Media Nation

The Times-Picayune of New Orleans today has a tough “open letter” to President Bush on its editorial page. Here’s the heart of it:

TIMES-PICAYUNE: Every official at the Federal Emergency Management Agency should be fired, Director Michael Brown especially.

In a nationally televised interview Thursday night, he said his agency hadn’t known until that day that thousands of storm victims were stranded at the Ernest N. Morial Convention Center. He gave another nationally televised interview the next morning and said, “We’ve provided food to the people at the Convention Center so that they’ve gotten at least one, if not two meals, every single day.”

Lies don’t get more bald-faced than that, Mr. President.

Yet, when you met with Mr. Brown Friday morning, you told him, “You’re doing a heck of a job.”

That’s unbelievable.

And that’s courageous editorializing.

Chief Justice William Rehnquist is dead, and the tragedy in New Orleans and beyond continues. So pardon the trivial nature of this post. But if the New York Times is going to run a headline for a Philip Roth story that asks, “Why Is This Man Smiling?,” shouldn’t it find a photo of Roth, you know, smiling?

Michael Brown didn’t just work for the International Arabian Horse Association before becoming the hopelessly unqualified head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency. He was asked to resign by the horse group, Brett Arends reports in today’s Boston Herald. (Via Jay Fitzgerald.)

By the way, the current lead item on the horse association’s website is headlined, “Help Horse Victims of Hurricane Katrina.” Just a guess, but I’d say the horses are in better hands than the people of New Orleans.

Over the past six months, major newspapers and wire services have produced 58 articles that mention both Planned Parenthood and the Plan B emergency-contraceptive pill, according to a search of Lexis-Nexis. Not until today, though, did we learn that the organization actually has a financial stake in Plan B.

According to a page-one story in the Boston Globe, “the national not-for-profit organization reaps millions of dollars in revenue by dispensing Plan B.” Reporter Diedtra Henderson continues:

HENDERSON: Internal e-mails exchanged between Planned Parenthood employees, and provided to the Globe by an attorney who filed a wrongful firing lawsuit on behalf of a former executive, indicate the drug’s manufacturer sells Plan B kits – with one or two pills in each – to Planned Parenthood clinics at a ”special” price of $4.25 apiece. The kits are usually sold to consumers for about $30.

Public-interest groups with hidden agendas are the bane of news organizations. (Media Nation recently exposed a conflict to which the Globe fell victim.) Who wouldn’t seek out Planned Parenthood’s views on emergency contraception? As Henderson observes, reporters have done that repeatedly without having any knowledge that the organization’s finances were involved in the debate.

At the same time, this is an odd conflict. It seems that Planned Parenthood’s advocacy of over-the-counter sales of Plan B drugs would actually cost the organization money, since women could simply go to their neighborhood drug store, as a Planned Parenthood spokeswoman tells Henderson.

Still, Planned Parenthood has clearly damaged its credibility on an important public-policy issue.

Say this for the mainstream media: you’re not going to see a lead sentence like the one Randall Robinson wrote today on his Huffington Post blog. Said Robinson, “It is reported that black hurricane victims in New Orleans have begun eating corpses to survive.”

“It is reported”? By whom? Lacking any other information, I can only assume that Robinson’s embrace of the passive is aimed at obscuring just how unfounded this really is. Certainly searching Google News for “hurricane eat corpses” yields nothing. I’m not saying Robinson made it up. I am saying he probably heard it from somebody who heard it from somebody who heard it from somebody.

I found a link to Robinson’s silly post on Drudge, who seems to be testing the bottom of his “80 percent accurate” guarantee.

The biggest emerging Katrina story is that the disaster in New Orleans had been predicted for years, yet no one did anything about it. Plenty of stuff to choose from, but this piece by Joel K. Bourne Jr. in National Geographic – found on the Daily Kos by Media Nation reader Paul – is particularly striking because of when it was published: October of last year. Read this and shake your head:

BOURNE: Thousands drowned in the murky brew that was soon contaminated by sewage and industrial waste. Thousands more who survived the flood later perished from dehydration and disease as they waited to be rescued. It took two months to pump the city dry, and by then the Big Easy was buried under a blanket of putrid sediment, a million people were homeless, and 50,000 were dead. It was the worst natural disaster in the history of the United States.

When did this calamity happen? It hasn’t – yet. But the doomsday scenario is not far-fetched. The Federal Emergency Management Agency lists a hurricane strike on New Orleans as one of the most dire threats to the nation, up there with a large earthquake in California or a terrorist attack on New York City. Even the Red Cross no longer opens hurricane shelters in the city, claiming the risk to its workers is too great.

From NPPA.org, the website of the National Press Photographers Association:

The environment journalists are working in has shifted from one of a post-storm rescue and recovery to one that’s more akin to urban warfare. Tonight’s news reports a desperate situation in New Orleans that is spiraling out of control, with fighting breaking out among the hurricane survivors, more looting and gunfire, reports of anarchy in many areas, and more bodies floating in the waterways and in the debris. Today there were reports of rapes taking place in and around the Superdome while outside the Convention Center bodies litter the sidewalks. More dead have been dragged to the corners of the building, the Associated Press reports, as there are no resources to deal with picking up the dead. Amidst this chaos and growing tension, photojournalists find themselves working in a growingly hostile environment where they are less welcome today than yesterday.

