Category: Politics

Bob Somerby at The Daily Howler can’t stop himself from blaming the media for the Bush administration’s lack of knowledge about flooding and levee breaches in New Orleans. In today’s episode, he faults NBC’s Brian Williams, NPR’s John Burnett, MSNBC meteorologist Sean McLaughlin, and CNN’s Aaron Brown for advancing the bullet-dodging theme in their post-storm reports.

What Somerby doesn’t consider is that reporters rely to some extent on sources for information about situations beyond their immediate knowledge.

Brian Williams was reporting from the Superdome on the Today show just after the height of the storm. Had he gone out to look at the low-lying parts of the city to make his judgment that New Orleans had survived relatively unscathed? Or was his report based on what officials were telling him?

John Burnett filed a report for Morning Edition on the day following the storm that that French Quarter was relatively unscathed. Toward the end of the report, however, he mentioned police had told him that “perhaps hundreds” of homes were flooded. He used first-hand accounts of the French Quarter’s condition, but like Williams, he relied on officials for information about the rest of the city. I don’t believe he used “dodged the bullet” in that report.

As I’ve pointed out, some members of the press — specifically the Times Picayune — were getting accurate information from local and state officials. Mayor Nagin had reported severe flooding in a radio interview as the storm was still hitting the city. That news had reached Baton Rouge by an hour after the storm and was reported at a press conference.

If Williams, Burnett, McLaughlin, and Brown had been told there was extensive flooding in New Orleans on Monday the 29th, it seems unlikely that bullet-dodging would have been the metaphor that came to mind. If I were Somerby, I’d be asking from who were they were getting their information about the effects of the storm?

A brief history in headlines. As you read these, think about whether FEMA has a coherent plan to deal with evacuees from any American city, much less New Orleans. I mean, just in case anything should happen anywhere.

Oregon gears up to take in 1,000 Katrina evacuees (Sunday 9.04.2005)
As many as 1,000 victims left homeless by Hurricane Katrina could start arriving in Oregon as soon as today, but probably later in the week as the state answers a federal call to provide shelter for storm evacuees in need of food, water and shelter.

Oregon assistance not needed so quickly, federal officials say (Wednesday. 9/07/2005)
Federal officials notified Gov. Ted Kulongoski on Tuesday evening that Hurricane Katrina evacuees won’t be arriving in Oregon immediately “due to changing circumstances in the Gulf Coast region.” But state and local officials were advised to remain prepared to offer shelter as needed.

FEMA asks Oregon to be ready for up to 500 Katrina evacuees (Friday, 9/09/2005)
The federal government has asked Oregon to be prepared to receive as many as 500 Hurricane Katrina evacuees on Saturday. Word came Thursday morning, a day after the Federal Emergency Management Agency had asked Oregon and other states to put preparations to shelter storm survivors on hold.

Without evacuees, Oregon shifts gears (Sunday, 9/11/2005)
Beeeeeep! This was a test, and only a test, of the Oregon emergency response system. If this had been an actual emergency…. After twice being told in recent days that evacuees — as many as 1,000 — would arrive in Oregon from the hurricane-ravaged Gulf Coast, those scrambling to welcome them got a definite answer Saturday as to whether they would come: no.

From an article by Cecelia M. Vega of the San Francisco Chronicle, on reporters being threatened with revocation of their credentials during body recovery operations in New Orleans, despite CNN’s victory in court to allow reporters to be on the scene:

Dean Nugent, of the Louisiana State Coroner’s Department, who accompanied the soldier, added that it wasn’t safe to be in Bywater. “They’ll kill you out here,” he said, referring to the few residents who have continued to defy mandatory evacuation orders and remain in their homes.”

“The cockroaches come out at night,” he said of the residents. “This is one of the worst places in the country. You should not be here. Especially you,” he told a female reporter.

Nugent, who is white, acknowledged he wasn’t personally familiar with the poor, black neighborhood, saying he only knew of it by reputation.

I don’t know where this joke originated — it was passed on by Barbara’s long-time friend Mary Rocco — but it marks one of the first jokes I’ve heard in a long time that wasn’t a simple repurposing of an old punchline and it manages to tweak Bush on a couple of fronts simultaneously.

