Jay Rosen has a interesting post on PressThink, that I’ll boil down to: whether critical thinking is absent from the reporting on Katrina, or whether its true that Katrina saved US media.
I’ve been thinking about this too. Especially after I watched this great montage on Salon: Reporters Gone Wild. I don’t know if it’s the case that this “story of the week” happens to coincide with what people think of as good journalism (challenging people in power, being a conduit for regular people’s stories, uncovering grift or crime), or if the tough reporter meme is just another “Teen murdered in Aruba.” That’s why I don’t think we’ll be able to judge the effect of Katrina on the mainstream media until the next big story.
I do believe that I’ve found a silver lining in the 24hr television news cycle, which is that if you point cameras on something long enough, the truth may eventually come out. Here, it was impossible to believe Chertoff and Bush and Brownie’s assertions that everything was fine when thousands of people were yelling at cameras that they had no food and water and pointing to the dead bodies. In Iraq, it was impossible to believe that major combat operations in Iraq were over when the media continued to report about the battles and the insurrection. The polls tend to reflect this.
So I’m just going to say thank you to the reporters who are asking the hard questions. I think they’re a big reason for the aid now flowing in—federal and personal donations. And I hope they’ll continue asking, whether it’s the balance of responsibility for Katrina between federal and state governments, or the next story of the week.
UPDATE: WOW! Not even an hour after I posted this, I see Dan Gillmor's pointed to Josh Marshall's report that Bush Administration is cutting off press access to report on Katrina's wake. I'll be checking back with Marshall often to see how this story unfolds. If it is the aforementioned "next story of the week," whether the MSM fights back, or just let's Bush & Co. re-write this story to fix their own image, will tell a lot about the hard questioning we've seen. Was it just a fleeting glimpse of what a truly independent fourth branch could be? Or will the press continue to fight to give voice to the thousands of victims of the Administrations incompetence.