More compare and contrast:
- 2005: Media destroys President Bush over his administration’s response to Hurricane Katrina. Or as Evan Thomas of Newsweek put it in mid-September of 2005, less than three weeks after the storm touched ground in New Orleans, “Katrina: How Bush Blew It.”
And of course, Howard Kurtz, the media “watchdog” for the Washington Post, Newsweek’s parent company, has his priorities in order on this one: “Obama to write Newsweek cover story on Haiti; conservative criticism to follow?”
(Mock Newsweek cover from Rob Long’s parody of the “news” magazine in National Review.)
Update: To build on one of the comments below, apparently, Obama is willing to take a good chunk out of what is likely already an intensely hectic schedule — which presumably could be better used to coordinate relief efforts — to pen however many hundreds of words of Newsweek asked for. Or, as is far more likely the case, a ghostwriter wrote this up and Obama signed off on it, and the magazine and the newspaper that publishes the essay are willing to silently play along with this minor fiction. Either way, as the links above highlight, this makes for quite a contrast with how those publications treated the last president when a natural disaster occurred.
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