The Poor In The USA Was Never A Hot Topic.......

until the Katrina disaster struck New Orleans. Now all these liberal newspapers are whining on the class angle for a while and trying to blame the Republican Bush administration for some agenda laden tripe that they dig up.

But the question that is being asked of the newspapers and big media is where have THEY been all these years when poverty has been festering in the poor communities in New Orleans? Apparently, they were nowhere to be found!

A Sept. 12 Washington Post story was headlined "Katrina Pushes Issues of Race and Poverty at Bush." An equally apt headline would have been, "Katrina Pushes Issues of Race and Poverty at a Media Establishment That Has Largely Ignored Them."

A database search of The Post for the past decade found one story that prominently mentioned the poor of New Orleans: a 2002 piece on a campaign to boost the minimum wage that cited the city's "40 percent poverty level." Far more typical of the Mardi Gras media was a 1995 Post story on how "the city's black neighborhoods come alive" with Sunday parades in the fall.

New York Times ombudsman Byron Calame found a similar record at his newspaper, unearthing only two articles about New Orleans in 10 years that "contained a few paragraphs on poverty and race."

The newspapers are not the seekers of truth, but a fair-weather friend to the needy and whatever news story advances their agenda, and that agenda is be a millstone around George Bushes neck. They could figure out a better way to be useful and serve the public purpose that they are charged with and that is to REPORT the news, not create it.