by Larry C. Johnson
While watching the MSNBC program, CONNECTED, COAST TO COAST with Ron Reagan, a man from the Evergreen Foundation was on air spinning the myth that the President had to “beg” the Governor of Louisiana to take action.
Having been on this show several times I called one of the bookers, Susan Durrwatcher, to alert her to the fact that this man was misrepresenting what happened. I offered Susan the following objective, documented facts (see timeline below).
Susan thanked me for my “opinion” and said “we just have a different perspective.”
Stunned, I asked her by what standard of journalism that an objective fact was mere opinion? I asked her to simply look at the documents and correct the record. She declined. I asked her to remove me from the MSNBC list of contacts. I’m sure MSNBC won’t miss me and I am certain I will have a happy life without having to subject myself to their unprofessional approach to journalism.
The Bush White House is furiously spinning to lay the blame on the Governor and Mayor of Louisiana. My position is that I think both the Governor and the Mayor can be faulted on a variety of fronts. I do not absolve them of their responsibility to properly and fully implement their own emergency response plans.
However, the Governor followed the appropriate protocol and, in accordance with the National Response Plan (NRP), asked the President in accordance with the Stafford Act, to declare a State of Emergency.
BELOW: The Timeline
TIMELINE
Friday, 26 August 2005, Governor of Louisiana declares state of emergency
Saturday morning, 27 August 2005, Governor of Louisiana asks President Bush to declare a state of emergency and requests Federal Assistance “to save lives and property”. Note, the letter was published on 27 August 2005 on Lexis Nexis but was dated 28 August 2005. Bush received the letter on Saturday and responded on the same day by declaring a State of Emergency. Note, per the NRP, William Lokey was designated as the Federal Coordinating Officer for Federal recovery operations in Louisiana.
Sunday, 28 August 2005, Mayor of New Orleans orders Mandatory Evacuation.
Note: In Governor Blanco’s request on the 27th, there is a specific request for help with evacuation and a specific request for help to “save lives and protect property”.
Monday, 29 August 2005, FEMA Director Brown requests DHS Secretary Chertoff’s help in getting 1000 DHS employees ready to deploy to the disaster within 48 hours.
Under the National Response Plane (see p. 93, Figure 11), once the President declares a State of Emergency the Department of Homeland Security is supposed to implement the Plan. Initially, DHS is supposed to deploy an Emergency Response Team to the State to provide expertise in assessing needs and determining appropriate courses of action. Moreover, on p. 52 of the NRP the President may act proactively under the Stafford Act.
Folks, these are not OPINIONS. These are cold, objective facts. However, MSNBC and other members of the mainstream media (MSM) are confused about what is a fact and what is opinion.
Larry C. Johnson
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I’ve sent off emailsto all the major news outlets I frequent alerting them to the existence of the NRP and it’s relevance to any accurate analysis of the current situation. As yet I’ve seen no mention of it at all on any of themajor cablenews outlets.
It’s as though they’re deliberately ignoring fact-based info which would clearly show the government hacks to be liars, preferring instead to continue flogging the “he said, he said” nature of their entertainment-style coverage.
[nod] It’s the same old game. Facts on one side, bullshit on the other, but to too much of the media it’s just “different perspectives”. Fact-checking evidently isn’t part of their job. (Viewers & readers are rarely any good at that, either, but it might help if they had more to work with.)
Cable news media is mainly an entertainment venue, and what they call news they evaluate according to it’s entertainment value rather than it’s informative value.
Like a soap opera plot, they get much more mileage out of the inter-governmental sqabbling and the absurd pontifications from competing spin-meisters than they would ever get out of simply reporting facts that confirm who’s lying and who’s telling the truth. Truth telling would just shorten the amount of time they can flog the story without having to do more due diligence in discovering more accurate information.
As long as the MSM continues to cater to and exploit the public’s disgusting appetite for other people’s tragedy, they will only get worse and worse. And as they continually fail to perform responsibly in accord with their duties to serve the public interest, (the very duty they are accorded specific protection in the Constitution for performing), they will become more and more of an aggressive force deliberately undermining our democracy for the sake of their own bottom line.
And as for society as a whole, we would be well served to remind ourselves that fact is fact and opinion is opinion, and that whenever we allow one to masquerade as the other, trouble is always the result. Clearly the MSNBC editors and producers care little about this and it will be their downfall in the end as we the people eventually tell them simply to “go fuck themselves”.
