RadioBlogger: dropping (metaphorical) bodies like John Gotti

There's been some exceptional work over at Radioblogger of late. RadioBlogger, working with Hugh Hewitt, offers outstanding transcripts of discussions with various media luminaries.

Recent conversations relate to the delayed Katrina response. Christopher Cooper, in Friday's Wall Street Journal, reports some startling news. And it's news that you probably haven't heard via conventional channels:

One of the mysteries of the fumbling federal response to... Katrina has been why the military, which was standing by, and federal disaster agencies, which had pre-positioned supplied in the area, didn't move in more quickly and with greater force. Senior government officials now say that one major reason for the delay was that they believed they had to plan for a far more complicated military operation, rather than... [just] a relief effort. [False] Accounts from local officials of widespread looting and unspeakable violence [Ed: sloppily relayed by the mainstream media ] -- which now appear to have been significantly overstated -- raised the specter that soldiers might be forced to confront or even kill American citizens. The prospect of such a scenario added political and tactical complications to the job of filling the city with troops and set back relief efforts by days... [FEMA] faulted a "hysteric media" for passing on such [bogus] stories...

In other words, the mainstream media -- through its sheer incompetence -- helped cause the humanitarian crisis it so stridently decries. Look for a related Sixty Minutes  expose, oh, about the same time Jessica Simpson pulls down a Nobel Prize for mathematics.

RadioBlogger captures some related conversation. James Lileks:

HH: Now let me talk about the media and New Orleans. I just did this...oh, it was so classic PBS, sitting around the table talking with three people about something that nobody's going to watch. But it was fun. And they're defending the media down there, and you know, the slashed baby throats, and the forty people in the freezer, et cetera, as, you know, they were the captives of Ray Nagin. What do you make of this? JL: I think, I'm going to defend the media here, because I think that if somebody runs screaming out of the dome, shouting that a giant octopus is eating people in the upper deck, I think it's the duty of the media to report that. Because if the media went inside, they might be eaten by the giant octopus. So I'm on their side in this one.

When Lileks breaks off a riff like that, it can probably only be equalled by P. Diddy or, perhaps, Mark "the Genius" Steyn:

And one thing I've learned since September 11th, is that a lot of things that 90% of journalists claim as fact are not fact. I mean, it started on about September the 12th, when people said we couldn't invade Afghanistan, because of the quote brutal Afghan winter... ...[if you're in the mainstream media], when you get to Iraq, you're supplied generally with a translator. The big news organizations have translators. Who are those translators? The ones that CNN and ABC and a lot of the big newspapers are using are actually the old Baath party translators. ...I think the Democrats for years now have made the mistake of... because they're not great issues people, and they make the mistake of, as they say in English soccer, playing the man, not the ball.... and they get rid of the guy, and some other guy nobody's ever heard of takes over, and life goes on, and the ideas, which is what's important about conservatism, those ideas stay strong. And until Democrats learn to stop wasting their time trying to do a... take a contract out on some peripheral political figure and actually attack the ideas, they're always going to be losing elections.

In his casual and exquisitely succint manner, Hugh Hewitt then boils the underlying truth to its purest distillation.

...We had all the resources of the American media combined in New Orleans. Everything they had, they threw at it. With the help of locals like you and national networks, print, media, radio, everything, not one outlet could get inside the convention center or the Superdome to do accurate reporting. What's that tell us about the trustworthyness of American media, when it's far away from home in a war zone like Iraq? Isn't that in fact an obvious admission that not only can they not do the job in New Orleans, we can't expect them to do the job of accurate reporting in a war zone like Iraq?

Indeed. Go ye and read of RadioBlogger, for it is good. Just do it. You know you want to.

Update: Welcome, RadioBlogger regulars! Related reading in these parts: The Stockdale Paradox and the Modern Left and Is the media biased? Google News has the answer.