We are the hollow reporters / We are the stuffed reporters

To get an idea of the utter uselessness of the tv news people, read this excerpt from an interview on CNN on September 5 between correspondent Soledad O’Brien (was she born of revolutionary leftist parents in 1971?) and Mayor Nagin:

Soledad O’BRIEN: Your evacuation plan before—when you put people into the Superdome. It wasn’t thought out. You got 20,000 people in there. And that you bear the brunt of the blame for some of this, a large chunk of it.

NAGIN: Look, I’ll take whatever responsibility that I have to take. But let me ask you this question: When you have a city of 500,000 people, and you have a category 5 storm bearing down on you, and you have the best you’ve ever done is evacuate 60 percent of the people out of the city, and you have never issued a mandatory evacuation in the city’s history, a city that is a couple of hundred years old, I did that. I elevated the level of distress to the citizens.

And I don’t know what else I could do, other than to tell them that it’s a mandatory evacuation. And if they stayed, make sure you have a frigging ax in your home, where you can bust out the roof just in case the water starts flowing.

And as a last resort, once this thing is above a category 3, there are no buildings in this city to withstand a category 3, a category 4 or a category 5 storm, other than the Superdome. That’s where we sent people as a shelter of last resort. When that filled up, we sent them to the Convention Center. Now, you tell me what else we could have done. [Emphasis added.]

O’BRIEN: What has Secretary Chertoff promised you? What has Donald Rumsfeld given you and promised you?

So, Nagin opens himself to the single most important question in the whole mess of the New Orleans evacuations, namely, what was he supposed to have done to prepare the Superdome and the Convention Center for thousands of evacuees, beyond merely sending them there? And, having been given this opening, what does “Soledad” do? She goes on to the next question! She evinces no awareness of the importance of the question which she herself had initially posed, and on which Nagin himself now challenges her to pin him down. In short, O’Brien is to journalism what Nagin is to government, a high visibility functionary who is just going through the motions, a hollow reporter asking a hollow mayor hollow questions.

Alternatively, she was entirely aware of the importance of the question, and wanted to help Nagin bluff his way out of it, because she knew that a truthful answer would be devastatingly damaging to him, and thus undercut the left’s attack on President Bush as the supposed fons et origo of the Superdome disaster. In either case, she was only going through the motions of being a reporter.

What is this useless airhead’s salary, anyway? Half a million? A million?

In fact, my intuition (which was based on absolutely zero knowledge of Soledad O’Brien’s career or of the current pay structures in tv news) turns out to be correct. I plugged “Soledad O’Brien,” “salary,” and “CNN” into Google, and found out that she was hired at CNN in 2003 at a salary estimated at between $600,000 and $1 million.

(Also, according to the African American Registry, O’Brien was born of a black Cuban mother and an Irish-Australian father in 1966, and so cannot be named after the infamous Soledad Brothers of 1970-71.)

Posted by Lawrence Auster at September 08, 2005 04:59 PM | Send