Media Coverage of Lahaina vs Katrina

Over at Chicago Boyz, Sgt Mom has a great piece on the coverage of the Lahaina fire, and compares it to the coverage given to New Orleans and Katrina 18 years ago. Back then, there was an incessant drumbeat of the failures of the Bush Administration in the handling that disaster.

And during the Lahaina fire, there was a lot of bureaucratic ineptitude that really helped “fan the flames”. Did the Hawaiian utility not attend to power line maintenance because a lot of their financial resources were devoted to “green projects”? Was this mandated or voluntary?
How was this disaster made worse by government decisions?

As of this writing there are still over 1,000 missing, many presumed dead.

She quotes an Iowa blogger, David Burge, aka Iowa Hawk, on the method of so much media coverage:

“Journalism is about covering important stories. With a pillow, until they stop moving”.

Is it possible the people involved in the Lahaina disaster are more politically acceptable to these “journalists”?

On Getting Older

On Facebook, one of the few groups I am in is devoted to the old things my town (Sacramento) had in years past. The group is growing rapidly, populated by members like me I suppose – aging Baby Boomers.

Somebody today posted a chart from this week, 1962, showing what the songs of the “Top 40” were.

Where were you in ’62? Here’s a “top 40” list from July of that year. The Beach Boys would appear in less than a year, with the Beatles and the “British Invasion: 2 years later.

When did the “Top 40” go away?

Probably sometime in the 1970s I guess.