{"id":60120,"date":"2016-08-30T11:30:15","date_gmt":"2016-08-30T16:30:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=60120"},"modified":"2016-08-28T16:08:58","modified_gmt":"2016-08-28T21:08:58","slug":"excuses","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=60120","title":{"rendered":"The Dog Ate The Entire American Mainstream Media&#8217;s Homework"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Over the past couple of weeks, conservatives have noted the media&#8217;s toxic double-standard in reporting two different natural disasters; their hyperbolic and sensationalistic coverage of Hurricane Katrina, which was as saturated as the sodden delta soil&#8230;<\/p>\n<p>&#8230;versus their virtual ban on coverage of the catastrophic rain storms that struck Cajun country over the past few weeks.<\/p>\n<p>We&#8217;ll come back to that.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Brown-Nosing Sycophants: \u00a0<\/strong><em><a href=\"http:\/\/www.wnyc.org\/shows\/otm\/\">On The Media<\/a><\/em> is an American Public Media is a NPR show on, well, the media &#8211; in the same sense that an infomercial about Pawn America is an investigation of the ethics of the short-term credit industry.<\/p>\n<p>The show is produced and narrated by two putatively-ink-stained wretches, Bob Garfield and Brooke Gladstone, who report on, well, the media with a fervor that indicates they really really really don&#8217;t want to get disinvited from any of New York&#8217;s\u00a0journo hangouts; within the world of journalism, the program comforts the comfortable and afflicts the afflicted. &#8220;OTM&#8221; is the figurative exclamation point on the end of &#8220;NPR has a liberal bias!&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>And they addressed the disparity in their most recent broadcast.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Profiles In Courage<\/strong>: \u00a0Oh, I slay me. \u00a0 \u00a0The hell they did.<\/p>\n<p>No, they didn&#8217;t &#8220;address&#8221; the disparity in coverage. \u00a0 What? \u00a0Over a bunch of cajuns?<\/p>\n<p>What they did &#8211; <a href=\"http:\/\/www.wnyc.org\/shows\/otm\/\">you can listen for yourself, starting around 20 minutes into the audio stream<\/a> &#8211; was claim &#8220;the dog ate the entire American mainstream media&#8217;s homework.<\/p>\n<p>The transcript isn&#8217;t up yet &#8211; but the gist of the story is this:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Unlike Katrina, there wasn&#8217;t a big buildup; since the disaster sprang from common rainstorm from a stalled frontal system, the\u00a0National Weather Service (NWS) didn&#8217;t give the customary several days of warning before the system hit.<\/li>\n<li>Since there wasn&#8217;t a big buildup, the media had no means to know they had to be in the neighborhood\u00a0<em>for\u00a0<\/em>the story.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Of course, it&#8217;s baked wind. \u00a0 \u00a0Most of what passes for &#8220;news&#8221; gets covered with no &#8220;buildup&#8221; or notice at all; car crashes, mass shootings, planes crashing into skyscrapers? \u00a0Somehow the media managed to get people onto the scene and try something that passes for &#8220;journalism&#8221; (I&#8217;ll be charitable) these days.<\/p>\n<p>Even without a &#8220;buildup&#8221;, there were a few unmistakeable signs that a highly-trained and experienced &#8220;journalist&#8221;\u00a0<em>might\u00a0<\/em>have been able to spot; an entire part of an entire state completely shut down and flooded out of business might be one&#8217;s first clue.<\/p>\n<p>But I suspect the &#8220;lack of buildup&#8221; for any disaster story\u00a0started in January 2009.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Over the past couple of weeks, conservatives have noted the media&#8217;s toxic double-standard in reporting two different natural disasters; their hyperbolic and sensationalistic coverage of Hurricane Katrina, which was as saturated as the sodden delta soil&#8230; &#8230;versus their virtual ban on coverage of the catastrophic rain storms that struck Cajun country over the past few [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[130],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-60120","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-tc-media-bias"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/60120","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=60120"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/60120\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":60122,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/60120\/revisions\/60122"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=60120"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=60120"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=60120"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}