NYT Complains: Bush “Sees Little of Ruin” in New Orleans

New York Times White House reporter Elisabeth Bumiller follows Bush back to the site of the Hurricane Katrina’s devastation for Friday’s “In New Orleans, Bush Speaks With Optimism but Sees Little of Ruin," and again tries to portray him as out of touch on Hurricane Katrina.

“Mr. Bush spent his brief visit in a meeting with political and business leaders on the edge of the Garden District, the grand neighborhood largely untouched by the floodwaters of Hurricane Katrina, and saw little devastation. He did not go into the city's hardest-hit areas or to Jackson Square, where several hundred girls from the Academy of the Sacred Heart staged a protest demanding stronger levees. Mr. Bush's motorcade did pass some abandoned neighborhoods as it traveled on Interstate 10 into the city.”

Bumiller made the same pointless criticism of a hands-off Bush back on September 3:

"Mr. Bush did not go into the heart of the city's devastation, where thousands of largely poor, black refugees have raged at the government's response to one of the worst natural disasters in American history. The White House cited security concerns and worries about causing more chaos as the reasons for keeping Mr. Bush away from the streets and the New Orleans Superdome, where refugees have lived in squalor and lawlessness for days….Throughout his day, Mr. Bush did not address the shocking images of the desperate and dying on television, even when he was asked by a reporter in Biloxi 'why the richest nation on earth can't get food and water to those people that need it.'"

Actually, as CNS News reports, “Whites dies at a higher rate than blacks in Hurricane Katrina,” according to updated figures from the Louisiana Department of Health and Hospitals. But those new facts, which calls into question the paper’s (and the mainstream media’s) initial race-based fretting, have yet to be addressed in the Times.

For more examples of New York Times bias, visit TimesWatch.