Since Bill Moyers retired, I watch PBS pretty rarely. I remembered why 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 genesis and
history of the storm, they avoided raising even the possibility that the
Bush administration may have contributed to the disaster.
I waited and waited for discussion of global warming's potential role in
fueling Katrina's ferocity. Finally, near the end, this science-focused show
spent maybe a minute quoting a scientist suggesting a possible link, and
then quickly undermined his words by having the prime expert they kept
coming back to dismiss the connection. They didn't even try to link Katrina
to the broader pattern of global climate change-related disasters, like
increases in tornadoes, floods, droughts, and forest fires. (A year before
Katrina, Swiss the world's second largest reinsurance company, warned of a
potential $150 billion annual toll from these kinds of disasters). The NOVA
show just kept repeating the same loop of scientists saying, we dodged the
bullet before, but it's headed for us now.
The program also made no mention, despite 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, even after FEMA had flagged a hurricane
swamping the city as one of America's three most likely national disasters.
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 challenge this
president, they took a critical issue and rendered it innocuous.
On some level, this didn't surprise me. It's a cliché to say that PBS has
become nothing but Big Bird, Brit imports, and home repair shows. But it's
true. There's not much to challenge us, aside from the odd documentary and
the occasional Frontline show. (One on the history of FEMA that followed the
NOVA program was actually pretty good, including footage of Bush Senior
saying "I'm not going to play the blame game" after his own political
appointees left FEMA wholly unprepared when Hurricane Andrew devastated
large parts of South Florida in 1992. But in endless interviews with Michael
Brown it never did mention the International Arabian Horse Association
connection, perhaps for fear raising that history would be viewed as
unseemly, or needlessly provoke the Suadis). I still urge my Senators to
keep supporting PBS just to keep this potential public commons open for the
future. But for now, the network increasingly seems the bought and paid for
subsidiary of WalMart, ExxonMobil, and Archer Daniels Midland. A resource
that once helped us think about real questions has now become largely a
civilized distraction.
---
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