The New York Times
September 5, 2005
Reporters Turn From Deference to Outrage
When even Fox News will not give Defense Secretary
Donald H. Rumsfeld more than half the screen for his first appearance in the
Hurricane Katrina disaster zone, it is clear that television is having a major
mood swing.
The last time reporters and anchors were so personally
and passionately involved in a story was early in the Iraq war, when journalists
who accompanied troops for weeks at a time became bullish supporters of the
soldiers and their mission.
Hurricane Katrina has had a similar but opposite
effect: after spending time with the storm refugees in the Superdome and the
convention center in
By the weekend, television news programs had more
hopeful images of daring helicopter rescues, airport triage, convoys of troops
deployed across the flood waters and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice
praying in church in her native Alabama, yet recrimination
still rang out.
Even the announcement that Chief Justice William H.
Rehnquist had died did not divert television cameras from the destruction - or
the government bungling. (MSNBC has an on-screen count of the time elapsed
since Katrina hit - "6 days/5 hours" - that is reminiscent of the
"Day 110" coverage of the Iranian hostage crisis that began in 1979.)
It's the kind of combative coverage that Richard M.
Nixon faced during Watergate, that Bill Clinton faced during his impeachment
trial and that most presidents have endured sometime in their tenures. But ever
since the Sept. 11 attacks, this president had been spared the harshest
questioning - even with troops bogged down in
On "Meet the Press" yesterday, Tim Russert
lacerated Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff, demanding to know,
among other things, "How the president could be so wrong, be so
misinformed?"
Fox News, normally highly deferential to the Bush
administration, was gentler but just as skeptical. Chris Wallace, the host of
"Fox News Sunday," asked Mr. Chertoff, "Mr. Secretary, how is it
possible that you could not have known on late Thursday, for instance, that
there were thousands of people in the convention center who didn't have food,
who didn't have water, who didn't have security, when that was being reported
on national television?"
The Bush administration, normally so deft at staying a
step ahead of the television cameras, spent the weekend trying to catch up.
President Bush, who plans to make a second trip to the
Mr. Rumsfeld and Ms. Rice visited the region to make
the same point, but their news conferences were clouded by an outburst by Aaron
F. Broussard, president of Jefferson Parish, who wept as he described, on
"Meet the Press," the drowning of a friend's mother who was left
stranded in the St. Bernard nursing home for four days. "Nobody's coming
to get us. The secretary has promised. Everybody's promised," Mr.
Broussard said. "They've had press conferences. I'm sick of the press
conferences. For God sakes, shut up and send us somebody."
Mr. Broussard's meltdown was shown on NBC, MSNBC and
also CNN, which has been one of the most aggressive in covering the disaster
and assigning blame.
The switch mirrors public outrage, but it is buoyed by
a rare sense of righteous indignation by a news media that is usually on the
defensive. Viewers could see that as late as Thursday, television news crews
could travel freely back and forth from the convention center, but water
trucks, ambulances and officials from the Federal Emergency Management Agency
could not.
Some reporters helped stranded victims because no
police officers or rescue workers were around. (Fox's Geraldo Rivera did his
rivals one better: yesterday, he nudged an Air Force rescue worker out of the
way so his camera crew could tape him as he helped lift an older woman in a
wheelchair to safety.)
News reports alerted the world, and, it seems, an
inattentive federal government, to the neglected victims in