Congressman can't get Bush on the line

September 2, 2005
by David Pace
AP

WASHINGTON --AP Thousands of people stranded in two swamped parishes south of New Orleans are just as desperate for supplies as those trapped in the city but can't get the attention of federal disaster relief officials, their congressman said Friday.

And to make matters worse, says Rep. Charlie Melancon, D-La., he was unable to deliver that message to President Bush during his visit to New Orleans because the president's security detail couldn't clear him to board Air Force One.

After waiting 90 minutes Friday while a U.S. marshal using a satellite phone repeatedly tried, and failed, to contact Bush's plane - located just 300 yards away at New Orleans' Armstrong airport - a disgusted Melancon left.

"After an hour and a half of that, and two hours to get down there, I am now back on my way, without seeing the president, not accomplishing anything in my mind today. I've wasted time while people are dying in South Louisiana," he said in a telephone interview.

"It's not personal to the president. It's just that this whole thing has been handled terribly." Melancon said the communications problems that kept him from meeting with Bush are symptomatic of the problems that have plagued the slow-moving federal response to the devastation left by Hurricane Katrina.

In St. Bernard and Plaquemines parishes, just south of New Orleans, victims of the hurricane are still waiting for food and water and for buses to escape the floodwaters, Melancon said.

And for the entire time Bush was in the state, the congressman said, a ban on helicopter flights further stalled the delivery of food and supplies."I thank the president for his visit today, but it was more show than substance," Melancon said.

"Frankly, we needed action days ago."

Reporters Turn From Deference to Outrage

September 5, 2005
by   Alessandra Stanley
New York Times

When even Fox News will not give Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld more than half the screen for his first appearance in the Hurricane Katrina disaster zone, it is clear that television is having a major mood swing.

The last time reporters and anchors were so personally and passionately involved in a story was early in the Iraq war, when journalists who accompanied troops for weeks at a time became bullish supporters of the soldiers and their mission.

Hurricane Katrina has had a similar but opposite effect: after spending time with the storm refugees in the Superdome and the convention center in New Orleans, normally poised, placid TV reporters now openly deplore the government's failure to help the victims adequately. And their outrage, illustrated with hauntingly edited montages of weeping mothers, sickly children and dead bodies rotting on the street, traveled up the news division chain of command, from camera operators to anchors and across the spectrum from CNN to Fox.

By the weekend, television news programs had more hopeful images of daring helicopter rescues, airport triage, convoys of troops deployed across the flood waters and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice praying in church in her native Alabama, yet recrimination still rang out.

Even the announcement that Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist had died did not divert television cameras from the destruction - or the government bungling. (MSNBC has an on-screen count of the time elapsed since Katrina hit - "6 days/5 hours" - that is reminiscent of the "Day 110" coverage of the Iranian hostage crisis that began in 1979.)

It's the kind of combative coverage that Richard M. Nixon faced during Watergate, that Bill Clinton faced during his impeachment trial and that most presidents have endured sometime in their tenures. But ever since the Sept. 11 attacks, this president had been spared the harshest questioning - even with troops bogged down in Iraq, his White House news conferences have been so tame they are parodied by "Saturday Night Live" and Jon Stewart.

On "Meet the Press" yesterday, Tim Russert lacerated Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff, demanding to know, among other things, "How the president could be so wrong, be so misinformed?"

Fox News, normally highly deferential to the Bush administration, was gentler but just as skeptical. Chris Wallace, the host of "Fox News Sunday," asked Mr. Chertoff, "Mr. Secretary, how is it possible that you could not have known on late Thursday, for instance, that there were thousands of people in the convention center who didn't have food, who didn't have water, who didn't have security, when that was being reported on national television?"

The Bush administration, normally so deft at staying a step ahead of the television cameras, spent the weekend trying to catch up. President Bush, who plans to make a second trip to the Gulf Coast today - a disaster mulligan - paid a quick visit to the Red Cross headquarters in Washington to thank the volunteers and publicly display his concern.

Mr. Rumsfeld and Ms. Rice visited the region to make the same point, but their news conferences were clouded by an outburst by Aaron F. Broussard, president of Jefferson Parish, who wept as he described, on "Meet the Press," the drowning of a friend's mother who was left stranded in the St. Bernard nursing home for four days. "Nobody's coming to get us. The secretary has promised. Everybody's promised," Mr. Broussard said. "They've had press conferences. I'm sick of the press conferences. For God sakes, shut up and send us somebody."

Mr. Broussard's meltdown was shown on NBC, MSNBC and also CNN, which has been one of the most aggressive in covering the disaster and assigning blame.

The switch mirrors public outrage, but it is buoyed by a rare sense of righteous indignation by a news media that is usually on the defensive. Viewers could see that as late as Thursday, television news crews could travel freely back and forth from the convention center, but water trucks, ambulances and officials from the Federal Emergency Management Agency could not.

Some reporters helped stranded victims because no police officers or rescue workers were around. (Fox's Geraldo Rivera did his rivals one better: yesterday, he nudged an Air Force rescue worker out of the way so his camera crew could tape him as he helped lift an older woman in a wheelchair to safety.)

News reports alerted the world, and, it seems, an inattentive federal government, to the neglected victims in New Orleans. And television networks even acted as benefactors, holding star-studded telethons to raise money for the storm's victims.