The View From 1776

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This evening I happened to catch a portion of NPR’s evening opinion journal called “All Things Considered.” To be fair, I must confess that I heard only part of the program and may have missed earlier discussions that gave a more rounded picture of events in New Orleans.

Let me repeat what I wrote earlier.  I am not making a racial attack.  I am implicitly criticizing the liberal welfare-state, while explicitly criticizing NPR’s claim to unbiased reporting.

What I heard on NPR was simply the American version of al-Jazeera, a one-sided, liberal tarring of whites and the Bush administration. 

First, the program moderator interviewed a Washington Post reporter who was on the scene in New Orleans.  The reporter described forlorn people.  Then she wondered why the government wasn’t doing more to help them. 

Contrast this to other disaster scenes, such as the 9/11 destruction of the World Trade Towers, when reporters filed endless stories about the courage and resourcefulness of victims helping fellow victims. 

Not in New Orleans.  The black population, accustomed since Huey Long’s days to expect the welfare-state to provide all needs, appear to have been rendered incapable of helping themselves, if we are to take our picture only from reporters’ stories.  Blacks seen in aerial video going from house to house weren’t rescuing people; they were “liberating” homeowners’ property.

After the interview with the Washington Post reporter, NPR segued into a lengthy monologue by a black liberal who got very specific: the plight of New Orleans’s blacks is caused by white Dixiecrats moving from the city to the suburbs, while working in collusion with Big Oil to deprive the urban poor.

As is often the case with liberals, he offered no facts to back his charges.  But his broadside certainly raises questions.

Does driving to work from the north side of Lake Ponchartrain constitute collusion with Big Oil?  If that added consumption drives up the price of gasoline in the New Orleans area, how does it impact blacks, most of whom, we are told, don’t have automobiles?  If more whites lived in the city, might we expect that they would have left more of their possessions behind in order to transport black families?  If more whites had not moved to the suburbs and remained in the city as voters, could there have been more black officeholders in a city where already the mayor, most of the civil administrators, and most of the police force are black?  Did he assume that more whites remaining in the city, instead of moving to the suburbs, would have increased Federal and state welfare payments to blacks?  Did he assume that had more whites not moved to the suburbs, they would have been available to pay surtaxes supplementing Federal and state welfare payments?

As I said, there may have been balancing opinions given voice in the program before I began to listen to it.  In any case, there were none following the black liberal’s monologue, which was the closing note on that segment of the program.

Following that opinion piece, NPR presented an update on the news, in which the first item was President Bush’s visit to New Orleans and the other Gulf Coast disaster areas.  The lead-in was the reporter’s statement that President Bush had finally “admitted” that Federal aid has been insufficient.  Had he been denying the problem up to that point?  Are we to expect a WMD sort of campaign to convince the public that the President has been lying?  May we expect Nancy Pelosi shortly to hold a press conference demanding to know what the President knew and when he knew it?

I’ll admit that it’s a semi-subtle point, by why make that sort of statement at all on a radio program funded by all taxpayers?  If nothing else, presenting it in that manner makes it editorial opinion and not impartial news, without properly identifying it as such.

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