The recent flooding in Baton Rouge is a study in media bias if you compare it to media coverage of Hurricane Katrina.
While Baton Rouge flooded, President Obama continued to play golf at Martha’s Vineyard, as if nothing was happening, and the media gave him a pass. George W. Bush was accused of being a racist when he cut his vacation short and did a flyover of New Orleans back in 2005.
Talk about double standards.
Without a doubt, media coverage of Katrina was a hack job done by Bush-haters who wanted to paint the sitting president in the worst possible light.
Because they had an agenda, they failed to report about what may well have been one of the most successful search-and-rescue operations in American history.
NBC News’ Brian Williams missed the real story because he was busy misreporting un-facts about un-events that the Washington Post said he perhaps “misremembered” the same way he did about his helicopter ride in Iraq. Williams and NBC News were awarded the 2005 Peabody Award for coverage of Hurricane Katrina. The award website states NBC reported on “all angles of events related to Hurricane Katrina” including “disintegrating social conditions” in New Orleans and for posing “difficult questions to government officials...dealing with issues of race and class...”
They covered all angles? What a bunch of bologna.
Williams was eventually relieved of his duties as NBC anchor for the kind of tale telling one would expect to hear while sipping hot cocoa around a campfire at Lake Wobegon.
Williams and other media hacks conveniently passed over the real story... about what went right when Mother Nature went wrong. A Real Clear Politics piece, “Katrina: What the Media Missed,” reports that upwards of 100,000 lives were saved. Sure, FEMA missed the mark, but a lot went right. While the media were looking for bad news and a thousand ways to blame it on Bush, our well-prepared military was busy saving lives, delivering babies and restoring law and order.
Which leads us to Baton Rouge, where flood waters ravaged homes and torrential rains delivered death and destruction ---- and the mainstream media ran cover for their golden boy who found time to pull away from his merriment at Martha’s Vineyard for a posh Hillary fundraiser, but was far too busy to fire up Air Force One to pay a visit as Comforter-in-Chief.
Let’s not forget that Bush-43 was castigated by the media and liberal pundits ---- including President Obama ---- for the fly-over they misconstrued as aloofness.
From the Senate floor, a preachy Obama said, “We can talk about what happened for a few days in 2005 and we should. We can talk about levees that could not hold...about a president who only saw the people from the window of an airplane instead of down here on the ground to provide comfort and aid.”
At least Bush showed up.
The outright hypocrisy of Obama golfing while the waters rose in Baton Rouge after making political hay out of his predecessor’s so-called indifference makes no difference to the Bush-Deranged-Syndrome media crowd who continue to cover for the guy who promised that waters would recede on his watch but obviously didn’t.
Susan lives in Alaska and writes about culture, politics and current events. Contact her by Facebook or at writestamper@gmail.com