Hurricane Katrina

None of the network evening newscasts identified ex-New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin as a Democrat when reporting on his conviction of 20 counts of corruption on Wednesday. The ABC World News called him "the face and voice of a city in ruins" post-Katrina, and joined CBS in simply labeling him the "former mayor" of New Orleans without the Democratic label. As NewsBusters reported last year, all…

Former New Orleans mayor Ray Nagin was convicted on 20 of 21 counts of corruption and bribery today. USA Today reporter Rick Jervis did a bit of a profile of Nagin in the course of reporting on the convictions. It included a recounting of his time at the city's helm during Hurricane Katrina in 2005. But one thing his 2:39 p.m. report predictably did not include was Nagin's Democratic Party…

Friday’s New York Times led off the National section on A-11 with Campbell Robertson’s story “Taking Stand, Nagin Defends Acts as Mayor of New Orleans.” But the entire article on the Democrat’s corruption trial unspooled for 931 words without the word “Democrat.” Jurors have heard how Nagin enriched himself from contractors rebuilding the city after Hurricane Katrina. The Times also couldn’t…

Though there were some exceptions (e.g., this one caught by Geoffrey Dickens at NewsBusters a few days ago), most press reports as the beginning of the trial of former New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin tagged him as a Democrat. Apparently, there's a quota on "D" references at the Associated Press. A lengthy AP story by Kevin McGaill carried at Time.com and AP's national site has no reference to…

In a keister-covering dispatch at the Associated Press, aka the Adminstration's Press, which, based on its headline, is supposed to be a big-picture look at where recovery efforts from last year's Superstorm Sandy stand ("NORMALCY ELUDES MANY A YEAR AFTER SANDY HIT NJ"), reporter Wayne Parry spent the vast majority of his 900-plus words on problems residents are having with insurance companies…

If President Barack Obama is losing Al Hunt, there is definitely trouble in Lefty-land. But let's not go too far. In the midst of leveling criticisms at Obama as "bordering on incompetence," the former host of CNN's Capital Gang and executive editor at Bloomberg News, who is now a Bloomberg View columnist and host of a Bloomberg TV's Political Capital Sunday news show, cited three examples of…

At the Associated Press yesterday, Michael Kunzelman managed to write a 500-word story about the arraignment of former New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin on bribery charges without once mentioning that Nagin is a Democrat. That's probably not a "Name That Party" record for "Most Words Used in an AP Story about a Democratic Politician Tainted by Scandal and/or Corruption," but it's especially galling…

As Carnival Triumph passengers began to deboard their crippled ship late Thursday night, CNN's Martin Savidge decided to compare their "isolation factor" at sea to that of Hurricane Katrina victims. Passenger Rob Kenny quickly put the cruise fiasco in perspective. "Katrina was a major devastation. We're on a friggin' cruise ship and we're just all having a good time," he told Savidge. [Video…

All three broadcast network evening newscasts on Friday night ran short items on the federal corruption indictments against the bumbling former Mayor of New Orleans, Ray Nagin, but skipped his party affiliation, a fact Reuters considered newsworthy – if not until their sixth paragraph: “Nagin, 56, and a Democrat...” ABC anchor Diane Sawyer generously described Nagin as “the face of…

Leave it to a Washington Post book reviewer to find a way to blame George W. Bush for the Irish Potato Famine. Okay, Peter Behrens didn't do exactly that, but he used the occasion of reviewing two books about the mass starvation of millions of Irish in the 1840s as an opportunity to bash the Bush administration over the federal response to Hurricane Katrina.  Oh, I almost forgot, the bogeyman…

CBS ran a puff piece Friday morning on President Obama's visit to hurricane-ravaged Staten Island, which stood in stark contrast to its hostile treatment of President Bush's visit to the Gulf Coast after Hurricane Katrina. CBS played into the Obama PR strategy, simply noting that he "pledged the government's support" to Staten Island residents and "met with families who've lost everything."…

In the days following Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans, America's media elite blasted the former Bush administration for not providing relief supplies to residents who were affected by the storm. With a Democrat in the White House now, however, reporters are saying almost nothing as New Yorkers are being ignored by various levels of government. With hundreds of thousands of his own residents…

In an appearance on CBS This Morning on Tuesday, the network's political director John Dickerson stopped by to briefly discuss the impact Hurricane Sandy could have on the upcoming election. The segment was primarily focused on how the candidates will try to sensitively make up for lost time on the campaign trail, but there was an underlying question. Who stands to gain the advantage as a…

In a stunning omission on Wednesday's NBC Today, brief coverage of a 2007 video of Barack Obama completely ignored the then-Senator praising his controversial pastor Jeremiah Wright as a "great leader, not just in Chicago, but all across the country." The NBC morning show adopted a dismissive attitude toward the video, with co-host Savannah Guthrie leading off the broadcast: "Conservatives…