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1. To ABC's Surprise, Katrina Victims Praise Bush and Blame Nagin ABC News producers probably didn't hear what they expected when they sent Dean Reynolds to the Houston Astrodome's parking lot to get reaction to President Bush's speech from black evacuees from New Orleans. Instead of denouncing Bush and blaming him for their plight, they praised Bush and blamed local officials. Reynolds asked Connie London: "Did you harbor any anger toward the President because of the slow federal response?" She rejected the premise: "No, none whatsoever, because I feel like our city and our state government should have been there before the federal government was called in." She pointed out: "They had RTA buses, Greyhound buses, school buses, that was just sitting there going under water when they could have been evacuating people." Not one of the six people interviewed on camera had a bad word for Bush -- despite Reynolds' best efforts. Reynolds goaded: "Was there anything that you found hard to believe that he said, that you thought, well, that's nice rhetoric, but, you know, the proof is in the pudding?" Brenda Marshall answered, "No, I didn't," prompting Reynolds to marvel to anchor Ted Koppel: "Very little skepticism here." 2. Analysts Note Bush's FDR-Like Big Spending, Mull Tax Hike Need Following Bush's Thursday night speech from New Orleans, network analysts noted how the massive spending proposals contradict Bush's conservative image and they speculated about the necessity of a tax hike. On CNN, Time's Jay Carney suggested it "is going to be very interesting to watch to see whether or not the President loses support from fiscal conservative Republicans" and Larry King asked David Gergen: "Do you buy the concept that maybe we need tax increases?" Gergen naturally agreed. MSNBC's Chris Matthews saw it as "a speech which was more redolent of an address by Lyndon B. Johnson or Franklin Delano Roosevelt than a conservative President." Tucker Carlson observed that Bush's "line that 'racism causes poverty,' and that federal spending is the solution to that" is "not conservative" and "to hear a purportedly conservative President say that is unreal." Carlson correctly added: "This guy is a bigger spender than Bill Clinton." Over on ABC, Ted Koppel echoed Matthews: "Not since FDR and the New Deal have I heard an American President promise quite as much....Doesn't sound like a conservative Republican." Koppel soon asked if Bush's programs can "be done without raising taxes?" 3. Scarborough and Williams Fret About Bush's Damage-Free Backdrop Just past 10pm EDT Thursday night after President Bush's address, MSNBC's Joe Scarborough asked NBC Nightly News anchor Brian Williams if, after "reporting from a major American city where young children died of dehydration out on sidewalks," he found it an "ironic choice" by President Bush to deliver his speech "from Jackson Square, an area largely untouched by Katrina's devastation?" Williams revealed that "some of us in the media were chattering about the choice of backdrops" and suggested you don't "want perhaps total devastation, but maybe a mid-range desolation behind the President." 4. Visit by "Big Oil" Bush to Oil Refinery Agitates Olbermann MSNBC's Keith Olbermann obsessed Thursday night with President Bush's visit to an oil refinery in Mississippi. "He goes to greet the President of the company and the workers at the Chevron oil refinery," Olbermann remarked on Countdown, adding his disbelief: "With all of the controversy over big oil and this administration, four and a half years, he does this today." Of course, refinery capacity is a major factor in the price of gas, so it's hardly a surprising stop. Suggesting Bush's public relations advisors are off their game, Olbermann complained that "today they sent him to the Chevron refinery in Pascagoula, Mississippi, as if reminding everybody of his oil connections and the government's oil connections was not among the worst things he could do right now. Where did the political sharpshooters in this administration go?" At the end of his hour, Olbermann insisted that Bush's visit "will undoubtedly strike many as strange" given the "controversial perceived ties to big oil already under fire." 5. Gibson Again Urges Tax Increase, FNC First Suggests Spending Cuts ABC's recurring solution: Raise taxes. On Wednesday's Good Morning America, co-host Charles Gibson, who last week pressed Senator Hillary Clinton about how, given the costs of Katrina and Iraq, we're "going to have to raise taxes?", hit White House counselor Dan Bartlett with the same argument: "Are you going to maintain that we can pay for this, we can pay for the war in Iraq, and we can pay for the rising healthcare costs in this country without raising taxes?" (The week before Gibson asked Clinton about raising taxes, his co-host, Diane Sawyer, had suggested a tax hike to President Bush.) Over on FNC's Fox and Friends, E.D. Hill treated a tax hike as an undesirable last resort. She told Bartlett that "I don't think Americans want to pay '70s era taxes," so "where are we gonna cut the money to fund this?" But, she recognized, "Congress spending less money is like a really warm day in International Falls, Minnesota. What about taxes? Would the President be willing to increase taxes to pay for this rebuilding?"
Bush and Blame Nagin
ABC News producers probably didn't hear what they expected when they sent Dean Reynolds to the Houston Astrodome's parking lot to get reaction to President Bush's speech from black evacuees from New Orleans. Instead of denouncing Bush and blaming him for their plight, they praised Bush and blamed local officials. Reynolds asked Connie London: "Did you harbor any anger toward the President because of the slow federal response?" She rejected the premise: "No, none whatsoever, because I feel like our city and our state government should have been there before the federal government was called in." She pointed out: "They had RTA buses, Greyhound buses, school buses, that was just sitting there going under water when they could have been evacuating people." Reynolds pressed another woman: "Did you feel that the President was sincere tonight?" She affirmed: "Yes, he was." Reynolds soon wondered who they held culpable for the levee breaks. Unlike the national media, London did not blame supposed Bush-mandated budget cuts: "They've been allocated federal funds to fix the levee system, and it never got done. I fault the mayor of our city personally. I really do." [This item was posted late Thursday night on the MRC's blog, NewsBusters.org. To offer a comment, and for a video clip in both RealPlayer and Windows Media formats, as well as an MP3 audio clip, go to this NewsBusters node: newsbusters.org ] The MRC's Rich Noyes alerted me to the reactions ABC broadcast. Immediately after Bush finished his speech from Jackson Square in New Orleans, at about 8:26pm local CDT, Ted Koppel, anchor of ABC's hour-long coverage, went to Dean Reynolds who was outside in a parking lot with a group of black people from New Orleans who are living at the Reliant Center next to the Astrodome. (No names were provided on-screen for those interviewed, so I only have first names for two, and no name for one, of the six.)
Reynolds elicited reaction from the group sitting in chairs: "I'd like to get the reaction of Connie London who spent several horrible hours at the Superdome. You heard the President say repeatedly that you are not alone, that the country stands beside you. Do you believe him?"
Mull Tax Hike Need Following Bush's Thursday night speech from New Orleans, network analysts noted how the massive spending proposals contradict Bush's conservative image and they speculated about the necessity of a tax hike. On CNN, Time's Jay Carney suggested it "is going to be very interesting to watch to see whether or not the President loses support from fiscal conservative Republicans" and Larry King asked David Gergen: "Do you buy the concept that maybe we need tax increases?" Gergen naturally agreed. MSNBC's Chris Matthews saw it as "a speech which was more redolent of an address by Lyndon B. Johnson or Franklin Delano Roosevelt than a conservative President." Tucker Carlson observed that Bush's "line that 'racism causes poverty,' and that federal spending is the solution to that" is "not conservative" and "to hear a purportedly conservative President say that is unreal." Carlson correctly added: "This guy is a bigger spender than Bill Clinton." Over on ABC, Ted Koppel echoed Matthews: "Not since FDR and the New Deal have I heard an American President promise quite as much....Doesn't sound like a conservative Republican." Koppel soon asked if Bush's programs can "be done without raising taxes?" A rundown of some quotes collated by the MRC's Brad Wilmouth: -- CNN's Larry King Live:
King: "Jay Carney, where do you think the money's going to come from?"
Later, King asked: "David Gergen, do you buy the concept that maybe we need tax increases?"
