For liberal talk radio host Randi Rhodes the rampagingwildfires in California last week presented an opportunity to remind listenersof another natural disaster—and not one of the Bush administration’s finestmoments.
While discussing President Bush’s Oct. 25 trip to the sceneof the California blazes. Rhodesadmonished him not to say anything “stupid.” She then replayed the 2005 audioclip in which the President praised FEMA director Michael Brown’s response toHurricane Katrina with the now infamous words. “Brownie you’re doing a heck ofa job.” The embattled Brown widely blamed for some of the post-Katrina chaos resigned10 days later.
On the other side of the talk dial conservative radio hostRush Limbaugh linked the fires that destroyed about 2,000 homes to elements ofthe environmental movement. He accused those who connected the fires and globalwarming of “a blatant attempt to politicize” the disaster. Then he laid blameon the “whacko environmentalists who will not let anybody go in and clear outthe dead wood.”
Inall the wildfires in Southern California werethe dominant story on the cable and radio talk shows last week just as theywere in the broader News Coverage Index of all media. The blazes across hundredsof thousands of acres of Southern Californiahillsides accounted for 36% of the airtime as measured by PEJ’s Talk ShowIndex for Oct. 21-26. That made it the fifth-biggest talk topic of the year. Andit easily trumped the week’s other major talk stories—the Presidential race(14%) the Iraq policydebate (9%) events inside Iraq(4%) and the debate over immigration policy at 4%.
It is unusual for talk hosts to spend a lot of timediscussing natural disasters since it’s generally difficult to foment debateand disagreement over violent or extreme acts of nature. But one aspect of thewildfires story just as it had for the more reportorial elements of the mediaculture transformed it into more than simply a tragedy to be lamented. Theshadow of Hurricane Katrina—and more notably the widely criticized governmentresponse to the GulfCoast flooding—envelopedthe wildfires providing a socio-political narrative to the coverage.
In the general news coverage this led to a number ofstories comparing for example conditions for the fire evacuees at San Diego’s Qualcommstadium with the hardships for Katrina refugees inside the New Orleans Superdome.(They were dissimilar.)
In parts of the talk sector however the politicization ofthe wildfires was more blatant—and more likely to jump to conclusions aboutblame of all sorts. Some liberals tried to conjure up embarrassing comparisonswith the Bush administration’s Katrina-related problems sometimes making FEMAthe fall guy. Conversely some conservatives assailed liberals for trying tomake political hay out of the tragedy while focusing some of their ire asLimbaugh did on environmentalists.
PEJ’s Talk Show Index released each week is designed to provide newsconsumers journalists and researchers with hard data about what stories andtopics are most frequently dissected and discussed in the media universe oftalk and opinion—a segment of the media that spans across both prime time cableand radio. PEJ’s Talk Show Indexincludes seven prime time cable shows and five radio talk hosts and is a subsetof our.)
It is worth noting that the talkers’ response to the wildfires was notmonolithic. Some of the hosts who devoted major coverage to the subject—CNN’sLou Dobbs and the Fox News Channel team of Sean Hannity and Alan Colmes—spentconsiderable time discussing news developments related to the fires. It was left to others such as MSNBC’s liberalKeith Olbermann and the Fox News Channel’s right-tilting Bill O’Reilly tohammer away at the more ideological angles to the story. And that was certainlythe case with radio hosts on both sides of the political spectrum.
“Politics and the Californiafire” was the headline on O’Reilly’s segment on Oct. 24. “The usual political loons are trying todefine the fire in an ideological way,” he declared.
O’Reilly took issue with several Democratic politicians including CaliforniaSenator Barbara Boxer who linked the war in Iraq with insufficient resourcesfor the firefighting efforts. The Pentagon. O’Reilly declared had concludedthat the war effort had “no negative effect” on the California crisis adding that “about 17,000National Guard [troops] are available right now but not needed.”
On his syndicated radio show. Sean Hannity also went after theenvironmentalists citing a Congressional study that he said accused them ofblocking the “thinning of forests to prevent wildfires.”
“You can’t cut down a tree you can’t thin it because you may hurt someobscure species that will offend these environmental extremist groups,” Hannityadded disapprovingly.
On his Oct. 26 cable show. Olbermann seized on an incident thatembarrassed the federal government. That was FEMA’s Oct. 23 press conference atwhich agency staffers posed as reporters and asked less-than-challengingquestions of FEMA deputy director Harvey Johnson. The Fox News Channel andMSNBC televised the event.
“FEMA eliminates the middle man and passes on the propagandasavings to you,” declared a dismissive Olbermann. “FEMA today said not a singlejournalist attended the news conference the press conference the de-pressconference.”
And Michael Savage the conservative contrarian radio talkerhad his own villain in all this. California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger,even though he was generally lauded for his aggressive response to the disaster.(“Fires Boost Schwarzenegger’s Image” was the headline on one AP story.)
Savage disagreed. “Strudel-negger (an apparent reference tothe governor’s Austrian background) is as good at this as the governor of Louisiana was inKatrina,” he asserted. “What a flop he is. Don’t tell me the muscleman did agood job. He stank.”
Forex Groups - Tips on Trading
Related article:
http://www.journalism.org/node/8312
comments | Add comment | Report as Spam
|
