From Mona Charen at the National Review. It was clear that the press reacted differently to the problems of FEMA's response in the two different disasters. FEMA's response was slower in several instances when it responded to the Sandy disaster, but this never became a major issue on the nightly news. It seemed as if they didn't learn from Katrina.
Six days after Katrina slammed into the Gulf Coast, President Bush’s
presidency had been declared a failure and a disgrace. It was all FEMA’s
fault, we were given to understand, and, by extension, Bush’s fault. It
wasn’t the incompetence of local and state officials, or the levee
collapse (a failure, by the way, that impartial observers lay at the
feet of another government agency going back years, the Army Corps of
Engineers). No, within a few days of the storm’s impact, Bush was an
enemy of the people.
Six days after Sandy hit the East Coast, most of the press had
utterly lost interest in the human toll, though thousands of people went
without food, water, gasoline, or electricity for the better part of
two weeks. The Washington Times reported two weeks after Sandy,
“Bodies are still being recovered in Staten Island. Chaos reigns in the
streets of the outer boroughs. Residents have taken up arms — baseball
bats, machetes, shotguns — as crime and looting soar.”
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