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CBS News's Jim Axelrod has blogged about his now-ended Price Patrol cross-country assignment which concluded this week. The feature highlighted the cost of gasoline across the country from New York to San Francisco. Axelrod and his producers hopped a red-eye from San Francisco to cover alleged price gouging in Atlanta, which has seen high gas prices following Hurricane Katrina due to a pipeline which has gone offline.
During ABC's Wednesday night prime time special, In the Path of Katrina, reporter Chris Cuomo exploited the tragedy to push for a permanent expansion of the federal government, just as occurred under FDR, "the last time the country responded with unprecedented sweeping changes to help the least fortunate. Today may demand an equal effort." Interviewing Randy Cohen, ethics columnist for the New York Times Magazine, Cuomo asserted: "Hurricane Katrina is perhaps the most economically destructive event in American history since the Great Depression, the last time the country responded with unprecedented sweeping changes to help the least fortunate. Today may demand an equal effort. Couldn't this hurricane be something that is a historically relevant event that may change how we deal with each other in this society?"Video: Real or Windows Media. Some more context and description follows.
Harry Smith, interviewing Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour on the Early Show today, started off by asking him where all the relief aid was, where the workers were. Smith said he was relaying this as the frequent complaint of Gulf Coast survivors of Hurricane Katrina that he'd been talking to. After Barbour replied that things were being tirelessly coordinated and set in order to get relief to needy residents as soon as possible, Smith prompted Barbour to give the viewers at home a glimmer of hope about the efforts underway:
As the pressure mounts on the media to figure out more and more creative ways to blame the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina on the Bush administration, a front-page New York Times article by David Sanger appears to lay the post-hurricane looting right at the White House doorstep:
"The dilatory performance of George Bush during the past week has been outrageous. Almost as unbelievable as Katrina itself is the fact that the leader of the free world has been outshone by the elected leaders of a region renowned for governmental ineptitude.
Live from the White House in the 7am EDT half hour of Thursday’s Good Morning America, Diane Sawyer pressed President George W. Bush to respond to a series of liberal talking points, starting with how “people have worried that the National Guard is stretched too thin” with “so many overseas” in Iraq.
The Media Post reports:
"The Washington Post has entered into a deal with blog search engine Technorati that will make it easy for readers to find blog entries about Post stories. Technorati already has similar deals with Salon.com and Newsweek.com, but WashingtonPost.com marks the search engine's first major newspaper partnership.
On NPR's Morning Edition today, co-anchor Renee Montagne was interviewing David Wessel of the Wall Street Journal on the hurricane's effects on the national economy. But she was a little over the top in her tone with her first question: "Is the hurricane the last straw for the economy?" (Hear it here.)
The big three broadcast networks have been mostly silent during the run-up to the Senate's hearings on Supreme Court nominee John Roberts, with just a handful of evening news stories over the last five weeks. But big papers such as the Washington Post have been busily poring over Roberts' writings, hunting for the legal brief or memo that might put his seemingly-assured confirmation in doubt.
Columnist Matt Towery, writing today on townhall.com, lays out a compelling – and, once you see the time line, plainly true – case that Big Media, stuck in its Eastern coastal elite attitudes, failed to provide anything like proper coverage of Hurricane Katrina.
If you'd like to see a typical example of how a major metropolitan newspaper completely skews a "gay marriage" story in favor of the gay left, see Mary Otto's piece in the WashPost today. Almost the entire story is devoted to the ACLU and gay activists and their arguments. (There were no liberal labels.) In the seventh paragraph, we get two state officials briefly defending the status quo. The conservative activist from Defend Maryland Marriage debuts in paragraph 20.
At about 4:40pm EDT this afternoon on MSNBC, Andrea Mitchell marveled at how Venezuela, “perhaps with a bit of a sense of irony,” has offered assistance despite the call by Pat Robertson, whom she identified as a “colleague” of the Bush administration, for the assassination of Venezuela's President. Chris Matthews soon piped up about how “we often argue about states' rights and the need to reduce the size of the federal government, yet in a crisis, it's the federal government which has the resources, the money, the manpower, the personpower I should say, to do the job.” Mitchell contended FEMA was ineffective until Bill Clinton became President and was going well until a second Bush took over the White House. She contended that “since the Clinton days,” FEMA has shown “that it can move very effectively,” but “we've seen also, post-9/11, that federal disaster assistance and coordination was sorely lacking.” She also wanted to know “how much the National Guard deployments from around the region to Iraq and Afghanistan and other parts of the world has depleted the resources that were available?”
Full transcript of the exchange follows.
Chicago Tribune's Clarence Page capped off the PBS NewsHour yesterday with a commentary on wedge issues in politics, particularly the supposed use of the race card by Republicans in President Nixon's "Southern Strategy.". Page congratulated Republican National Committee chairman Ken Mehlman for publicly renouncing the "Southern Strategy" earlier this year in an apology given to the NAACP, but he closed his commentary hinting that the GOP is all too ready to make gays the next wedge issue: