Daily Archives: September 15, 2005

Another Legacy?

Talk about legacy presidents. What will the world remember in fifty years from now – the partisan ankle biting and dishonest petty insults that “Bush lied about WMD’s”, or that the transformation of the Middle East into a democratic region was attributable to Bush’s bold doctrine of fighting terrorism by transforming terrorist breeding grounds?

Today Bush gave a bold speech in which he personally took ownership of the rebuilding of New Orleans. This is the first time in modern American history where a city has to be entirely rebuilt. Bush put his stamp on that undertaking tonight. In fifty years, or perhaps even fifteen years, if and when New Orleans has emerged as one of America’s greatest renaissance cities, do you think folks will still be parroting the “blame Bush” headlines, or reciting what Bush’s poll numbers were three days after the hurricane?

Me neither.

Agenda Journalism Leads to Bad Policies

Lorie at PoliPundit continues with the subject of what we should have learned from Katrina. Here I posted about agenda journalism contributing to a decline of real meaningful discourse in our society. Lorie’s post provides a concrete example of this.

Agenda journalism isn’t just unfair, unethical or frustrating to those who want the whole story to be told. It has real consequences. Blinded by politics, the media reports what they want us to know, rather than what we need to know. We are left with an ignorant public, an inneffective representative democracy and ultimately bad policies.

mm-5