Larry, thank you for sharing this — I am and remain dubious of our media, despite all of the praise circulating about what a good job they’ve done.
Media, like government, exists to serve itself, not us. And everything they do or do not do it toward tht end.
Oh, and, you say “some” are ignoring facts — do you know of any who are embracing them? Because I have yet to find them!
Brinnaine, you are astute to remain in doubt about the media … it was wonderful, for a couple days, to think that maybe they’d awakened out of their robotic states. But they always revert to type.
Larry should maybe start his own radio or TV show.
The Cable news media is now in full “entertainment mode”. Their main focus seems to be a constant stream of video of the devastation combined with sappy, faux-compassionate commentary; and “reporter” sessions with carefully selected victims with the same sort of staged faux-compassionate hetoric.
Real reporting from the field, (such as that from real news people like Nic Robertson or Jeff Koinange from CNN), is disappearing as the “we feel your pain” crowd of fake news people dominate their broadcast segments.
They are deliberately going along with the White House spin here. These people are not really journalists, they are shills.
Very troubling. Yet more evidence for the necessity of the blogosphere. Thanks for the diary.
Larry, have you considered calling Keith Olbermann? He’s certainly one to listen to reason and facts. You shouldn’t limit yourself to not going on MSNBC ever again. I would just be more selective who’s show you are on.
Keith has been excellent this past week so you might want to give him a shot.
Yes! Olbermann has the only fact-based show on MSNBC.
(Happily, he outperforms the odious pontificator Matthews too.)
his shows ratings are higher. (many more viewers)
I’m not surprised when it comes to MSNBC… Cable Snews is starting to resemble pro-wrestling– 60% Personalities/ Partisan Opinions… 30% Cool flashing lights and theme music… 10% News…
And everyone is either good looking, a former politician, or tied somehow to a former politician.
It is nice to see some are fighting back
but no recent stuff…or am I missing something?
Yeah I wish they would update too (and hit the Abrams show or Fox News)… They’re the bane of my industry, local snews… Although some secretly like what they’re doing
Print? Broadcast? Both?
Do you know how to contact anyone in Houston that you caould ask to verify if military recruiters are indeed having a “jab fair” there today?
Broadcast and no… I’m low on the totem pole in local news which makes me pretty much the least important person on the planet (between the frozen TV Dinner chef and the coach of the atlanta hawks).
“jab fair”?
Job fair — sorry.
And no worries ont he low on the totem pole thing, we are all peons now….
True… I guess by the time we go from peon to important we’ll be too busy fighting the new peons that want our jobs.
going back to Reagan admin days if not earlier.
The right systematically pushed to eliminate the distinction between facts and all other kinds of information. An early complaint was to attack fact-checking as “injecting opinion” into reporting and interviewing. Their media buyup and consolidation helped them essentially eliminate the concept of independent factuality for the general electorate.
We were absolutely guaranteed, by the end of Reagan if not early into his administration, to end up where we are today because of this program.
Some few of us may have noticed one sad, lone counterexample 2 weeks ago. It concerned Pat Robertson’s claim that he hadn’t called for “assassination” of Chavez. AP radio news and some TV broadcasts played the clip of that statement immediately followed by the audio clip of his previous, actual call for the assassination.
The Republican Revolution beginning with Ronald Reagan would have been utterly impossible if the United States had had a national press that practiced such rudimentary fact-vetting.
We’ve raised one or two generations of voters who’ve never known public fact-checking to miss it.
That a ‘Bush supporter’ keeps sending the writer photos of abandoned school buses in New Orleans. This is to damn the local authorities.
What good are school buses with nowhere to take them, no tent city erected on dry ground up state equipped with food, water and medicine? Where was Nagin supposed to send those people who had no transportation, no homes, no money?
Exactly. That’s just what I was ranting to my sister about yesterday. People who are blaming the people who didn’t leave..everyone here already knows many people couldn’t leave, no cars, no gas money, too old to walk, etc but I was on a tear about well even if they left where the fuck were they supposed to go? With no money or anything, just get outa town and sit on the side of the road somewhere then no doubt get guns pointed at them by the Nat. Guard for ‘congregating due to being black’?(that is when the Guard finally showed up)
And I imagine we’re going to see that picture of those school buses as Exhibit A of incompetence ad nauseum when that is only a tiny tiny percentage of the whole goddam mess of monumental incompetence from federal government.
and who was suppose to drive them? jesus Christ these people are driving me quite insane. Must. Take. Deep. Breaths.