A bit later in the 9pm EDT hour, Tucker Carlson, in New Jersey: "But the most interesting line in the whole thing to me was his line that 'racism causes poverty,' and that federal spending is the solution to that. Now, that may be right, it may be wrong, it's not conservative. Conservatives don't believe that, and to hear a purportedly conservative president say that is unreal. And the precedent, imagine if I'm the mayor of Detroit, I'm listening to this thinking, 'Well, I've got a lot of poverty caused by racism,' right, if I'm the mayor of Hartford or Bridgeport or Washington, D.C., right? I mean, this is a precedent he has set. It's a remarkable thing for a Republican president to say, and I think it's going to annoy the hell out of his base."
Damage-Free Backdrop Just past 10pm EDT Thursday night after President Bush's address, MSNBC's Joe Scarborough asked NBC Nightly News anchor Brian Williams if, after "reporting from a major American city where young children died of dehydration out on sidewalks," he found it an "ironic choice" by President Bush to deliver his speech "from Jackson Square, an area largely untouched by Katrina's devastation?" Williams revealed that "some of us in the media were chattering about the choice of backdrops" and suggested you don't "want perhaps total devastation, but maybe a mid-range desolation behind the President." Scarborough, at MSNBC's New Jersey facility, asked: "Brian, talk about it. This has been a, not to personalize this too much, but it has been a personal journey for you. You've been on the ground from the very beginning, like you said, reporting from a major American city where young children died of dehydration out on sidewalks, and now you've got the President of the United States delivering a speech to the nation from Jackson Square, an area largely untouched by Katrina's devastation. Did you find that an ironic choice?" From a New Orleans street, Williams replied: "I will say some of us in the media were chattering about the choice of backdrops, not that you want perhaps total devastation, but maybe a mid-range desolation behind the President. This was, if we were coming here to New Orleans to do a Nightly News centered around the city, that might have been one of the locations we chose as, in the parlance of our business, a beauty shot. There are few better-looking backdrops in this city. It's their candy store. It's their President. They chose the backdrop for a message presumably of hope. I can say, Joe, this. We decided to come cover this hurricane. The difference about this storm was it was headed right for here, and this is a bathtub, and we can look out at the Mississippi at ships at or above, as you know, eye level. We rode out that storm that day with those people in the Superdome. Not all of them lived. And I've said this before on the air, I hope the lesson of this is not that my son and daughter at home have been assigned a different value as humans in the United States than their equivalents here in New Orleans. I would certainly like that not to be true about the country I was raised in, that I have prospered in, and that I love."
Agitates Olbermann MSNBC's Keith Olbermann obsessed Thursday night with President Bush's visit to an oil refinery in Mississippi. "He goes to greet the President of the company and the workers at the Chevron oil refinery," Olbermann remarked on Countdown, adding his disbelief: "With all of the controversy over big oil and this administration, four and a half years, he does this today." Of course, refinery capacity is a major factor in the price of gas, so it's hardly a surprising stop. Suggesting Bush's public relations advisors are off their game, Olbermann complained that "today they sent him to the Chevron refinery in Pascagoula, Mississippi, as if reminding everybody of his oil connections and the government's oil connections was not among the worst things he could do right now. Where did the political sharpshooters in this administration go?" At the end of his hour, Olbermann insisted that Bush's visit "will undoubtedly strike many as strange" given the "controversial perceived ties to big oil already under fire." The MRC's Brad Wilmouth took down Olbermann's comments on his September 15 show.
# At 8:12pm EDT to Newsweek's Howard Fineman: "Last question: Mr. Bush goes to Pascagoula in Mississippi late this afternoon hours before this critical speech, it's his other part of this trip, and he goes to greet the president of the company and the workers at the Chevron oil refinery. With all of the controversy over big oil and this administration, four and a half years, he does this today. Howard, who is his principal advance man on this trip, Howard Dean? Does this just not hand a whole section of the good publicity that might come tonight back over this gesture?"
