MediaBloodhound

The MIA VP

Let’s face it: Dick Cheney is one scary guy. We rarely see him but when we do it seems some catastrophe has just occurred here or abroad, or he’s threatening one if we reject his administration’s agenda. Peddling misinformation is another pastime that summons him from his crypt, from the Saddam-9/11 link and poised stockpiles of WMD to Dr. Strangelove-esque proclamations that our troops will be "greeted as liberators" or the insurgency "is in the last throes."

If Karl Rove is Bush’s brain, then Dick Cheney is his dark shadow.

Touted in 2000 as the battle-ready elder statesman on the ticket, Cheney - four heart attacks notwithstanding - was supposed to stem doubt about Junior’s ability to run the country. But pre-9/11, Cheney’s appearances were kept to a minimum in order to avoid underscoring George’s lack of presidential gravitas. And since 9/11, Cheney has – initially under the cover of national security – managed to remain almost completely out of the public eye. Every now and then, he emerges from one of his undisclosed bunkers to bark something out of the corner of his mouth, like a modern-day Mr. Potter. As when he snarled at Pat Leahy, “Go fuck yourself,” on the hallowed floor of the Senate (which, incidentally, is illegal).

Meanwhile, and largely to the blind eye of the mainstream media, Dick Cheney - a.k.a. “Big Time,” as his little buddy calls him - has spent the majority of his tenure pulling strings behind the scenes for his friends in high places. Bush knocks ’em down - countries, cities - and then Big Time, through no-bid contracts, sends in his crew of cronies to mop up for whopping profits (over $10 billion in Iraq alone). While local contractors, from Baghdad to the Bayou, get bupkis. So brazen is this practice that not even political fallout from Katrina’s gross negligence proved a deterrent. Halliburton and a cast of ol’ chums were back on the job before you could say misappropriation of funds.

When critics like Noam Chomsky and others use the term “corporate media,” it’s to highlight one simple but salient point: it’s not in the interest of media, owned by big business, to shine a light on such shady dealings. (Incidentally, it was Senator Leahy’s disgust at the no-bid Halliburton contracts in Iraq that set Cheney off.) At the end of the day, it’s why these stories go unreported or underreported, or are given a positive or neutral slant.

Each time Halliburton is awarded another no-bid contract by this administration - if it is reported - it’s as if the process is completely above board. Even the subsequent and seemingly inevitable stories of graft and incompetence, the hallmark of both Halliburton and this administration, draw little or no attention. When they do, they vanish in a media minute. Follow-up inquiries of such wrongdoings often go unmentioned by network and cable news, or are mentioned in passing right before cutting away not to a correspondent to shed further light, but rather to a commercial that conveniently blunts the impact of the story. When printed, these news items are often banished to the back pages, usually encapsulated in one-paragraph nuggets only news addicts might spot, but not the general American reading public (and that’s of the minority of them who read the newspaper regularly).

Case in point is a story broken by the Hattiesburg American and picked up by alternative media sources, but utterly neglected by the mainstream press. While everyone wondered where Cheney was after Katrina hit, it turns out that – aside from vacationing in Wyoming – he was making sure power was restored to a pipeline that serves the Northeast. His office left two voice mail messages for the Southern Pines Electric Power Association, ordering them to immediately restore power to Colonial Pipeline Company. In doing so, power was delayed at least 24 hours to two rural hospitals and a number of water systems in the Pine Belt. In the end, it was not restored to the hospitals until six days after the storm.

“We were led to believe a national emergency was created when the pipelines were shut down,” said Jim Compton, general manager of the South Mississippi Electric Power Association. Crews who were trying to restore power to the two rural hospitals – Stone County Hospital and George County Hospital – were ordered instead to work on the Colonial Pipeline project. They were also forced to do this in extremely hazardous conditions, including working in the dark while there were fires in the trees and broken power poles strewn about. Their lives, though, as the lives of those stranded in the hospitals without electricity and water and food, come at a small price to our emperor of empathy.

In the end, it took one man to voice the feelings of so many Americans when it comes to our Vice President, and to our mainstream media for their kid’s gloves in dealing with him: “Go fuck yourself, Mr. Cheney.” These words, delivered by Gulfport resident Ben Marble in the middle of Cheney's post-Katrina photo-op, resonated as we had to once more watch Bigtime rise from the depths to gloss over his culpability in more death and destruction with platitudes. “Go fuck yourself,” Marble repeated, like a wind whistling the words we heard in our heads.

