Tuesday, September 27, 2005

Much Complete Washout of N.O. Reality Not Exaggerated - [feeble update]

It now appears that a good deal of the Media wet dream after Katrina -- babies raped, murders galore, widespread social devolution -- was, according to New York TimeSpeak, "exaggerated." The exact headline is:
Some Reports of N.O. Violence Exaggerated
It's not even a Times story, but an AP story, which is attempting, wimpily, to at least report the fact that the reporting in the wake of Katrina offered some Grand Guignol without the theater, tickets, or enjoyably dissolute patrons. You gotta love that "Some." The Independent is, if nothing else, clearer:
"It just morphed into this mythical place where the most unthinkable deeds were being done," Ed Bush of the National Guard told yesterday's Los Angeles Times. Only now, one month later, is the record being set straight.
So the US media, given a chance now to clear up a few fantasias, once more turns its attention to Brownie, or to Jon Voigt playing John Paul. Anything, in fact, except the truth about your own ability to accurately report the truth.

If you tried to distort some fact about the NY Times even nowhere close to the extent it and its fellow high priests of the 4th Estate have distorted the Katrina chronicles, e.g., "The New York Times Understands Public Discourse" - (ha haaaaaaaaaaaa, hohohohohewhewhewhahahahohoheehahaheeeeeee!!!!) the Times would have its entire bevy of lawyers doing the Hamster Dance on your tympana.

The big errors - the real whoppers - are simply too obese to fit into the precise, clinical genre of the Correction.

One story that appears to still hold up is the reporting by Burnett and the Post on the Morial Center. Especially that bit, overlooked by everyone (1), about the 257 National Guardsmen, sons of Louisiana, Past Masters of the Arts of Self Concealment.

One reads the Times, (the free bits) because its daily self-deceptions, its normative swerve from its own headlight-haloed face, when decoded, offer wisps of insight into the bowels of USian news production, where the light mayn't shine.
(1) Update: The Times of Sept. 28th, 2005, buries the Morial story inside a big picture account of why the National Guard deserves our understanding. It helpfully points out that the fellow commanding the guard at the Morial is an architect in real life. It still does not explain why emergency messages about the Morial did not get to people in a position to offer relief in a timely manner. There were two - count 'em: 2 - places where large quantities of the unraptured had been huddled: the Superdome and the Morial. One - the Dome - got help after the Guard moved its own headquarters there. The other got bupkis.

5 Comments:

Blogger Tom Matrullo said...

The Lord works in mysterious ways, Mr. Moran. Leave these things or invite madness. Was it not our own Calvin who taught us not to question Infinite Wisdom?

9/29/2005 8:35 AM  
Blogger Juke said...

The Mayor works in mysterious ways also his wonders to perform, and the Senate as well. And the various appointees here and there.
And Rupert Murdoch and whatever other-dimensional entities he's beholden to.
I'm plumb out of non-mysterious-ways examples come to that.
It seems to have been decided my lot is to shotgun-nag the optimistic naive, a task I don't shoulder anything like willingly.
Brown was what they call in Spookville a cut-out - a fusible link in engineer-speak. Not a particularly willing one evidently.
Bush is so on a grander scale. Pretending it's him, or Cheney etc. means the thing that put them there can place its next set of pawns on the board with a smugness unrivalled since...uhmm... maybe never before.
Or Richelieu comes to mind.
This wheelessness means tons of TV now, and watching the hive-system news agents yesterday the unifying argot shift was them all speaking of the "Republicans" in the third-person plural.
Oh right.
Like Scarborough and O'Reilly are separable from the parisitic clot that's watching its fortunes pale and self-combust on all fronts now.
Well wait, they are.
It's just that they're what you have to get rid of first before the Republicans, or you've given the real bad guys that much deeper cover.

9/29/2005 11:48 PM  
Blogger Tom Matrullo said...

One looks at the recent series of train wrecks - Brown, DeLay, Bennett, Libby - and it does begin to seem statistically odd. Bird flu? Sympathetic madness? Inordinately high self-selection of Mr. Stupids? Who's next?

9/30/2005 5:32 PM  
Blogger Juke said...

Try thinking of it as chitin, larval armor, the soon-to-be shucked carapace of the rough beast it's hour come 'round etc...
The "con" in con game, I reiterate, is not there because the agent/operator is so full of self-confidence, but because he uses your own confidence against you.
Many many right-thinking champions of decency are convinced Bush is somehow responsible for all this - or one layer further in, Cheney and Rove.
And the purgative catharsis will do the trick.
This after two stolen elections, wars and lies and deaths and complete, or nearly, dominance of media tone and message.
Then viola! Suddenly everything crumbles.
Right.
Maybe so. I'd rather be paranoid and mistaken about it than correct.
But a Supreme Court with Roberts at its head and Gonzales at its stinging tail...and the Quisling media lauding the Democratic change...
It's scarier even than this present frightful horseshit.
Oceania.
Sleight of hand.
Nothing up the sleeve of no one there.

10/01/2005 8:04 PM  
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