PUBLIC MARKS with tags government & left

The disaster in New Orleans was caused, not by too little welfare spending, but by too much. Four decades of dependence on government left people without the resources -- economic, intellectual, or moral -- to plan ahead and provide for themselves in an emergency

But reporters still ignore free market advocates who predicted it. Media coverage of problems facing the new Medicare prescription drug plan focused on elderly patients left in the lurch by bureaucracy, producing what CBS’s Bill Plante called a “political headache” for the Bush administration. But in the Jan. 16 reports on the “Evening News” and “World News Tonight,” both networks ignored conservative critics who had argued the plan was doomed to fail because it was a typical big government solution that ignored the free market.