FRIDAY'S LETTERS: Novak Should be Fired, Green Zone 'Cowards', Katrina Press Post-Mortem Overdue

By: E&P Staff In today's letters, a call for Robert Novak's dismissal from the Chicago Sun-Times, U.S. reporters in Iraq couldn't uncover a massacre in the Green Zone, and a reader wonders why reporters are more interested in looking back to the run-up to the Iraq war than at their Katrina coverage.


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Ditch Novak

I don't know much about the ethics of journalism, but don't you think the time has come for media critics (like E&P) to call for the firing of Robert Novak from the Sun-Times and his syndicate?

Lee Erwin


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Green Zone 'Cowards'

It's difficult for the U.S. press corps to uncover a "massacre" or any other alleged crime when 98 percent of the cowards are hunkered down in the Green Zone while their Iraqi stringers cover the war.

Brad Silliman
Savannah Tenn.


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Why No Katrina Post-Mortem in Press?

In the immediate aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, the airwaves were full of images of suffering people - suffering black people. (Suffering white people, out of sight outside New Orleans, were almost invisible in the news coverage I saw.) More than one journalist speculated that a national debate on issues of race and class was called for by the allegedly disproportionate impact of the storm on black people. The terms of the debate, it was hinted implicitly or explicitly, were to follow the assumptions, framing devices, and vocabulary of the Kerner Commission Report of 1968 or such-like. (We have 'Classic Politics' in this country the way we have 'Classic Rock' radio stations, and for about the same reasons.) There was no hint of familiarity by such journalists with the old line about The New York Times - that in the event of discovery of a meteorite about to strike the earth, the newspaper's headline would be 'World Ending; Blacks, Women Suffer Most'. The MSM can be irony-impaired when it comes to identity politics.

Months later, the figures are in, and not only do they trash the idea that blacks and the poor - overlapping categories, to be sure, in the Ninth Ward - died out of proportion to their representation in the population, but the casualty list makes it clear that the controlling variable of who constituted the 1,500 victims was age. This last category is frequently overlooked by conventional journalism, especially in those silly pie charts showing income and wealth-holding distribution in the United States. (This is invariably done to give supporting evidence to some political mantra being intoned by some such organization as the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities.) In any event, as in almost all domestic issues, an obsession with baby-boom era identity-politics categories proved to be, as often before, the cause of shoddy analysis and poor journalism. No wonder the mainstream media's credibility on racial issues is so low. Ordinary people have the disconcerting habit of believing the evidence of their own naked eyes in preference to what they see on television, when it comes to drawing large lessons about social policy. Now the media shows signs of repeating the same quality of work in relation to the illegal immigration issue, i.e., recasting complex issues to fit the usual simple-minded movie scenario of The Forces of Bigotry vs. The Enlightened Few Whose Vision Will Eventually Prevail.

Perhaps I've missed it, but none of the journalism reviews I read have taken much of a look back at the 'meaning of it all' reporting by the networks and newsweeklies per Hurricane Katrina, which contrasts interestingly with the obsessive research concerning who-said-what in the run-up to Bush's war. Only the conservative media ghetto (CMG) has pointed out that the eagerness of these news organizations to use the disaster to evangelize for a political ideology conflicted with what was actually happening on the ground. Thus, the "CMG" gains credibility with consumers as the only place to go for any unflinching information about the sensitive issues of race and gender which may be unflattering to middle-class liberalism. Maybe this is why Fox News and O'Reilly have some influence. You won't find much skeptical reporting of the claims of middle-class liberal groups and individuals in the MSM.

Once in a great while (i.e., the Matthew Shepard mythology that was gullibly swallowed by the media) E & P has featured criticism challenging the conventional opinions prevailing among the staffers of the big urban media organizations. Let?s see if you are up to it. You sure went out of the way to refute a throwaway comment by Bill O'Reilly about no right-wingers on the cover of TIME magazine. Well, Hurricane Katrina is a slightly more important subject for research and the naming and shaming of the journalists who used the event to fan racial bitterness. Has E & P has anything to say on the subject?

Mark Richard
Columbus, Ohio