MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann broke from his self-described pattern of not offering commentary, and called for an end to the media’s self-imposed editorial silence concerning the U.S. government’s response to a terrible natural disaster.
Okay, it was a different disaster during a different administration. But did you hear what he said? A week into the Hurricane Katrina recovery he declared that,
But now, at last, it has stopped getting exponentially worse…and having given our leaders what we now know is the week or so they need to get their acts together, that period of editorial silence I mentioned should come to an end.
As the chaos of recovery efforts in and around New Orleans became the big story, old media commentators fired barrages of harsh rhetoric toward President Bush and members of his administration directly involved with disaster relief. Never mind what part of that criticism was justified, and what part was driven by political preferences. It was a blend.
We even heard a commentator accuse Bush of racism – “the big elephant in the room” in the commentator’s words.
We’re now in the midst of another disaster, albeit not within the borders of the United States. But Haiti is a close neighbor; many American citizens were in Haiti when it shook apart; many American citizens have relatives living there who are dead or missing. The U.S. is overwhelmingly the dominant provider of international aid. President Obama, when a candidate, often quoted the Bible verse that summons us to be our brother’s keeper. So how well is our brother’s keeping going with regard to USAID’s effort in Haiti?
MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow asked the key question:
Who do the marching orders come from?
The disaster response effort in Haiti, with the U.S. effort led by USAID, may be providing a new paradigm of international relief chaos. And as a consequence, people are dying, just as they always do in natural disasters like earthquakes and hurricanes and tornadoes and wildfires and cyclones and volcanic eruptions. Building codes and high construction standards can ameliorate the damage — if this quake had struck California, the death toll would likely have been in the hundreds, not the hundreds of thousands — but in the end Mother Nature will have her way, and there’s not much presidents, potentates, prime ministers, or Nobel Prize laureates can do about it, except the best they can.
So when will Keith Olbermann announce, on behalf of the legacy media, that it’s time to offer an editorial assessment of how well the disaster response has been going? When will the MSM realize there is no magic bullet that can pre-empt, much less instantly solve, seismic dislocations, and that in the end the Earth is far more powerful than Man, Albert Arnold Gore, Jr., to the contrary notwithstanding?
Or, is the elephant in this disaster room an old media that’s more concerned about not appearing critical of the Obama Administration than it is about the fate of our neighbors, brothers, sisters, fathers, mothers, sons and daughters in Haiti?
Not quite as easy as it looked back in 2005 is it, Keith? Or is the explanation simply racism, Jack?
We look forward to your next special commentaries.