Think Progress has video and lowlights of Diane Sawyer’s interview with Al Gore today. As TP points out the interview reaffirmed the thesis of Gore’s book on the “serial obsessions” of the media.
This reminded me of a post from Dan Baum’s New Orleans Journal at The New Yorker to which I’d been meaning to link. It’s a great post on Dan’s first visit to the lower 9th ward when he thought recovery “will never happen there” and one of his most recent visits in which he found hope for the area.
At any rate one my favorite parts involved Sawyer. Baum relates how in the days after the levees broke he went to the lower 9th ward, cordoned off by military, in hopes he could get in to see the area. The National Guard would not let him in. But they told him to park his car and a soldier would walk with him to the crest of the St Claude Ave bridge so he could take a look at the area. So he and the soldier “huffed up the bridge’s incline in the soupy humidity.” After cresting the bridge they looked upon the devastation in stunned silence. Then this occurred…
The silence was broken by three black S.U.V.s speeding along the bridge
toward us, engines roaring. It was too small a motorcade to be
President Bush, but I thought it might be Secretary of State
Condoleezza Rice or Governor Kathleen Blanco. The trucks stopped, and a
platoon of suits and security agents jumped out, and then, one long leg
at a time, Diane Sawyer emerged, in fishing waders that were turned
down at the top.