I remembered why I don't watch PBS much any more when I saw the NOVA special on New Orleans, "The Storm that Drowned a City." It gave some useful chronology, but in an hour-long program on the scientific roots of the storm, they spent most of their time on a handful of talking heads who managed to completely avoid placing even the tiniest speck of blame on the Bush administration.
I waited and waited for discussion of global warming's potential role in the disaster. It was absent until a brief minute near the end, and then dismissed the possible connection almost as soon as they raised it by saying that not all scientists agree. They didn't even try to link this disaster to the broader pattern of other disasters related to global climate change, like increases in tornadoes, floods, droughts, and forest fires (even before Katrina, the world's second largest reinsurance company, Swiss Re, warned of a $150 billion a year toll from these kinds of disasters). They just kept repeating the same loop of scientists saying, 'we dodged the bullet last time, but we aren't going to this time.'
The program also made no mention, in a lengthy discussion of the New Orleans levees, of the Bush administration's $71 million cuts to the budget of the Louisiana Corps of Engineers. They talked about the erosion of wetlands that once formed a critical hurricane buffer, but blamed it all on channelized rivers no longer depositing silt, while ignoring the additional impact of Bush reversing a Clinton-era directive that protected the wetlands from commercial development. Saying nothing that might even remotely reflect badly on Bush, they took a critical issue and rendered it innocuous.
PS--Frontline's special on FEMA was somewhat better, but in endless interviews with Michael Brown they never did mention the International Arabian Horse Association. Maybe they just didn't want to offend the Saudis.
Paul Rogat Loeb is the author of The Impossible Will Take a Little While: A Citizen's Guide to Hope in a Time of Fear, named the #3 political book of 2004 by the History Channel and the American Book Association, and winner of the Nautilus Award for best social change book of the year. His previous books include Soul of a Citizen: Living With Conviction in a Cynical Time. See www.paulloeb.org.