All Blog Posts from Public Eye

"If you're an African American and you read about someone being called a porch monkey, that overrides any positive thing that you would read in the comments. You're starting to see some of the language you see on neo-Nazi sites, and that's not good for The Washington Post or for the subjects in those stories."

--Washington Post reporter Darryl Fears, who believes that reader comments on stories should be eliminated if the Post cannot filter out offensive comments in advance. Washingtonpost.com Executive Editor Jim Brady told Howard Kurtz he lacks the resources to screen all the comments that come in daily.

Here's a question media writers, press critics and bloggers have been batting around since Katrina: Do the media overhype minor concerns that pack a visceral punch and underplay important concerns that are more complicated and/or less immediate?



The question of why America wasn't better prepared for Katrina, after all, doesn't begin and end with the government. It also falls to the media: Did they sound the necessary alarms about what could happen in New Orleans? In August of 2001, FEMA managers made a list of the three potential catastrophes Americans were most likely to face: a terrorist attack on New York City, a hurricane in New Orleans, and an earthquake near San Francisco.



There were, then, credible warnings about what could be coming – and, in fact, two of the three predictions have now come to pass. But despite the official warnings, most Americans had no idea that New Orleans was at such high risk for devastation. That isn't to say that there weren't prescient reports from some quarters: The New Orleans Times Picayune, for example, ran an excellent five-part series on the potential disaster back in June of 2002.



But most of the media paid little attention.

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