Unimpressed With The Press

John McCain was in the Lower Ninth Ward yesterday. This is a small area, so it's not surprising that he spoke two blocks from where I was working. In light of the context and of the education opportunity for the Boston, MA high schoolers volunteering with us that day, a cadre of us split off from the rebuilding groups to get a taste of the Presidential race.

Senator McCain stepped out from the Straight Talk Express to shake hands, take pictures, and thank several National Guardsmen (amen, Senator!) before taking the world's most abbreviated tour of the Lower Ninth. It comprised about three blocks of Lamanche Street, and culminated in a press conference outside St. David's Church:



He traveled a mere three blocks, with perhaps five doors opened to him (two of them Christian centers, the rest local residences). All of these buildings were in condition similar to this one:


...which is striking, since there are houses in the Lower Ninth (blocks away from his route) that look like this:


And yet today's papers attribute special significance to Senator McCain's description of the Bush administration's failures in Katrina, since he "stood in the Lower Ninth Ward" while declaiming them. Senator McCain spent at most an hour and a half in the Lower Ninth, and neither he nor his aides saw anything representative of the conditions there. There's a lesson here about the all-too-human tendency to mistake background for context and appearance for substance.

There's also a lesson about the sensationalist and bloodthirsty bent of the press corps. Senator McCain was reported to have taken "direct aim at the Bush administration",

"tick[ing] off a long list of mistakes by the current administration, saying there were 'unqualified people in charge, there was a total misreading of the dimensions of the disaster, there was a failure of communications.'" [Ibid.]

I heard the question that elicited this response, and I have no doubt that Senator McCain carefully chose his words to leave the President nothing more than vaguely responsible for the Katrina and Rita disasters. The reporter asked, "In what ways did President Bush fail in dealing with Katrina?" That part's true enough. The above McCain quote selected by the Times was preceded by something like, "Well, I think we all know that mistakes were made, and we've talked about them in depth. There were..."

In other words, Senator McCain answered a completely different question than the one that was asked: to wit, "What mistakes were made in dealing with Katrina?" Note the passive tense. Note also that all but the first of the examples the Senator cited were at least as applicable at the local level as they were at the White House. In fact, the Senator gave the example of non-interoperable radios used by relief personnel, an example which in no way reflects the President's judgment or action.

The logical follow-up question would have been: "Senator McCain, we're aware that those mistakes were made. In what ways did the President contribute to them?" But it was not to be.

Instead, the press corps somehow heard a screaming indictment in the Senator's delicate treatment of the President. I was there, though, and I see no dissonance between the tenor of McCain's softshoe yesterday and his decision to campaign with the President. I was, however, disappointed by the face-to-face docility and consequent misinterpretation offered by the press.

In fairness, though, what can you expect from a press corps that covered the Senator's stroll down Lamanche while corralled into media-friendly feeding troughs?


Lest you should think, as I did until I asked one of the Guardsmen present, that this was a nefarious plot to restrict journalists to taking only those pictures arranged by the campaign, know this: the reporters requested those flatbeds.

I hope that this indolence isn't typical of all campaign reporting. To my knowledge, no reporters cased the neighborhood to observe the condition of houses off the anointed path. No reporters interviewed community leaders ahead of time to find, for example, that the City had fought against reopening the local school, and that children (and therefore neighborhood residents) had been allowed to return only after months of effort by the community associations. No reporters had sufficiently examined records or newspaper reports to be able to ask Senator McCain his understanding of Presidential responsibilities, both legal and persuasive, in a situation such as that following Katrina, and, as above, specifically how the President did or didn't acquit himself of those perceived responsibilities.

In short, the press dropped all of the balls on this one. Senator McCain at least gets credit for visiting the Lower Ninth Ward, however briefly; for leveling criticism, however inchoate, at the White House for its myriad Katrina failings; for speaking directly to the Guardsmen present; and, perhaps most of all, for shaking hands with and then publicly thanking the stellar high schoolers I was working with:


And yes, that's Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal next to Mr. and Mrs. McCain. They travel together, you know.