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Saturday, September 03, 2005
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I've been mulling this over all morning: I wonder if one of the root causes of the slow and poor response in New Orleans is this administration's overdependence upon mass-media to control the populace? There are signs that Bush and his adminstration were still clearly thinking in mass-media terms; Bush himself was on a public tour on Tuesday, and when he did wake up to the reality, his first response was to ask his dad and President Clinton to come in for a photo opp.
Over and over again this week we've heard that no one on the ground -- refugees, first responders, National Guard, etc. knew what was going on, or what to do. No power, no television, no telephone (land or cell), no newspapers, no Internet access. My guess is that most radio stations were knocked out too, which, if you assume that a lot of people had battery-powered radios, would still make the Emergency Broadcast System next to useless.
And the communication breakdown worked in both directions -- it wasn't until CNN and the other networks started relaying coverage of how bad things really were that the government started moving. The turning point yesterday seemed to be when the police chief started driving around town with a megaphone telling people that help was on the way, where to go and what to do.
Do we have a government, and a society, that is entirely reliant on mass media to maintain order and civility? What's the lesson to be learned here?
1:49:05 PM 
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Among the political fallout: taking center stage is Michael Brown, head of FEMA -- which is widely being lambasted for its handling of the New Orleans disaster this week. Brown's job history, and the story of how he got his current job, makes for interesting reading, as reporters fit the pieces together. Here's one account on a political blog which pulls pieces from several media outlets.
Reports suggest that Brown got the job by being the college roommate of the prior head of FEMA (who in turn, was a political fixer for the Bush administration). Brown had essentially no experience with emergency response, and in fact was fired from his previous job as head of the International Arabian Horse Administration -- a pressure cooker of a job if there ever was one, and clearly the place to go headhunting for emergency-response coordinators.
Update: here's more on Brown. Read through all the comments, if you can -- links off to many other interesting articles and background on the guy. Or stop at whatever point you either can't stand it anymore, or you question the validity/bias of the sources and comments (I didn't write it, and I haven't done first-person research).
1:35:51 PM
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Dave Winer has a couple of pointers to really fascinating news articles from 2000 talking about the threat that a severe hurricane posed to New Orleans. Here's a good one from USA Today.
Here's another one from Time -- requires you to purchase the article, which I haven't done, but the teaser alone is enough to give you the creeps.
People clearly knew this week's tragedy was coming, in excruciating detail. It was neither a national, state, nor local priority to do anything about it. Once the immediate crisis is over, there's going to be political hell to pay for this.
10:41:30 AM
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© Copyright 2005 Kevin Schofield.
Last update: 10/4/2005; 3:19:18 PM.
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