Hurricane Katrina

CNN this morning did a series of reports from New Orleans focusing on the problems with that city’s levees. “American Morning’s” Soledad O’Brien first interviewed Joey DIFatta, chairman of St. Bernard Parish, along with New Orleans city council president Oliver Thomas. Later, O’Brien questioned an Army Corps of Engineers colonel. During these discussions, it was suggested that lower quality…

Faithful readers of NewsBusters are quite aware of the ever-changing opinion of the Army Corps of Engineers by America’s Old Grey Lady, the New York Times.  As reported here and here, the Times for more than a decade has had a very negative view of the Corps.  They have questioned the value of its work, its accounting practices, and the environmental impact of its projects.  However, in the days…

Too slow on Katrina, too quick on Rita? During Saturday’s special hour-long NBC Nightly News, reporter Kevin Corke suggested President Bush ran “the risk of looking like a political opportunist” with Hurricane Rita by taking exactly the active hands-on approach demanded by media critics in the days after Hurricane Katrina hit the gulf coast last month.The liberal media are never satisfied.MRC…

“NBC Nightly News” anchor Brian Williams wrote an op-ed for the New York Times this morning. In a lot of respects, it praised former president Lyndon Baines Johnson, while certainly not flattering George W. Bush. In fact, the purpose of the piece appears to be to chastise president Bush for not going to Texas ahead of Rita by relaying what Johnson did forty years ago when Hurricane Betsy hit…

A day after NBC's Matt Lauer asked on Today, "why are there so many hurricanes this year and is global warming to blame?" and Robert Bazell ominously concluded an NBC Nightly News story by asserting that "many experts say" hurricane-fueling global warming "results partly from humans releasing greenhouse gases possibly creating even more violent storms in the future," ABC and CBS aired stories…

There are some who would argue journalists don't do serious stories about religion. The respect for a higher power cherished by the majority in this country is not a voice represented in the newsroom. Some might think that even when religion is approached in a story, it is treated like wacky antics of the criminally insane. Well that just isn't true. You obviously don't care about black people…

Declaring that the Media Research Center “is a much more biased organization than any institution in the MSM," CBS Evening News Executive Producer Jim Murphy, on the CBS News “Public Eye” blog on Thursday, criticized two MRC CyberAlert articles I wrote which were first posted this week on NewsBusters. Public Eye Editor Vaughn Ververs asked Murphy to comment on a September 20 NewsBusters item…

CNN’s Joe Johns patrolled the halls of Congress this morning asking senators and representatives how America was going to pay for the reconstruction of New Orleans.  His questions normally revolved around two themes:  raising taxes, and cutting funding for the Iraq war (video to follow):To Sen. Cornyn (R–Tex):  Are we talking about scaling back tax cuts to pay for Katrina?Lead-in to Sen. Reid (D–…