“FEMA has truly learned the lessons of Katrina,” writes Al Kamen at Washington Post today. “Even its handling of the media has improved dramatically. For example, as the California wildfires raged Tuesday, Vice Adm. Harvey E. Johnson, the deputy administrator, had a 1 p.m. news briefing.”
The presser, he writes, was carried live on Fox “News”, MSNBC and others and went very well…
Of course, that could be because the questions were asked by FEMA staffers playing reporters.
Un. Believable.
“We were expecting the press to come,” admitted Mike Widomski, FEMA’s Deputy Director of Public Affairs and one of the first “reporters” to ask a question. “But,” writes Kamen, “they didn’t. So the staff played reporters for what on TV looked just like the real thing.”
“If the worst thing that happens to me in this disaster is that we had staff in the chairs to ask questions that [Widomski claims] reporters had been asking all day,” Widomski told Kamen, “trust me, I’ll be happy.”
The “worst thing”?! Hell, that one’ll likely win you a Medal of Honor, Mike! “Be happy” indeed! And keep up the bad work!
Think Progress has video of Fox’s coverage of FEMA’s fake news conference.
UPDATE: White House apologizes. Says it’ll never ever ever happen again…
UPDATE 10/28/07: We thought we were kidding with that “Medal of Honor” crack. But it looks like the guy who set up the phony presser has now been promoted! Details here…
UPDATE 10/29/07: Promotion planned has now been retracted. Details at same RAW STORY link as above.
Good one Brad, that’s what I’ve been trying to do is follow the ‘turd polishers’, they’ll lead us to the criminals. (connect the criminals together thru the P.R. men they use)
Another thing, it seems all that FEMA does now daze is provide lip service.
Is this now the
Fake
Emergency
Management
Advertisers ?
And where is Duct Tape Dave Paulison ?
Unf*cking believable. Why that’s just like the oil companies writing energy policy, or credit companies writing tort reform, or any other number of things that have been happening under Bush that involves the fox watching the hen house.
I just got to come home yesterday. At least our house didn’t burn down, but many, many did just blocks away (in Rancho Bernardo). Bush’s visit was useless, of course. I knew I wouldn’t be able to get close enough to tell him what a prick he is, so I didn’t even bother. Those condos that burned down were right across the street from the elementary school I used to walk to every day (way back when.) My heart goes out to all those that had damages from the fires. BTW, a lot of people did not receive the “reverse 911” calls, including us. Our neighbors called us to make sure we had heard about the evacuation.
This is both outrageous and shocking, that FEMA would use its own resources, its own taxpayer-supplied salaries, to “stage” a press conference about its own progress. Why do we continue to put up with this c**p?! What person in a position of authority, a decision-maker, made this stunt happen? THAT person should be drummed out of FEMA.
Let him/her go waste some private sector organization’s money.
So am I
rightleft that these guys are the spawn of Jeffie “too many softballs” Gannon-Guckert?Linda #4
The
UnitedStates government is too nice to stop stuff like this.Like Germany of old that was too nice to stop Hitler, they do their thing and CYA and just bees cool.
They are too nice to save democracy, the nation, or the planet. All they want is votes. Wierd shit.
I am trying to figure out how to turn into a roach or Keith Richards so I might survive.
Did someone link this yet ?
House Passes Thought Crime Prevention Bill
Looks pretty messy to me
Was Jeff Gannon there? I thought I saw one of the reporters with a fake ZZ-TOP beard on!
Well, did you think anything changed? Were you surprised at this? Please! I’d be surprised if there WASN’T fake reporters there!
They probably put more time into the “fake reporter” strategy, than helping the fire victims! It took them days to go there, didn’t it? Those days were spent cooking up the “fake reporter” strategy!
Jonesy’s Endgame is pretty good if you haven’t seen it yet.
Flo, it was AWFUL. He’s LOST it. He thinks global warming is a ruse by the elites to enslave the masses.
99, yeah up until that point tho it was still pretty good
1/4 of it is B.S., so you can put that part in the b.s. can
although he is right about the carbon tax part, another ruse to pilfer our treasury in the end.
Well, the man’s a patriot and he has more courage in his little finger than any of the fuckers in DC, but his usual information-laden hyperbole has risen to new heights in that video, and I don’t think it’s funny. We need him, everyone, to be level-headed about this stuff, and he’s just given all the people we’d need pretty badly a flawless excuse to discount everything he says.
It’s almost as if the fear of continually speaking up about the high crimes becomes so hard to bear that the mind goes off on these outrageous tangents as insurance against getting hauled off to the torture chambers. If yer just a nut they leave you alone.
