Now that Trump has slammed Team Biden’s slow response to Hurricane Helene, media outlets have claimed the real scandal is not the FEMA response or the emergency funding shortfall, but Trump’s statements. ABC ran footage from The View of Kamala Harris saying criticism of FEMA is “the height of irresponsibility, and, frankly, callousness.”
That’s amazing. Because when George W. Bush, then, it was the liberal Democrat media that was easily defined as the irresponsible, callous opportunists. We recall Hurricane Katrina 19 years ago, when NewsBusters was in its first few weeks.
Then-NBC anchor Brian Williams denied he was acting like a "crusader" when he signed off his program from the Lower Ninth Ward of New Orleans saying “This is a neighborhood that’s been left to die.” Crusader? Williams responded, “I’ll let others reach those kinds of sweeping conclusions.” Now what kind of conclusion is more sweeping than the assertion that a neighborhood was “left to die”?
In 2005, the media painted FEMA as a barrel of chumps under Bush. Now, under the Democrats, FEMA are not to be questioned. Not their competence, or compassion, or whatever complaint you have.
Williams wasn't the only one crusading against President Bush. MSNBC host Keith Olbermann claimed "A few changes of pronouns in there and he might not have looked so much like a 21st century Marie Antoinette."
It was NBC and MSNBC that tremendously hyped Mayor Ray Nagin’s “Today” show estimate of 10,000 dead in New Orleans. Later, they estimated 1,392 casualties for the whole storm. It was MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough who asked Williams why President Bush would address the nation in prime time from an area unaffected by flooding while the anchorman was “reporting from a major American city where young children died of dehydration out on sidewalks.” Not to be outdone, Williams lectured: “I hope the lesson of this is not that my son and daughter at home have been assigned a different value as humans in the United States than their equivalents here in New Orleans.”
CBS commentator Nancy Giles found racism: "If the majority of the hardest hit victims of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans were white people, they would not have gone for days without food and water, forcing many to steal for mere survival. Their bodies would not have been left to float in putrid water....The President has put himself at risk by visiting the troops in Iraq, but didn’t venture anywhere near the Superdome or the convention center, where thousands of victims, mostly black and poor, needed to see that he gave a damn."
Former New York Times Executive Editor Howell Raines ripped the Republicans in a Los Angeles Times op-ed: "The churchgoing cultural populism of George Bush has given the United States an administration that worries about the House of Saud and the welfare of oil companies while the poor drown in their attics and their sons and daughters die in foreign deserts."
You have to laugh when the media lecture about Trump trying to politicize the hurricane. They routinely politicize tragedies, hurricanes included. Enjoy the podcast below, or wherever you listen to podcasts.
