BBC - Viewpoint: Has Katrina saved US media?

[rndmprsn]

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/4214516.stm

As President Bush scurries back to the Gulf Coast, it is clear that this is the greatest challenge to politics-as-usual in America since the fall of Richard Nixon in the 1970s.

Mr Bush's famed "folksy" style has failed to impress in this crisis
Then as now, good reporting lies at the heart of what is changing.

But unlike Watergate, "Katrinagate" was public service journalism ruthlessly exposing the truth on a live and continuous basis...

...But with the sick and the dying forced to sit in their own excrement behind him in New Orleans, its early-evening anchor Shepard Smith declared civil war against the studio-driven notion that the biggest problem was still stopping the looters.

On other networks like NBC, CNN and ABC it was the authority figures, who are so used to an easy ride at press conferences, that felt the full force of reporters finally determined to ditch the deference.

As the heads of the Homeland Security department and the Federal Emergency Management Agency (Fema) appeared for network interviews, their defensive remarks about where aid was arriving to, and when, were exposed immediately as either downright lies or breath-taking ignorance.

[NNadir]

1. Not really. A few reporters inadvertantly driven insane by reality

will have very little long term effect on the unreality offered by the networks.

I predict that in two weeks, the big news will be the equivalent of Tom Cruise's behavoir on furniture.