PressEthic

On yesterday's Meet The Press, the media was brought to task by a member of the public, and for once, survived the attack. Tim Russert interviewed, for the second time, a gentleman by the name of Aaron Broussard, who is the president of Jefferson Parish in Lousiana. When Russert interviewed Broussard three weeks ago, he delivered a tear soaked speech claiming that the "beaurocracy has committed murder." They were told "the calvery is comin'," and it didn't. He told a heart wrenching story about his friend Tim Rodrigue, who told his mother time and again that someone was coming to get her, because that's what the federal government told him. They did not come, and she passed away in St. Rita's nursing home.

Russert replayed this speech, driving Broussard to tears once again, and then pounced. The reason he asked Broussard back to the show was to dig further into his remarks. After the previous show, "bloggers" (unidentified all) had raised serious questions about Broussard's statements, leading Meet the Press to look further into the issue.

Broussard brissled, recanted some of the facts, and noted that the was very emotional at the time. The Lousiana man's first instinct was to admonish the press and bloggers for being so nitpicky-- to hold him so rigidly accountable for his statements. The fact is though, that such details led to greater discoveries, especially regarding St. Rita's. He then stated,

Did inefficiencies, did bureaucracy commit murder here? Absolutely, it did. And Congress and the media will flush it out and find it out and those people will be held accountable. You've already given an example. These people in the nursing home in St. Bernard, they're getting indicted. Good. They ought to be indicted. They ought to get good old-fashioned Western justice. They ought to be taken out and administered to like they did in the old West. Yes, there's a lot of people that they're going to find that are going to be villains in this situation, but they're also going to find for the most part that the Peter Principle was squared. The Peter Principle is you promote somebody to the level of incompetency, but when you promote somebody to the level of incompetency in a life or death department, then those people should be ousted. Those people should be strung up. Those people should be burned at the stake. And I'm sure Congress and the press is going to do that.

Granted, this sounds like a statement given by George Bush. It's emotional and cowboy driven, and I'm sure we should hold off on the "western justice." The round about point is that it was an unintentional stroking of the media's own ego, and I'd like to take advantage of that. Not only did media self-scrutiny bring about more in-depth coverage, but it is leading to justice. Journalists are listening to bloggers, and the result is a better, more thorough story.

What strikes me even more are the ideas of Aaron Broussard. Broussard is the very definition of "local color" in a story. What does Everyman have to say? Well, they may not be reading the newspaper (apparently no one is), but John Q. Public still depends on the media to be safeguards of democracy, fact checkers to the government.

It's nice to hear for a change.