I know, but when I would listen to him once or so a week cruising down to Riverside back in ’02-’03, I thought he was 99% b.s.
So either him or me have come a long ways since.
Well, it’s probably a little bit of both, Flo. There for a while, when serious people were giving him a chance, he settled right down and started speaking the truth in sensible terms. Hell, I couldn’t really blame him for his hysterics because he saw murderous stuff everyone was ignoring. Anyone would be hysterical in that case, and they would start to settle down once people started listening… and he did. But now he’s gone off down the garden path for real, and it reminds me of Daniel Sheehan throwing himself body and soul into the UFO gig after his blistering exposure of the treasonous deeds in the Iran/Contra mess.
There are other examples I might cite. It’s as though they come to a point where ONLY going fruitcake floridly and very publicly can save their hides… or it seems they THINK that, anyway….
Bums me out. I’m into hero worship. 🙁
Don’t forget my terminal case of the hots for Thomas Paine….
Fake FEMA reporters: Only slightly more phony than the actual mainstream media.
Old Media Ablaze Over Staged FEMA Presser
Liberal activists and the Old Media are aghast and outraged over a press conference conducted last Tuesday by the Federal Emergency Management Agency. Reporters were only able to listen to a department spokesman respond to questions about relief efforts for the California wildfires posed by other members of the FEMA staff. Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff appropriately chastised the sham press conference and promised an investigation and disciplinary action and the White House expressed its displeasure with the incident.
Surely no one at FEMA believed that the staged event would not immediately be discovered and criticized. What could the motivation have been for such a stunt? Perhaps FEMA wanted an opportunity to present its version of events before the Old Media created its own reality about the fires and the actions of the agency. News consumers had already listened to reporters making comparisons to the federal response to Hurricane Katrina and attempting to find fault with the handling of relief efforts. California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger had to take ABC’s Claire Shipman by the hand to convince her that everything possible was being done and that she should stop trying to invent mistakes and shortcomings. Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid and other environuts demagogued the tragedy as evidence of the effect of global warming, while California Democrats like Sen. Barbara Boxer and Lt. Governor John Garamendi incorrectly claimed that relief efforts were impeded by having troops and equipment in Iraq.
One of the lessons learned in the wake of Katrina is how the unaccountable Old Media are able to create a false impression that their ideological soul mates in the Democratic Party use for political advantage. In my book, “The Great Media War: A Battlefield Report”, I detail the flawed coverage of one of the greatest natural disasters in American history ““ a record that has yet to be corrected.
When I learned of the fake news conference, I expected that the characterization of Jeff Gannon as a “phony reporter” would be revived. Liberal media activist Keith Olbermann noted it on his nightly train wreck of a talk show and the lefties of the blogosphere dutifully repeated it ad nauseum. This is a classic case of how a lie becomes reality, since the record proves otherwise. I was as real as a reporter gets, writing over 500 articles as a White House correspondent, a job that Secret Service records indicate I actually showed up for more than 200 times over the course of two years. The veracity of my work as a reporter has never been successfully challenged.
Further, in 2006 ““ a year after my supposed exposure as a “phony reporter” – my peers accepted me into the National Press Club, the most prestigious association of professional journalists in the world. My book about the media will be featured at the National Press Club’s 30th annual book fair on November 1. Not bad for a “fake, fraud and phony.”
Jeff Gannon, if that’s really you then I have a few things to say.
1.It’s already been long established that you’re a fake reporter, just a whore whose purpose was to help Scottie McClellan make a save when he was under pressure, by lobbing him nice softball questions that he could hit out of the park. THAT was what got your cover blown, your “fellow” reporters became curious of your blatantly biased softball questioning. THAT’S when it started to come unraveled and it came out that you weren’t even using your own name when you signed in at the White House. Digging deeper people found out that you weren’t a real reporter at all and that your “Talon News” was nothing but a right-wing propaganda mouthpiece. You can claim to be a real reporter all you want; I can claim to be a water buffalo however that doesn’t make me one.
2.If you are in fact James Guckert and not Johnny Gosch then will you PLEASE take the D.N.A. test that Noreen Gosch has been requesting? Why keep dodging it if you are confident that you aren’t Johnny Gosch? What do you have to hide?
Misdirection is a wonderful tool.
So now, we talk about the fake FEMA Press Conference (which was a crime, yes, but not any worse than 1000 others the Rethuglicans committed that day) rather than the missing equipment and National Guard or the outrageous Forestry Management Programs that might have led to this disaster.
It’s all about diverting attention — that’s how every magic trick (and crime) works.