So-called Neutrality of the Press

Ted Koeppel ended his "Nightline" show last night (August 30) with pictures of the devastation in New Orleans and then followed the pictures with a long, sober comment about how this is what a U.S. city would look like after a terrorist attack. He then closed with an imperious statement that it is just a matter of time before such an attack occurs.

Don't just take my word for it:

Aug. 30, 2005: Being Prepared
Nightline Closing Thoughts
By TED KOPPEL

We don't like anticipating disasters. It suggests pessimism and America is largely a nation of optimists.

But when you look at the damage inflicted by an accidental storm, you have to think about the sheer havoc that an intentional terrorist attack may produce one of these days.

We want to believe that no one will ever use a weapon of mass destruction against one of our cities. But it's almost inevitable that someone will. We don't like to hear that; we certainly don't want to contemplate the consequences. But we need to talk about it and we need to plan for it.

The very worst thing you can do when confronting a potential disaster is to take the position that it'll never happen to us.

Well, I guess journalists have become nothing more than corporate mouthpieces and shills for the political establishment that they are supposed to investigate and thus create respect and accountability for the American public. Bah, that is gone now, completely gone.

But no matter, now they have some pictures to make the FEAR of terrorism all the more PALPABLE, all the more REAL to the minds of the American people. Anyone think that a republican ad campaign is coming on? Its not like they need one, right? After all they own or are connected to all the major media outlets.

But we can list a simple checklist of republican problems in addition to the debacle in Iraq: gas reaching record levels which will have a devastating ripple effect of increasing prices throughout the economy, insane amounts of death in Iraq, economic instability increasing for those who are not super-rich, poverty levels increasing in the United States with children and the very poorest Americans being abandoned by the "pull yourself up" crowd (poverty was 12.7% according to a report released yesterday), increasing numbers of Americans with no health insurance (16% across the country)... and we can go on and on.

So, the president (although we really don't have one, do we?) and congress (they must be fearing the mid-term elections right about now) could call for a massive campaign of infrastructure investment much like other leaders have led us through struggles and challenges before (going to the moon, the civil war, world war II, etc).
No. We are seeing these cowards for what they truly are... Opportunists of the worst order who are taking a tragedy such as this and diverting it into a call for more police state policies and military misadventures. And they say that the media is "leftist" and unfair to conservatives.

Just what planet do these people live on?