Telling the whole story

In the previous post about the military's significant involvement in hurricane relief efforts, John posted a terrific comment with some of Victor Davis Hanson's thoughts on what the media choose to report on during these storms.

For all the media's efforts to turn the natural disaster of New Orleans into either 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.

Let ghoulish CNN file suit against the government to film all the bloated corpses it can find. Let a pontificating PBS "NewsHour" conduct more televised roundtables with grim-faced elites searching out purported national racism. But few any longer trust a frenzied media whose reporters and commentators continually prove as incompetent as they are disingenuous.

Was it too much to ask reporters to look to history to judge this recovery against other past disasters here and abroad? Could they have strived for accuracy instead of ratings — and at least made sure that the images from their cameras did not refute their own predetermined scripts?

I linked to that page listing numerous military operations related to Rita and Katrina because it struck me just how little I'd heard about these operations in the media.

I do often question the media's reliability, but I should say the I think print media is usually light years better than the broadcast and cable tv news networks. The TV media are usually after the shocking emotion-laden images, and they could care less about telling the complete story.

I watched some of the TV coverage late last night as the hurricane approached the coast, and no matter what channel I was on, it mostly consisted of the typical shot of some poor correspondent standing in the wind and rain commenting about how bad the wind and rain was. For 45 minutes that's all I heard. At one point, the camera panned over to Shepherd Smith on FOX, but he wanted the camera to stay on some business sign, as the wind was starting to peel it away. Oooh, gripping.

Some of the channels kept saying landfall could come at "any time", even the eye was still 40 miles out. Gotta hype, gotta hype. Three buildings in Galveston caught fire, and that's all I heard about for 40 minutes. I figured maybe this hurricane isn't going to be too bad if the only thing they can find to beat to death is three burning buildings.

Why not tell the stories of these military personnel and the work they are doing? Tell the story of the Iwo Jima, what they've been doing since Katrina, and their sortie to escape Rita? Or all of these operations, conducted by 72,000 troops? Did you know that many were involved?

Yeah, I know why we don't see these kinds of stories on TV. Because this isn't nearly as exciting and gripping and heartpounding as this.