For a brief moment, America seemed right again. Before, of course, Marble was hunted down by military police waving M-16’s, who apprehended him up the road on the site where his house once stood, then handcuffed, detained and questioned him.

And before Big Time resumed, as Bob Dylan might say, his idiot wind.

Reporting America’s Story

"NBC Nightly News" anchor Brian Williams, a standout during Hurricane Katrina, visited "The Daily Show" last week and detailed his harrowing experience covering the storm. His voice still edged with the indignation viewers witnessed in those broadcasts, Williams eventually landed on what dismayed him most about the government’s torpid response. Noting he’d been in "lousy" places before, like Iraq, and had seen horrible things, he went on to say the difference here was “these were Americans.”

CNN’s Anderson Cooper, another anchor noteworthy for his no-nonsense coverage of Katrina, also expressed a similar view while being profiled in the NY Times on Monday. “I have been tearing up on this story more than any story I’ve worked on. I can’t really explain why that is.” He added, “It’s not hard to be moved. The fact that it is in the United States, for me, added a layer and dimension to the story.”

A common argument for this bias centers on the reflexive notion that we should feel greater empathy toward our fellow countrymen. Proud to be American. Just as, say, an Italian citizen might be proud to be Italian. One man’s xenophobia is another’s patriotism? Fine. But where is the line drawn? Should the mainstream media make such distinctions for us in the way they report - or decide not to report - a story? And when does national pride determine whose suffering and loss of life we see on the nightly news and covers of newspapers and magazines?

Here in the States, we are conditioned to live in a vacuum, to see America as “the world” and an American life as somehow more valuable. We hear it every time a plane crashes overseas: X number of people died, X number of them were American. Innocuous enough on the surface, but the implication is that our lives are significant. While others? Not so much. Even if that isn’t the intent, such reporting has this effect, and over time becomes ingrained in who we are as a people. It slips into our national subconscious, so to speak. Maybe that’s why Anderson Cooper couldn’t explain why he was more choked up over Katrina than any story he’s ever covered.

Consequently, on the whole, our citizens do less international travel than our brothers and sisters in other industrialized nations. So while we still profess to be a melting pot, we mix very little with the rest of the world. The dangerous effect of this vacuum is that, by not recognizing all human life as equally significant, we as a country are more inclined to accept human suffering. As long as it’s not ours. This compels us to stand up and be outraged over those who died because of criminal negligence and mismanagement in New Orleans, but accepting of criminal negligence and mismanagement - and massive loss of life - in Iraq.

Whether it’s the estimated 100,000 plus Iraqi civilian deaths or the tortured prisoners of war in Abu Ghraib and other chambers of inhumanity condoned and utilized by this administration to dodge Geneva Conventions, our mainstream media has been woefully lacking in their coverage. Over the two and a half years since this war of choice commenced, ask yourself how often we've seen images of dead or disfigured Iraqi children or post-Abu Ghraib torture victims. (Incidentally, our soldiers’ lives didn't carry much currency either until Cindy Sheehan entered the scene; they continue to fight without the armor they need and their caskets remain off-limits to photographers, while the media barely bats an eye.)

Katrina revealed a similar bias in how we depict the poor and underprivileged in our own country, a microcosm of how we depict the suffering of those abroad. The victims of the hurricane were first dubbed “refugees” before many in the mainstream media (though some defended this usage, notably the NY Times) recognized the racist overtones and changed the reference to “evacuees.” Meanwhile, President Bush, evoking the perspicacity of Mr. Magoo, initially referred to the hurricane-stricken areas as “this region of the world." In addition to giving the impression our Commander-in-Chief is unaware that Louisiana and Mississippi are part of the United States, this gaffe seemed to compound the Third World flavor of their plight.

That the majority of faces suffering from this disaster had black skin was not lost on anyone either. Least of all, CNN anchor Wolf Blitzer, winner of the Freudian slip award for his reference to the victims: “…so many of these people, almost all of them that we see, are so poor and they are so black…” Throughout, the media spoke of these poor as if they had been belched from some ghetto Atlantis beneath the Mississippi River. Then, as if suddenly seeing the light, we heard them crowing about how America will finally be forced to confront its own poverty. (That is, until the next serial killer, fair-skinned missing person, celebrity breakup or shark attack comes down the pike.) On the heels of these empty assertions, we now learn that Katrina and its bungled aftermath may have contributed to the swiftest spate of gentrification since the origins of Manifest Destiny.

