In the long-ago of 2005, just days after Hurricane Katrina made landfall near New Orleans, a young Kanye West blurted out on live television during a fundraising drive with comedian Mike Meyers that “George Bush doesn’t care about black people.”
It was perhaps an early sign of West’s mental instability, but at the time it ended up defining the media narrative about Katrina and Bush, who was lambasted by the media for being indifferent to the fate of New Orleans because it was mostly poor black people who had been killed or displaced by the storm.
It didn’t matter that the main cause of the problems in New Orleans during and immediately after Katrina — lack of evacuation, widespread looting, poor emergency response and coordination — was corruption at the local and state level, not incompetence at FEMA. (New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin would later be indicted and convicted in federal court on multiple corruption charges.)
But in the moment that didn’t matter. The national news media unfairly blamed President Bush. Every major media outlet ran a now-infamous photo of him looking down on hurricane-ravaged New Orleans from the window of Air Force One, cementing the narrative that the president was detached and indifferent to events on the ground.
It would come to be known as Bush’s “Katrina moment,” and it heralded the effective end of his administration. Democrats sailed to a massive victory in the 2006 midterms, campaigning on Bush’s allegedly flat-footed Katrina response and the unpopular war in Iraq, rendering the president impotent
