9:25 AM Keynote address by Chris Cooper and Robert Block
The following are snippets from the morning’s first address by the authors of Disaster: Hurricane Katrina and the Failure of Homeland Security. Full video and audio streams available post-conference.
Chris Cooper (CC): “The federal government knew full well that this was going to happen. They didn’t know a couple of days before, they knew years in advance. They knew [thousands] would die … Manhattan is a bad place to live, Chicago has a lot of chemical depots surrounding it, California has the threat of earthquakes … New Orleans may be ok this hurricane season, it’s half-evacuated already. But, I don’t know what will happen if a hurricane hits Charleston, SC or an earthquake hits San Francisco.”
Robert “Bobby” Block (BB): [Refers to latest Economist entitled Who Killed The Newspaper?] “This article suggests you guys (bloggers) did. [applause] I think that’s bulls***. We need to work together … The irony of this is that our book says our federal system, that was designed to prevent new 9/11s and hurricanes, said they were looking for ground truth. If they had bothered to look, everything was there on the internet. Matthew Broderick refused to ring the bell and sat around for the better part of two days wondering if the levees had breached. He hadn’t looked at the Picayune, [your work] and 700 emails. And he could have to find ‘ground truth.'”
Mark Moseley: “How can blogs be vetted [to get news] to the decision makers? Please address the information gap.”
CC: “Broderick et al. got information starting 7:30am on the day of the hurricane and got it from a variety of sources. He rejected the data because he thought ‘it was hyped.’ A breach, to him, meant a catastrophic disaster. In response to the T-P’s footage of the levee breach, Broderick says, ‘That was one house … it could have been flooding a swamp for all I know.’ He asserted that his job was ‘to counter the media.’ We are confronted with this problem everyday as journalists.”
BB: refers to The Faber Book Of Reportage – journalism –> journalese. “Months later Broderick reads a report ‘80% of city flooded, 100s of people on rooftops.’ He said, ‘To me, that was hype. If 80% of the city were flooded, not 100s but 1000s of people would have been on the rooftops.’ You’re never going to win with assholes like that.”
Mark Folse: “Do national journalists need local context?”
CC: “In any country, you need someone on the ground. Dude, there are no [cardinal] directions in New Orleans. [In defense of] national journalists, your sources are people like Ray Nagin and Eddie Compass. If you can’t rely on them, who can you depend on?”
BB: “[Local politicians] were spreading the hype. But where the national media did fail – FEMA failed twice. They failed once during the flood and they are failing again during the recovery. The next news story comes and everyone leaves. The recovery is [its own story].”
CC: “The rebuilding is [going to be harder.]”
Mark Moseley: “Shouldn’t we be blaming our local leaders for exacerbating rumors that delayed federal response? Is it just because we are a poor state with bad leadership that we shouldn’t expect help for three days?”
CC: “That’s a total copout. They knew Nagin didn’t have helicopter, they knew the city needed generators (the state needed 50, they had 10 on hand). They knew Gov. Blanco and Nagin couldn’t handle this. That’s that the federal government is for – if the local govt. can’t help, they’re supposed to step in.”
BB: “This is why we started the book with the Hurricane Pam exercise. Do news searches from 1993 – put in Katrina for Andrew and it’s the same – nothing has changed. It was the same blame game. This is where you can turn adversity to your advantage – Florida, in 1992, decided not to look for heads but the failure of the system and went about it their own way. If the constituency and leadership is smart, they will look at Florida … and the leadership of FEMA by James Lee Witt.”
CC: “You’ve got to write what you know. I don’t want to know your opinion on Iraq, but your thoughts on rebuilding. I want to know what dangerblond thinks of Ernesto heading here.”
Loki: [greatly shortened] “Address the commercialization of mass media.”
BB: “TV by its very nature needs images, is in competition, is info-tainment, but whose fault is that? I remember being in a screwed-up part of the world and wondering if these people got the leader they deserve. You know what CNN is. You know what Fox News is [alludes to Jon Stewart segment] ‘FACTS, NOT FEAR’ – as the FEAR music plays in the background.”
And so on … We’ll be back after these messages! Stay tuned for the Personal Viewpoints panel with Josh Britton, Dedra Johnson, Lois Dunn, and our very own rowdy duo, Greg Peters and Ashley Morris!