According to the article, written by Donald R. Winslow and posted yesterday, journalists’ worries are not limited to what could happen to them at the hands of roving mobs. One photographer reportedly was knocked to the ground by police after he took pictures of them shooting at and beating suspected looters.

You don’t often hear a confrontational interview on NPR, and “All Things Considered” co-host Robert Siegel is hardly the first person you’d think of as someone who might break the mold. So I was surprised and impressed yesterday when Siegel, in that polite way of his, sunk his teeth into the unsuspecting secretary of homeland security, Michael Chertoff, and resolutely refused to let go.

You can hear the entire segment by clicking here and selecting “Listen.” As you will learn, Siegel devoted most of the interview to badgering Chertoff about why planning for Katrina had been so inadequate, when people on the ground (that is, in the water) are likely to see some relief and – most important – when folks at the convention center, a scene of third-world desperation, are going to be rescued.

Here is the toughest exchange:

SIEGEL: We are hearing from our reporter – and he’s on another line right now – thousands of people at the convention center in New Orleans with no food, zero.

CHERTOFF: As I say, I’m telling you that we are getting food and water to areas where people are staging. And, you know, the one thing about an episode like this is if you talk to someone and you get a rumor or you get someone’s anecdotal version of something, I think it’s dangerous to extrapolate it all over the place. The limitation here on getting food and water to people is the condition on the ground. And as soon as we can physically move through the ground with these assets, we’re going to do that. So –

SIEGEL: But, Mr. Secretary, when you say that there is – we shouldn’t listen to rumors, these are things coming from reporters who have not only covered many, many other hurricanes; they’ve covered wars and refugee camps. These aren’t rumors. They’re seeing thousands of people there.

CHERTOFF: Well, I would be – actually I have not heard a report of thousands of people in the convention center who don’t have food and water. I can tell you that I know specifically the Superdome, which was the designated staging area for a large number of evacuees, does have food and water. I know we have teams putting food and water out at other designated evacuation areas. So, you know, this isn’t – and we’ve got plenty of food and water if we can get it out to people. And that is the effort we’re undertaking.

After bringing the interview to a tense close, Siegel turned to reporter John Burnett, who had seen the convention-center disaster first-hand. (You can listen to Burnett here.) Burnett began with this:

BURNETT: Let me clarify for the secretary and for everyone else what myself and … just drove away from three blocks from here in the Ernest Morial Convention Center. There are, I estimate, 2,000 people living like animals inside the city convention center and around it. They’ve been there since the hurricane. There’s no food. There’s absolutely no water. There’s no medical treatment. There’s no police and no security. And there are two dead bodies lying on the ground and in a wheelchair beside the convention center, both elderly people, both covered with blankets now. We understand that two other elderly people died in the last couple of days. We understand that there was a 10-year-old girl who was raped in the convention center in the last two nights. People are absolutely desperate there. I’ve never seen anything like this.

It was a devastating response to Chertoff’s cavalier suggestion that Siegel was rumor-mongering. Not surprisingly, at the end of Burnett’s report, Siegel announced, “And later this afternoon Secretary Chertoff’s spokeswoman called to say that after our interview with the secretary of homeland security, he received a report confirming the situation at the convention center. And he says the department is working tirelessly to get food and supplies to those in need and also to save lives.”

I’m going to cut Chertoff a little slack here. He can’t know everything that’s going on, and certainly the Department of Homeland Security isn’t nearly as responsible for hurricane relief as the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which is getting ripped for the way it has (or hasn’t) responded. It was both decent and politically astute of him to have his spokeswoman call NPR to acknowledge the suffering at the convention center.

Still, other than President Bush, Chertoff’s the highest-ranking federal official dealing with disaster. NPR’s member stations are dependent on federal tax money, which makes NPR itself vulnerable to political attack. In that context, Siegel deserves credit for taking such an aggressive stance. Chertoff came off as surprised, defensive, arrogant and uninformed. We never would have heard that side of him if Siegel had contented himself with blandly allowing the secretary to run through his talking points.

I just finished four days of orientation at Northeastern, so my apologies in advance for passing this one off. My receiver: Mark Jurkowitz, who, if you haven’t seen his Media Log yet, has some excellent links following up the racial implications of Katrina coverage. The essential link is to the emotional comments of photographer Chris Graythen.

Romenesko has got a few links up on a simmering controversy over the devastation in New Orleans. When hungry people grab food from abandoned grocery stores, are they responding rationally to unusual circumstances? Or are they looting?

Incredibly, this Boing Boing item suggests that the difference in at least one case may depend on whether the person is white or black: a white couple is described as “finding” food, whereas a black man had apparently grabbed his goodie bag by “looting” a store. As you will see, the two pictures are remarkably alike.

Yes, we’re talking about two different news agencies, and as the item itself notes, we have no way of knowing whether there were circumstances that might justify such labeling. But it’s hard to disagree with Romenesko letter-writer Christina Pazzanese, who says, “Perhaps these photos will stimulate a media ‘gut check’ as we race to tell the stories of the thousands who lost their lives and livelihoods.”

Last night I was watching CNN when I saw some folks – I don’t remember their race – described as “looters.” They were walking out of an abandoned grocery store with what appeared to be food and other essentials. (And yes, I realize there is real looting going on, too, but that’s not what I’m talking about.) What’s happening in New Orleans is horrible, and is likely to get worse. Editors need to stop and think about how they describe people who find themselves in a desperate situation.