I’m already forwarding the timeline and have saved it as it will be needed in the future.
I wonder when they’re going to decide to revise dictionaries and thesauri, so that “fact” is given as a synonym of “opinion” and vice versa.
At least we’d know it’s official at that point. You know how it is… English is a living, evolving language and all that… too bad it seems it’s expected to evolve under political pressure.
Lynne Cheney has already been quite active in getting school textbooks destroyed and replaced with ones she approves of. She’s also challenged one of the main sets of guidelines for determining textbook content, claiming that teaching about our historical transgressions is somehow un-American and doesn’t instill in students the proper pride and respect for the country.
This is an excellent article here detailing the anti-democratic propaganda activities of this disgusting woman.
LOOK at Larry’s timeline.
LOOK at the date of the White House photo in my post aboe.
I love that
The implication is that learning is not possible and (strangely) that perspective is absolute (though that makes no sense).
She sounds like Norah O’Donnell’s twin.
(Suppose you saw the bit from Media Matters yesterday about Norah rhapsodizing about what a great “crisis manager” that Bush is.)
As Ron Suskind recorded some years ago in his great piece in the NYT entitled; “Without a Doubt;
(quoting an [unnamed] White house official;)
This describes the rubric of deception and denial that characterizes the Bush regime’s entire interface with the public and the world. Their PR/Propaganda machine is in reality one huge “PSYOPS” program directed against everyone outside their immediate circle.
.
Two different letters ::
Governor Blanco asks President to Declare an
Emergency for the State of Louisiana due to Hurricane Katrina
BATON ROUGE–Today Governor Kathleen Babineaux Blanco forwarded a letter to President Bush requesting that he declare an emergency for the State of Louisiana due to Hurricane Katrina.
The full text of the letter follows:
August 27, 2005
The President
The White House
Washington, D. C.
Through:
Regional Director
FEMA Region VI
800 North Loop 288
Denton, Texas 76209
Dear Mr. President:
Under the provisions of Section 501 (a) of the Robert T. Stafford Disaster Relief and Emergency Assistance Act, 42 U.S.C. §§ 5121-5206 (Stafford Act), and implemented by 44 CFR § 206.35, I request that you declare an emergency for the State of Louisiana due to Hurricane Katrina for the time period beginning August 26, 2005, and continuing. The affected areas are all the southeastern parishes including the New Orleans Metropolitan area and the mid state Interstate I-49 corridor and northern parishes along the I-20 corridor that are accepting the thousands of citizens evacuating from the areas expecting to be flooded as a result of Hurricane Katrina.
In response to the situation I have taken appropriate action under State law and directed the execution of the State Emergency Plan on August 26, 2005 in accordance with Section 501 (a) of the Stafford Act. A State of Emergency has been issued for the State in order to support the evacuations of the coastal areas in accordance with our State Evacuation Plan and the remainder of the state to support the State Special Needs and Sheltering Plan.
[…]
In addition, I anticipate the need for debris removal, which poses an immediate threat to lives, public health, and safety.
Pursuant to Sections 502 and 407 of the Stafford Act, 42 U.S.C. §§ 5192 & 5173, the State agrees to indemnify and hold harmless the United States of America for any claims arising from the removal of debris or wreckage for this disaster. The State agrees that debris removal from public and private property will not occur until the landowner signs an unconditional authorization for the removal of debris.
I have designated Mr. Art Jones as the State Coordinating Officer for this request. He will work with the Federal Emergency Management Agency in damage assessments and may provide further information or justification on my behalf.
Sincerely,
Kathleen Babineaux Blanco
Governor
Enclosure
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Here is an explanation of what happens that makes sense to me.
http://matewan.squarespace.com/journal/2005/9/6/war-on-the-poor-in-new-orleans-2-the-attempt-to-decl
are-martial-law.html
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The two main pipelines Colonial and Plantation are pumping full capacity according to State Secr. of Transportation.
I couldn’t understand strategic oil pipelines dependent on electrical power and not self-generating diesel units. Emergency units were placed in pumping stations to get transport back on line. Corporate power!
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So Larry, whatcha gonna do? You and Pat Lang got anything you are working on you care to share with us? I agree with another poster upthread…call THE AMN and #1 MSNBC show Olbermann. He WILL be happy to talk to you about the lies. Did you catch his lamblasting Bush two nights ago? It was soooooooooo great.