the natives are getting restless

[topaz]

From Slate: the reporters are getting angry.

Related: Crooks and Liars supplies a video clip of Shepard Smith and Geraldo Rivera losing it on camera. (Say what you will about Geraldo, I don't think this was staged -- he's just not that good an actor.)

These video and audio clips are stunning. They are all worth reviewing. The NPR clip linked from Slate is particularly riveting: I have never heard Robert Siegel come so close to losing his temper during an interview.

At dinner last night someone else brought up this phenomenon of reporters being unable to maintain neutrality. My mother said she had heard one reporter say that this was the first time in her career that she felt she could not stay on the sidelines, that she had a moral obligation to intervene in the situation.

It seems as though New Orleans, and not Iraq, could become this generation's Vietnam. It is obviously too soon to tell, but no other event I have seen in my lifetime has led the press -- or the public -- to such open disbelief with the government's statements as the events of the last week have. The protests against the two Gulf Wars, by contrast, seem remote and detached: outrage from the usual suspects and bland equivocation from the media. I have never seen such rage from the press.

Comments

[agaran.livejournal.com]

Just saw the clips you pointed to.

I said to Steph, "Holy cow! If Fox News is showing this stuff, you know the Administration is now hip deep in their own shit."

She replied, "Not likely. This will just be another example of something that will blow over, just like the Rove story."

[pinkfish.livejournal.com]

. . . either that, or it is just another escalation. You know,

• The Rove story was getting too hot, so we did a Supreme Court nomination,
  
• The Supreme Court nomination was getting too hot, so we had a hurricane hit,
  
• The Hurricane was getting too hot, so we knocked off the Chief Justice, ...
  

I don't know why,
she swallowed the fly.

[crouchback.livejournal.com]

I think it's the fact that they are telling blatant lies and the reporters can see it first-hand.

In the past, the lies that have gotten told have been hard to discredit.

Now, well, when Michael Chertoff is trying to sell us on yet another "no one predicted this" lie, CNN's report (http://www.cnn.com/2005/US/09/03/katrina.chertoff/index.html) of his statement is quite critical.

[feste-sylvain.livejournal.com]

Reporters have been lied to before.

But now, it's Americans dying right before their eyes, in America.

And nobody who has witnessed the devastation first-hand is going to put up with the bullshit.

Not "Vietnam" so much as "Watergate".

[mr-privacy.livejournal.com]

I was going to say Vietnam was an ongoing event, and that this will be swept aside by events. But I think Sylvain's closer here. Vietnam was ongoing, Watergate was a single event, which no one could have forseen.

[psongster.livejournal.com]

Over dinner I was talking with a bunch of folks about exactly these issues. I think the political consequences of this week are going to be *huge*. Even Fox News is showing that this administration is dangerously incompetent.

I just found this quote on Crooks and Liars:

"I think it puts into question all of the Homeland Security and Northern Command planning for the last four years, because if we can't respond faster than this to an event we saw coming across the Gulf for days, then why do we think we're prepared to respond to a nuclear or biological attack?"

Concise, pointed ... and spoken by Newt Gingrich.

[hammercock.livejournal.com]

The press are angry, and it's about fucking time. The incompetency of this administration has largely gotten a free pass for the last 5 years. I really hope this opens up the sluices and that the press can keep up this momentum.

[jacflash.livejournal.com]

Yes.

The protests against the two Gulf Wars, by contrast, seem remote and detached: outrage from the usual suspects and bland equivocation from the media.

The war protests have had, for me, the flavor of habit: a generation learned during the Vietnam era that the correct way to respond to war was with protest, and was following through accordingly.

This is very different. I have this not-so-vague sense that Very Large Forces are being set in motion, and interesting times (in the Chinese sense) are upon us.

Something is palpably collapsing like a house of cards. Is it just the Republican thing, or is it something larger? I can't tell yet.

[crouchback.livejournal.com]

I have the very same feeling-like something else is coming.