Q: What is George W. Bush’s position on Roe vs. Wade?

A: He really doesn’t care how black people get out of New Orleans.

Ba-dum-bum.

Atrios has the text of a Wall Street Journal article covering the disparity between the actual reported conditions of floodwaters in New Orleans on the day Hurricane Katrina struck, the few national outlets that reported significant flooding by mid-day that Monday, and the bulk of the media, the administration, and others who have made the mistake of declaring that the levees were actually breached on Tuesday.

The WSJ quotes the Washington Post‘s Leonard Downie, Jr. as saying that “people on the ground didn’t know what happened,” blaming communications problems due to Katrina. That explanation doesn’t — as the links to the Times-Picayune stories above show — hold water. Serious flooding had been reported at a Baton Rouge press conference by 9am Monday, an hour after the storm had passed through New Orleans.

Administration officials have already claimed that they thought the damage to the city wasn’t as bad as it turned out to be because the media reports didn’t say it was bad. Well, who does the media get its information from? The media that listened to local and state officials, like the Times-Picayune, knew that flooding was taking place. They knew that levee breaches had occurred by Monday afternoon.

My money is on the likelihood that the bulk of the media was listening to FEMA or other federal officials, who appeared to be unaware that flooding had begun at the same time as the storm. They, in turn, were looking at the news media who came to them for their information, and the coverage looked good to them.

Compare and contrast. This will be on the test.

Statement by General Robert E. Lee in a letter to his wife (dated December 27, 1856) regarding a speech against abolition by President Franklin Pierce, with which he was “much pleased.”

The blacks are immeasurably better off here than in Africa, morally, physically, and socially. The painful discipline they are undergoing is necessary for their further instruction as a race, and will prepare them, I hope, for better things.

Statement by Barbara Pierce Bush — mother to President George W. Bush, wife of President George H.W. Bush, and descendent of the same family as President Franklin Pierce — regarding New Orleans residents evacuated to the Astrodome in Houston after losing their homes, possessions, and families.

So many of the people in the arenas here, you know, were underprivileged anyway, this is…this is working very well for them.

Did anyone consider that his experience with horses was the reason Michael Brown was put in charge of FEMA? After all, if people in need are always waiting for the cavalry to come over the hill, who better to put in charge of the the agency meant to save them than a man with a decade of equine-related program activities?

Or maybe W’s purported fear of horses ties into the reason he wasn’t in closer contact those first couple of days.

Many thanks to Digby, Driftglass, and The Poor Man for links this week. Special thanks to onegoodmove for an extra posting of the Mayor Nagin interview from last week’s “Nightline.” It’s always good to know a few more people are reading.

10 September 2005 is the 70th anniversary of the death of Louisiana Senator Huey P. Long, who was shot in the state capitol building in Baton Rouge on 8 September 1935.

Everyone who thinks that Huey was just a corrupt Southern politician — an image the monied elite in this country, including banker’s son Robert Penn Warren (All the King’s Men), did much to promote — should keep this in mind and wonder why the ruling class found him threatening.

From Every Man a King: The Autobiography of Huey P. Long by Huey P. Long, 1933

CHAPTER XXXVI

THE MADDENED FORTUNE HOLDERS AND THEIR
INFURIATED PUBLIC PRESS!

The increasing fury with which I have been and am to be, assailed by reason of the fight and growth of support for limiting the size of fortunes can only be explained by the madness which human nature attaches to the holders of accumulated wealth.

What I have proposed is:—

THE LONG PLAN

1. A capital levy tax on the property owned by any one person of 1% of all over $1,000,000 [dp: $14,275,000 in 2005 dollars]; 2% of all over $2,000,000 [$28,550,000] etc., until, when it reaches fortunes of over $10,000,000 [$145,750,000], the government takes all above that figure; which means a limit on the size of any one man’s forture to something like $50,000,000 [$728,750,000]—the balance to go to the government to spread out in its work among all the people.

2. An inheritance tax which does not allow one man to make more than $5,000,000 [$71,375,000] in a lifetime without working for it, all over that amount to go to the government to be spread among the people for its work.

3. An income tax which does not allow any one man to make more than $1,000,000 [$14,275,000] in one year, exclusive of taxes, the balance to go to the United States for general work among the people.