“These were Americans.” In the same interview, Mr. Williams also noted that this was the overwhelming refrain from viewers who followed the coverage of Katrina. It seemed as if he was trying to ring from these words a defining moment of national disgrace and a standard to which our government must never fail to meet. But I wonder instead how many Americans felt the hollowness of these words that night.

Looming over Times Square, an enormous billboard for “NBC Nightly News” with Brian Williams stares down at pedestrians. The tagline reads: “Reporting America’s Story.”

As Walter Cronkite used to say, “And that’s the way it is.”

The Best We Can Do

As Hurricane Katrina and Bush Administration ineptitude assailed the Gulf Coast this past week, two things became glaringly clear: the dire need for competency in both our government and our press. And how one institution cannot function effectively without the other. The White House, the mainstream media and the segment of our society who questions neither all have an unwritten contract that was breached during this storm. The tacit agreement to spin, report and receive news as sport or entertainment or nuisance. This fell away in the wake of Katrina. The breach: unmitigated reality.

As the enormity of the disaster unfolded, network and cable news anchors – from the genially detached Brian Williams of “NBC Nightly News” and Paula Zahn of CNN to the normally smug and reptilian Shepard Smith of FOX News - expressed outrage and frustration, rejected spin and demanded answers when the levees broke and help was nowhere in sight. By Thursday night, Williams grew increasingly irate as his broadcast proceeded:

WILLIAMS: Rescue workers overwhelmed, food and water scarce, people left behind, becoming more and more unglued. Where is the help? The people of New Orleans are asking repeatedly in Washington, ‘Are you watching? Are you listening.’

FEMA Director Michael Brown – former commissioner of the International Arabian Horse Association who has no prior emergency-management experience – seemed completely unaware that Paula Zahn was surprised he’d just heard about the people huddled in the New Orleans Convention Center without food and water for days.

BROWN: And so, this -- this catastrophic disaster continues to grow. I will tell you this, though. Every person in that Convention Center, we just learned about that today. And so, I have directed that we have all available resources to get to that Convention Center to make certain that they have the food and water, the medical care that they need...

ZAHN: Sir, you aren’t telling me...

BROWN: ...and that we take care of those bodies that are there.

ZAHN: Sir, you aren’t just telling me you just learned that the folks at the Convention Center didn’t have food and water until today, are you? You had no idea they were completely cut off?

Shepard Smith, on the scene for “The O’Reilly Factor,” was not the Shepard Smith Bill O’Reilly expected. Instead of focusing on lawless renegades, Smith, his voice cracked with sorrow and frustration, reported on the dead and dying around him and on the special treatment given to 700 guests and employees staying at a local Hilton Hotel who, without waiting in evacuation lines, had just been bused safely out of town with a National Guard escort. O’Reilly, taken aback by Smith’s newfound journalistic integrity, sneered: “You sound a little bitter, Shep.”

Though this was heartening to see the mainstream media actually doing their job, it must be noted that these journalists and their cohorts helped to create the conditions for this breakdown in government. When fixtures of our mainstream media don’t become outraged until we’re in the middle of a national disaster, made exponentially worse by an administration with a history of negligence - for which it is the media’s duty to watchdog - it is also too little, too late. The journalistic levees have long been broken in the United States.

Failure after failure, lie after lie, spin after spin, this administration has led our country lethally astray. But neither 9/11 lack of foresight nor the damning Downing Street Memo, neither the highly suspect 2004 election nor the ever-mounting soldier and civilian death tolls in Iraq, nor countless other abuses of power and instances of negligence were enough. Lifeless bodies floating down the bayou. Abandoned citizens dying of heat and dehydration and hunger. Motherless dead babies wrapped in sheets and resting in excrement. This is what it took the mainstream media to see the potential horrific effects of an incompetent White House. When the smell and sight of death was under their nose and in plain view. Suddenly, covering this government, at least for a moment, stopped feeling like a game. A passive pastime.

