In the wake of a mortifyingly slow government response to the Gulf Coast disaster, the press is demanding answers from the White House with unprecedented vigor.
President Bush and his aides are refusing to provide them -- saying this is no time to play the "blame game."
But as a frustrated Terry Moran of ABC News put it yesterday, during the stonewalling marathon that passed for Scott McClellan's mid-day press briefing: "It's not a blame game. It's accountability! It's accountability!"
The White House press corps is sensing a political sea change caused by Katrina. Bush and his aides are finding it impossible to wave off the incontrovertible facts and heart-rending images emerging from the lake that was once a great American city. They're finding it harder to set the news agenda. And the scathing criticism is becoming increasingly bipartisan, freeing reporters from the obligation to make every White House story sound like one with two sides equally based in reality.
Bush may be paying the price for the years during which his rhetoric and reality have been at times irreconcilable. After all, this post-Katrina press awakening is not the result of reporters expressing their personal or political opinions so much as it is about their asking tough questions based on what they, and others, have seen with their own eyes.
Media Rising
Agence France Presse reports: "In the emotional aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, US television's often deferential treatment of government officials has been replaced by fiercely combative interviews and scathing commentary."
Alessandra Stanley writes in the New York Times that "after spending time with the storm refugees in the Superdome and the convention center in New Orleans, normally poised, placid TV reporters now openly deplore the government's failure to help the victims adequately. And their outrage, illustrated with hauntingly edited montages of weeping mothers, sickly children and dead bodies rotting on the street, traveled up the news division chain of command, from camera operators to anchors and across the spectrum from CNN to Fox. . . .
"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 Iraq, his White House news conferences have been so tame they are parodied by 'Saturday Night Live' and Jon Stewart."
Howard Kurtz writes in The Washington Post: "This kind of activist stance, which would have drawn flak had it come from American reporters in Iraq, seemed utterly appropriate when applied to the yawning gap between mounting casualties and reassuring rhetoric. . . .
"Maybe, just maybe, journalism needs to bring more passion to the table -- and not just when cable shows are obsessing on the latest missing white woman."
In USA Today, Peter Johnson quotes Fordham University communications professor Paul Levinson: "The media rose to the occasion, shone their light on the desolation and the needy, and kept it focused there until the cavalry finally began to arrive."
Johnson writes that "some observers say that Katrina's media legacy may be a return to a post-Watergate-like era of tougher scrutiny of the federal government and public policy issues. . . .