The forgoing program means all taxes paid by the fortune holders at the top and none by the people at the bottom; the spreading of wealth among all the people and the breaking up of a system of Lords and Slaves in our economic life. It allows the millionaires to have, however, more than they can use for any luxury they can enjoy on earth. But, with such limits, all else can survive.

That the public press should regard my plan and effort as a calamity and me as a menace is no more than should be expected, gauged in the light of past events. According to Ridpath, the eminent historian:

“The ruling classes always possess the means of information and the processes by which it is distributed. The newspaper of modern times belongs to the upper man. The under man has no voice; or if, having a voice, his cry is lost like a shout in the desert. Capital, in the places of power, seizes upon the organs of public utterance, and howls the humble down the wind. Lying and misrepresentation are the natural weapons of those who maintain an existing vice and gather the usufruct of crime.”

—Ridpath’s History of the World, Page 410.

In 1932, the vote for my resolution showed possibly a half dozen other Senators back of it. It grew in the last Congress to nearly twenty Senators. Such growth through one other year will mean the success of a venture, the completion of everything I have undertaken,—the time when I can and will retire from the stress and fury of public life, maybe as my forties begin,—a contemplation so serene as to appear impossible.

That day will reflect credit on the States whose Senators took the early lead to spread the wealth of the land among all the people.

Then no tear dimmed eyes of a small child will be lifted into the saddened face of a father or mother unable to give it the necessities required by its soul and body for life; then the powerful will be rebuked in the sight of man for holding what they cannot consume, but which is craved to sustain humanity; the food of the land will feed, the raiment clothe, and the houses shelter all the people; the powerful will be elated by the well being of all, rather than through their greed.

Then those of us who have pursued that phantom of Jefferson, Jackson, Webster, Theodore Roosevelt and Bryan may hear wafted from their lips in Valhalla:

EVERY MAN A KING

“What did the president know and when did he know it?”

It’s time to dust off the question that gained prominence in the Watergate investigation and point some fingers.

I first learned of the levee break watching the West Coast feed of CNN’s Paula Zahn NOW (no transcript available). On the West Coast, they incorporate breaking news segments with pre-recorded material, and one of the anchors (identified by others as Rick Sanchez) was interviewing a VP at Tulane University Hospital in the Central Business District who reported that police officials had informed her earlier in the day that there was a breach in the 17th Street levee. The water at the hospital — about 3 miles from where the breach occurred — was rising at a rate of about one inch every five minutes. That was at about 2am New Orleans time. A long report on the Times-Picayune Breaking News blog was posted at about that time, saying ” A large section of the vital 17th Street Canal levee, where it connects to the brand new ‘hurricane proof’ Old Hammond Highway bridge, gave way late Monday morning in Bucktown after Katrina’s fiercest winds were well north.” A report from Monday at 2:30pm said “Times-Picayune photographer Ted Jackson waded into the Lower 9th Ward Monday afternoon and reported a scene of utter destruction. The wind still howled, floodwaters covered vehicles in the street and people were clinging to porches and waiting in attics for rescuers who had yet to arrive.” Even right-wing idealogues on the Free Republic site knew something was up, if they tore themselves away from FOX News and flipped to CNN for a little bit.

The Times-Picayune had reported “6 to 8 feet of water” forcing people into their attics in the Lower 9th Ward as early as 9am. In fact, they reported flooding had been confirmed by Maj. Gen. Bennet C. Landreneau of the Louisiana National Guard, although at the time — an hour after the height of the storm — it wasn’t yet known whether the levees had been breached or overtopped. FEMA director Michael Brown may have missed that info — he didn’t get to Baton Rouge for a couple more hours. The first Times-Picayune report of a levee breach is at 2pm Monday.

In other words, there were already reports of severe flooding within an hour of the time the hurricane hit New Orleans. State officials were aware of it and had even briefed the press on the matter by 9am. The cause of the flooding (or at least one cause) was known by the early afternoon.

And here’s the kicker. Mayor Ray Nagin had told a radio station that water was coming over a levee into the 9th Ward in significant amounts in what the report describes as “an early morning interview.” That was early Monday morning.