# To Chris Matthews at 8:54pm EDT: "From the purely political point-of-view -- the strategy, the photo-ops, the making hay, the hardball, if you will -- when did the President and his team lose their edge? They have been in a slump for months, but since Katrina hit, they look like the Yankees after game three of the playoffs with the Red Sox last year. Today they sent him to the Chevron refinery in Pascagoula, Mississippi, as if reminding everybody of his oil connections-"
First Suggests Spending Cuts ABC's recurring solution: Raise taxes. On Wednesday's Good Morning America, co-host Charles Gibson, who last week pressed Senator Hillary Clinton about how, given the costs of Katrina and Iraq, we're "going to have to raise taxes?", hit White House counselor Dan Bartlett with the same argument: "Are you going to maintain that we can pay for this, we can pay for the war in Iraq, and we can pay for the rising healthcare costs in this country without raising taxes?" (The week before Gibson asked Clinton about raising taxes, his co-host, Diane Sawyer, had suggested a tax hike to President Bush.) Over on FNC's Fox and Friends, E.D. Hill treated a tax hike as an undesirable last resort. She told Bartlett that "I don't think Americans want to pay '70s era taxes," so "where are we gonna cut the money to fund this?" But, she recognized, "Congress spending less money is like a really warm day in International Falls, Minnesota. What about taxes? Would the President be willing to increase taxes to pay for this rebuilding?" The September 8 CyberAlert recounted: Six days after ABC's Diane Sawyer pressed President Bush about raising taxes, her colleague, Charles Gibson, also exploited the hurricane disaster to raise the subject of a tax hike with Senator Hillary Clinton. Following his Wednesday interview on Good Morning America with Clinton, Gibson related how "just before we went on the air" he "asked her given the fact that it's going to cost so much for recovery and with what we're spending in Iraq whether we're not going to have to raise taxes." Gibson fretted: "You can't get a politician to say definitively we're going to have to raise taxes. And so, she didn't." On September 1, Sawyer related how after her White House session with Bush, "I also asked him about this idea that the whole economy could be torqued by this in such a way. And I said, 'will you call for tax increases, in fact, if that's required?'" For more details: www.mrc.org The MRC's Brian Boyd caught Gibson's last question to Bartlett, who appeared from the White House lawn to preview President Bush's upcoming prime time address. Gibson's questions, and some of Bartlett's answers, during the 7am half hour interview on the September 15 GMA: # Gibson: "Tonight, President Bush will be in Louisiana and will address the nation on Hurricane Katrina. An important speech for the President because there has been such criticism of the federal response to the storm. So, we turn to Dan Bartlett, counselor to the President, at the White House....Dan, I feel like I'm quoting polls every time you're on the broadcast, but the President's approval ratings, as you know, in free fall. Is this a speech that he should have given a lot earlier?" # Gibson: "The President says he takes responsibility for failures in the federal response to Katrina. The just replaced head of FEMA in the New York Times this morning says 'things were going to hell in a handbasket.' So what's the President taking responsibility for?"
# Gibson: "There are reports you had to show the President the network newscast four days after the storm hit to impress upon him how bad this was. Did the President miss the severity, the enormity of this in the early days?"
# Gibson: "But are you going to maintain that we can pay for this, we can pay for the war in Iraq, and we can pay for the rising healthcare costs in this country without raising taxes? These are astronomical dollars we're talking about that will cost the federal treasury?"
On FNC's Fox and Friends a few minutes earlier, the MRC's Michael Rule observed, after Bartlett outlined Bush's proposals, E.D. Hill warned him: "You've got to work in partnership with Congress too because I'm telling you, I don't think Americans want to pay '70s era taxes, where are we gonna cut the money to fund this? I mean it sounds like a wonderful idea and it's not that people don't support it, but where are politicians going to say, 'you know what, I'll drop this project in my district so that we can put this money into New Orleans'?"
-- Brent Baker
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