camera crews, amid the stench of rotting corpses and a heaving mass of literally thousands of sick and dying.

Katrina’s aftermath has exposed the ‘most powerful country in the world’ as literally powerless to address the most basic needs of the most highly visible suffering people on the planet. This monstrous failure could literally be paradigm-shifting in its effect on the public consciousness.

The power of this story is evident in the accounts from on-location cable correspondents, who usually have no difficulty avoiding serious criticism of the powerful in any situation. But in New Orleans yesterday, several of them could not.

Fox News’ Geraldo Rivera and Shepard Smith, for instance, veered wildly off script while reporting from the watery grave New Orleans has become. It took only a few hours holed up in the Superdome to provoke outrage in both of them—not only at the inhuman conditions inside the Louisiana Superdome, where the dead lay rotting next to the living, but that ‘hundreds and hundreds and hundreds” of survivors were being denied exit. Have we forgotten already that these people were encouraged to head for the Superdome by authorities? How on earth could they be denied the right to leave an open cesspool?

Fox was ready, though. Earlier in the evening there was Bill O’Reilly, vile apologist for the administration, safely tucked in his quiet studio, poised on the ‘kill’ button, ready to unceremoniously cut off Smith or Rivera before the humanity of their reporting infected viewers with a genuine sense of concern for the suffering. In a flash they were gone, without the usual grateful sendoff. And then later on, with Smith describing the unspeakable conditions in the Superdome, the repugnant Sean Hannity called for ‘perspective’, but Smith, looking murderous, would not back down: “This is perspective!”

Others are finding that outrage is playing well, too, whether it’s Ted Koppel on ABC or the smirking Aaron Brown on MSNBC. We should take note of the reasons this is happening, when so many other tragedies failed to produce seemingly spontaneous ejaculation of on-air disgust and outrage.

Unlike the 9/11 tragedy, which unfolded in a way that tended to draw stark lines between survivors and victims, in the aftermath of Katrina this afternoon’s survivors might easily become this evening’s victims. The catastrophe is still developing, while the 9/11 attacks hit with a ferocity that, mercifully, passed relatively quickly in media-time. There were very few survivors from the collapse of the towers, and the environmental crises that followed were slow to develop and poorly covered by the press. Because the victims of 9/11 either died immediately that morning, or got sick offstage from Ground Zero in the weeks to follow, the attacks were not seen as a developing story even though thousands developed serious ailments in the toxic conditions of Ground Zero that fall and winter.

Another important element helping to direct disgust and outrage at authorities is the inability of the press to take distance from the suffering of those around them, as they are able to do in virtually every other disaster area they visit. There is no luxury hotel for them to retreat to in New Orleans, no media hospitality area or secure facility to separate them very long from the suffering. Further, the people who are literally dying by degrees around them speak the same language they do. Once one’s humanity is triggered, it becomes harder and harder to stay on message. Even Adolh Eichmann was said to have been appalled upon touring the concentration camps.

(more)
http://www.911truth.org/article.php?story=20050904221329705

[Demeter]

1. We Aren't Powerless; Our "Government" Is Unwilling

Our "Public servants" are nothing of the kind: they are merely parasites and robbers. Our electorate is poisoned by the devisive politics of long GOP practice, since before the Civil War. And our 4th Estate is sold to the highest bidder.