NOW: Questions of Balance
Ken A. Bode
January 3, 2006
On December 12, Patricia de Stacy Harrison, the President and CEO of CPB received a letter from Congressman Bob Inglis of South Carolina. Rep. Inglis passed on the views of a constituent who complained that two segments on the September 30 edition of NOW were strongly critical of Republicans and the Bush Administration while "almost no effort was made to present balancing points of view."
Ms. Harrison referred Rep. Inglis' letter to the CPB ombudsmen for review.
The first segment in the September 30 broadcast was about the shortcomings of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) during and after Hurricane Katrina. NOW's report made the case that these shortcomings were due to unqualified political appointees and cuts in funding for natural disasters in favor of preventing terrorist acts.
Rep. Inglis' letter mentions "insiders at FEMA" who tell a different story than former FEMA chief Michael Brown. The expert witnesses used in the program are former or current FEMA employees or local disaster relief specialists. None of them seems to have the problem of being a disgruntled, demoted or dismissed employee. These are experienced disaster relief specialists who have an informed point of view, and it is useful for the public to hear from them. Undoubtedly it took courage for civil servants like these to speak so directly and honestly about the problems within their own agency involving natural disaster relief, when such a large proportion of the Homeland Security budget now is earmarked to prevent future acts of terror.
As the Congress and the country try to figure out how to avoid the next Hurricane Katrina or an earthquake of a similar magnitude, this bit of investigative journalism put two very valid pieces of information on the table:
1. FEMA has been downgraded since George W. Bush took office and inexperienced political appointees have taken over jobs and responsibilities that require training and skills. There are plenty of skilled emergency planners who also are Republicans. It is not politics, but cronyism, that is at the root of the problem.
2. National priorities after 9/11 are bent strongly toward preventing another act of terrorism, and local emergency planning experts believe this makes the country more vulnerable than it needs to be to a catastrophic event the magnitude of Katrina. In other words the governmental re-organization after 9/11 may work for terrorism but not for natural disasters.
These issues are worthy of public discussion. I complement the producers of NOW for raising them.
Congressman Inglis' second objection in this report was the strong implication in the NOW report that Florida, and particularly the Miami-Dade area, received excessively generous hurricane relief for a storm that did very little damage because 2004 was an election year. Reporter Maria Hinojosa says they made more than a dozen phone calls to the agency and several e-mail efforts to include interviews with FEMA officials. All they got was a statement from a spokesperson that "politics played no role in disaster relief decisions."
NOW is an influential program that gives serious treatment to important issues. It was a failure of FEMA's public affairs department that they did not put the agency's best response in the broadcast. It would have been useful to hear what an official spokesperson for FEMA has to say about budget cuts and unfilled positions, for example.
It is a common assumption that Presidents of both parties have used federal programs to buttress political support in key states during election years. On the other hand, the fact that Miami-Dade got more hurricane relief than it apparently needed does not really prove that FEMA relief dollars were used as a political sweetener for Florida voters.
The second NOW segment addressed in Congressman Inglis' letter was a report about Rep. Tom DeLay and the illegal involvement of corporate money in Texas politics. Once again, the complaint was lack of balance. This time the congressman is right. NOW host David Brancaccio interviewed Craig McDonald from Texans for Public Justice, a group that filed the original complaint against Rep. DeLay with Texas prosecutor Ronnie Earle. Brancaccio lobbed softball questions which seemed to raise an alternative viewpoint and Mr. McDonald used his answers to hit them over the fence with points that reinforced his brief against DeLay.
At one point, NOW ran a clip of an interview with prosecutor Earle conducted by Brancaccio in 2004, adding another voice to the case against DeLay. "There were no pro-DeLay voices," said Rep. Inglis. He is right. Mr. DeLay is putting on a case in court and his side of the story deserved a fair mention in the broadcast. Fairness and balance, Mr. Brancaccio, keep it in mind. If you don't, you are playing into the hands of those who argue that there is an inherent bias in PBS's public affairs coverage.
Finally, the September 30 broadcast ended with a short clip of Rep. Tom DeLay riding in a golf cart driven by President George W. Bush. Just two Texas politicians on the golf course together? Or a video reminder meant to tie the aroma of DeLay to Mr. Bush? I leave it to you to decide, but in my opinion, it was a bit over the top.