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With a new mayoral candidate poised to unseat New Orleans mayor Ray Nagin, there’s been much talk about the extent to which Hurricane Katrina changed the complexion of the city. But the floods also wrought deep changes to the decades-old contours of the local newspaper and broadcasting scenes. Last week, Brooke and OTM producer Jamie York visited New Orleans, and brought back this report about a vastly transformed media landscape.
It used to be quite common for presidents to reach into the ranks of the press corps to find their spokesmen. But for almost three decades now, press secretaries have come with P.R. bona fides – not journalistic ones. Bush’s appointment this week of Fox News TV and radio personality Tony Snow to the job reverses that trend. ABC News political director Mark Halperin tells Brooke that it’s a step in the right direction for the Bush team.
In February, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld delivered a speech entitled “The Long War.” In it, he invoked the Cold War while at the same time laying out broad strategies to fight what could be a decades-long terrorist threat across the globe. How will these sorts of war-branding efforts affect how the conflict is ultimately remembered? Brooke puts the question to Gideon Rose, managing editor of Foreign Affairs.
Two months ago, a historian in Washington discovered that intelligence operatives were secretly re-classifying documents in the National Archives. This week, an internal investigation at the Archives concluded that about a third of the records pulled from the shelves should not have been reclassified. Brooke speaks with J. William Leonard, who oversaw the audit of the secret program.
Barely a week into his new job, Italian Prime Minister Romano Prodi is already under pressure to rewrite the media ownership laws that allowed outgoing P.M. Silvio Berlusconi to build a media empire. Berlusconi kept a tight leash on the media, and often fired journalists, commentators, and even satirists not to his liking. Megan Williams reports from Rome on the troubled past and future prospects of political satire on Italian TV.
For many years, Garland Robinette and his now former wife anchored New Orleans’ local CBS evening news. Long retired, Robinette happened to be filling in for a sick friend on a local AM radio station last year when Hurricane Katrina hit. But since then, he has been a permanent fixture on the broadcast waves, a must listen for the city and its diaspora. Robinette tells Brooke about being angry when everyone is listening.
Highlights from Past ShowsThis week, White House press secretary Scott McClellan told reporters something they didn’t know. To wit: he will soon be stepping down, for good, from the podium. Reporters might have seldom gotten what they wanted from his daily briefings. But taken as a whole, his tenure speaks volumes about the state of the presidency. At least it does to Bob.
The war in Iraq was temporarily displaced from the headlines this week by speculation about a U.S. invasion of Iran – speculation triggered by Seymour Hersh’s latest jaw-dropper in the New Yorker. While many have wondered about the true intentions of President Bush, others couldn’t help but question those of Hersh’s sources. Slate defense analyst Fred Kaplan joins Bob with some possible explanations.
On the Media is funded by The Bydale Foundation, The Ford Foundation, The John S. and James L. Knight Foundation and the Overbrook Foundation.