The Bush Administration has put into positions of power, under the watch of our mainstream media, dozens of people who are either unqualified, have a conflict of interest due to business associations, or have demonstrated abject incompetence over the last six years. Bush praises them uniformly – even awarding some, like former CIA Director George Tenet, the Medal of Honor - while people of character and clarity of mind, from Paul O’Neil to Richard Clarke to General Shinseki, have been fired for admirable service to their country. Throughout, the mainstream media has, by and large, allowed the swift-boating of national discourse to cloud the underlying message these men shared and believed was urgent enough to stake their livelihoods, their reputations and, quite possibly, their lives to share with everyone. Simply thus: The level of incompetence they witnessed in this administration, where decision-making processes depend more on ideology than fact, was a national security risk.

And so this was our line of defense when disaster struck: George was still on vacation; when compelled to act, his first move was to fly to San Diego to make a speech about staying the course in Iraq; acknowledging there was a national disaster a few days later, he compassionately flew over the Gulf Coast and then, like any leader in the face of crisis, turned in the opposite direction and flew back to the White House; then he praised the bungled efforts of his embattled FEMA Director and buddy: “Brownie, you’re doing a heck of a job.” Meanwhile, National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice was yukking it up at “Spamalot” and shoe shopping in the Big Apple; Vice President Dick Cheney was MIA in Wyoming; and next in line to the Presidency, House Speaker Dennis Hastert was recommending we just bulldoze the rest of New Orleans. Feel better?

The next sweeping action? The Bush Administration went into full spin mode, leveling blame on citizens who “chose” not to evacuate, state and local officials, anyone who is not within their circle of criminal negligence. Spin they do swiftly, efficiently. Maybe because after so many blunders in office they’ve had ample time to hone their damage control skills. This is the CYA (Cover Your Ass) administration. The equivalence of the office employee who produces, if anything, shoddy work, but is adept at promoting the image of his value to the company. People once referred to such folks as bullshit artists. The difference is poor job performance and CYA mythmaking at the highest levels of government cost lives.

We already we saw the mainstream media falling back into line by the weekend. “Meet the Press” host Tim Russert ran with Karl Rove talking points when addressing Jefferson Parish President Aaron Broussard:

MR. RUSSERT: Mr. Broussard, let me ask - I want to ask - should...

MR. BROUSSARD: You know, just some quick examples...

MR. RUSSERT: Hold on. Hold on, sir. Shouldn’t the mayor of New Orleans and the governor of New Orleans bear some responsibility? Couldn’t they have been much more forceful, much more effective and much more organized in evacuating the area?

MR. BROUSSARD: Sir, they were told like me, every single day, “The cavalry’s coming,” on a federal level, “The cavalry's coming, the cavalry’s coming, the cavalry’s coming.” I have just begun to hear the hoofs of the cavalry. The cavalry’s still not here yet, but I’ve begun to hear the hoofs, and we’re almost a week out.

Broussard, undeterred by Russert’s haranguing, went on to the story of one mother and son’s tragedy.

MR. BROUSSARD: The guy who runs this building I’m in, emergency management, he’s responsible for everything. His mother was trapped in St. Bernard nursing home and every day she called him and said, “Are you coming, son? Is somebody coming?” And he said, “Yeah, Mama, somebody’s coming to get you. Somebody’s coming to get you on Tuesday. Somebody’s coming to get you on Wednesday. Somebody’s coming to get you on Thursday. Somebody’s coming to get you on Friday. And she drowned Friday night. She drowned Friday night.

At this point Broussard is in tears, and Russert, reluctantly, pulls back his carving utensils but manages to show little empathy.

MR. RUSSERT: Mr. President...

MR. BROUSSARD: Nobody’s coming to get us. Nobody’s coming to get us. The secretary has promised. Everybody’s promised. They’ve had press conferences. I’m sick of the press conferences. For God sakes, shut up and send us somebody.

MR. RUSSERT: Just take a pause, Mr. President. While you gather yourself in your very emotional times, I understand, let me go to Governor Haley Barbour of Mississippi.

If we continue to lack a responsible mainstream media in this country, Katrina may very well turn out to be a glimpse into an even grimmer future. John F. Kennedy may have feared such a future when he said:

“There is a terrific disadvantage in not having the abrasive quality of the press applied to you daily. Even though we never like it, and even though we wish they didn't write it, and even though we disapprove, there isn't any doubt that we could not do the job at all in a free society without a very, very active press.”