Reporter: Katrina a media wake-up call

In the wake of Hurricane Katrina and the culmination of several investigations close to the Bush administration, the public's role of assessing the government and the media has become a central issue. \nDavid Shuster, an MSNBC correspondent based in Washington, spoke Thursday at the School of Public and Environmental Affairs about the role of the press and media in democracy and civil society. He outlined the media's coverage of the Bush administration since Sept. 11, 2001, from a cable news perspective and addressed issues at the forefront of the political sphere.\nWhile critics have reacted strongly to false reports that spread through news agencies in the immediate aftermath of the hurricane, including exaggerated death tolls, Shuster defended some of the media's mistakes. \n"That's part of the give and take between the media and the administration that's going to happen with stories we just can't wrap our arms around," Shuster said.\nHe said communication was a problem because it was based on the "game of telephone" that gets played. \n"Someone says, 'NBC said a child was raped.' Well, no, NBC didn't say that, NBC said someone told them a child was raped," Shuster said in an interview after the presentation. "That attribution gets lost."\nWhile Shuster admitted that the media needs to work harder at presenting accurate information, he said the government and the public need to also be aware and communicate with each other. "I feel we all have to do a better job," he said.\nShuster described the fallout of the Katrina disaster as a wake-up call for the media, hinting that news agencies had been lax following Sept. 11, rallying around the president and restraining from asking hard questions for fear of being seen as unpatriotic.\n"There was very limited information," said Shuster, adding that what makes Katrina so significant is that for the first time since before Sept. 11, news agencies didn't have to rely on officials or experts to tell them what was going on in New Orleans.\n"All you had to do was point your camera there, there's a woman who tells you she hasn't been able to provide food or water to her children in four days; point your camera there, there's another dead person with a note attached to them," said Shuster, who was in Biloxi, Miss., when the hurricane hit and spent most of the past month covering the story.\n"For the first time in a long time, Americans were seeing people dying right before them," Shuster said. "Suddenly it becomes even more of a difference between what the officials were saying and what was happening in New Orleans. The facts and evidence are incontrovertible."\nShuster tied together the problems of Sept. 11, the war in Iraq and the current legal issues revolving around the Bush administration for the nearly 150 people in attendance. He painted a simple portrait of the four years since the terrorist attacks and demonstrated the effect that event has had on much of the current news in the media, Abu Ghraib prison to the grand jury hearings into how undercover CIA agent Valerie Plame's covert status was leaked to the media.\n"It was the quiet before the storm -- figuratively and literally," Shuster said of the rising problems this past summer.\nShuster advised that while the media is heading back into a period of having to rely on officials to tell them the facts, the public shouldn't stop making their own decisions about the news being presented to them.\n"Don't let your eyes fool you," he said, when asked a question about whether Fox News Channel was biased. "Listen to how questions are formed, how questions are answered," adding that someone's gut instinct is "probably right."\nHe also defended the role of the media, which is often accused of having a conservative or liberal bias. \n"It's not media bias. It's not a deliberate effort ... to bash the administration," he said. "It's about letting the chips fall where they may." \nShuster said the press's job is to afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted, thereby playing a watchdog role for the leaders in government, which is currently the Republican Party.\nKeith MacDonald, a journalism graduate student, said he enjoyed Shuster's hour-long presentation. \n"I thought that it was a nice, concise outline of how the view of the administration has changed based on landmarks and milestones," MacDonald said. "He put it into a perspective that made sense."\nA Bloomington native, Shuster is featured daily on MSNBC's "Hardball with Chris Matthews." He previously worked for Fox News and CNN. His stepfather, Robert Agranoff, is a SPEA professor emeritus and his mother, Susan Klein, is a School of Education professor emeritus.