You’re probably about as tired of reading my screeds on the hurricane Katrina disaster as I am of writing them, but this stuff is vitally important! Via a h/t from Hedgehog, via Real Clear Politics, via Powerline, Victor Davis Hanson puts the whole media orgy-of-Bush-hatred into clear perspective.

But the media’s coverage turned out to be almost as disturbing as the natural calamity and initial bureaucratic ineptness — in both the falsehood it spread and the truth it ignored. Political commentators proved more disturbing, seeking to turn death to partisan advantage.

The public was given few facts about what really happened among those trapped, especially the human mayhem that took place. Most would appreciate evidence before sweeping cultural analysis of half-reported stories that were not followed up because they were either untrue or politically incorrect.

I know that I watched my TV in wonder at what could come out of their mouths that would be more stupid than the last thing they regurgitated on-air — and I wasn’t very often disappointed either, sorry to say. But VDH goes on:

Using its Iraqi template, the wired media’s one constant is not amazing human resilience but hyped gloom. Later corrections and downgrades seldom make the headlines like their past blaring inaccuracies.

For all the media’s efforts to turn the natural disaster of New Orleans into a racist nightmare, a death knell for one or the other political parties or an indictment of American culture at large, it was none of that at all. What we did endure instead were slick but poorly educated journalists, worried not about truth but about preempting their rivals with an ever-more-hysterical story, all in a fuzzy context of political correctness about race, the environment and the war.

My wife was just on the phone talking with a Muslim friend of ours in Maui, HI about the disaster relief efforts. The price of gasoline on Maui is currently $3.85 for regular, and the press on Maui is overwhelmingly liberal, so our friend had not heard much of anything positive about the relief efforts until she talked with the wife. Probably doesn’t believe it anyway, cause that’s not what she has been seeing on the TV.

If you don’t read the blogs or listen to talk radio (no, not Air America), you really don’t know what is going on! If you don’t follow Victor Davis Hanson, you are missing a whole lot more. (db)

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