I posted one of Hugh's two quotes earlier today from Hewitt's appearence on PBS last night. Here is the other one, and a repeat of the first one. I wish I had seen this. The moderator of the discussion and the other reporters being interviewed were obviously reeling from his comments. He was loaded for bear. I doubt if they will use him again. He really cleaned their clocks.
JEFFREY BROWN: Mr. Hewitt, what about another issue that Mr. Woods raised, that's the aggressiveness of the reporters, the passion that they brought to the story, do you think that that was useful in pushing officials to respond?
HUGH HEWITT: No. Absolutely not. In fact I think that some of the journalists involved especially anchors became so caught up in their own persona and their own celebrity they missed important and obvious stories.
They failed to report on the basic issues surrounding who deploys the National Guard; they failed to report on why the Salvation Army and the Red Cross were forbidden by state officials to deliver supplies to the Superdome and the convention center. They failed to report what happened to the buses; they failed to establish a chronology -- so addicted did they become to the idea that at last, after two years of media collapse - I mean, we go back to Jayson Blair and Rather-gate and Eason Jordan -- it's been terrible two years for the American media.
They finally had something in which they could appear quasi heroic, and they tried very hard to appear quasi heroic, and in so doing they botched the story. And I just have to object to my fellow guest here, it wasn't that they missed things; there were sins of omission, it's that they reported panic inducing, fear inducing, hysteria inducing mass sort of casualty events, looting, pillaging, murder sprees, sort of the most squalid journalism you could imagine, and I have to ask them and ask the media generally, don't we have to go back and find out how to guard against this sort of thing, because we've had mass disasters in the past, we're going to have them in the future -- if media becomes addicted it to -- they told me it was so I'll put it out there -- that's terrible for democracy to have a media that is willing to suspend their disbelief and report urban myth.
And I think one other thing, Jeff, people have to ask: Why was the media so eager and willing to circulate these stories? Is it because we were dealing with the urban under class, largely black, and largely a community with which the elite media does not often deal? And as a result they were willing to believe stories about this community that they might not have given any credence to in a different situation.
REPEAT OF THE FIRST ONE: JEFFREY BROWN: And, Mr. HEWITT, same question, what did you like and what did you dislike?
HUGH HEWITT: Well, Keith just said they did not report an ordinary story; in fact they were reporting lies. The central part of this story, what went on at the convention center and the Superdome was wrong. American media threw everything they had at this story, all the bureaus, all the networks, all the newspapers, everything went to New Orleans, and yet they could not get inside the convention center, they could not get inside the Superdome to dispel the lurid, the hysterical, the salaciousness of the reporting.
I have in mind especially the throat-slashed seven-year-old girl who had been gang-raped at the convention center -- didn't happen. In fact, there were no rapes at the convention center or the Superdome that have yet been corroborated in any way.
There weren't stacks of bodies in the freezer. But America was riveted by this reporting, wholesale collapse of the media's own levees they let in all the rumors, and all the innuendo, all the first-person story because they were caught up in their own emotionalism. Exactly what Keith was praising I think led to one of the worst weeks of reporting in the history of American media, and it raises this question: If all of that amount of resources was given over to this story and they got it wrong, how can we trust American media in a place far away like Iraq where they don't speak the language, where there is an insurgency, and I think the question comes back we really can't.
COMPLETE DISCUSSION AT:
pbs.org |
