Friday, January 15, 1999: Unwelcome optimism

[Muninn]

I would be more offended by what Tom said if he'd somehow meant the people who suffered don't deserve the attention and aid. But I'm pretty sure he was talking about how the media handled it and how they devote less time to other disasters, which is true. I think a lot of the uproar at the time was that such devastation and mismanagement happened in America.

[Tom_Radigan]

I would be more offended by what Tom said if he'd somehow meant the people who suffered don't deserve the attention and aid. But I'm pretty sure he was talking about how the media handled it and how they devote less time to other disasters, which is true. I think a lot of the uproar at the time was that such devastation and mismanagement happened in America.

Yes, it is true, my attack was on the news media's treatment of the whole situation, less the coverage of it than the fact that they politicized it into an attack on the Bush administration, who were not able to magically resolve everything in two days and who could not do anything about the ineptitude of the state an local governments involved. As I mentioned before, surrounding areas such as the state of Mississippi prepared for disaster more completely and quickly and were able to recover more quickly from the effects of Katrina. Of course, when a second, lesser storm came by a couple of years later, New Orleans was definitely more ready to deal with the situation.

There's no point in denying the fact that if Katrina happened under either the administrations of either Clinton or Obama, the press coverage would be radically different.