Kate of the Canadian Small Dead Animals blog, who is actually vacationing in Beijing this week, writes that "Watching CCTV coverage of the massive Chinese quake aftermath (as best I can, considering the language gap) one can't help but notice how 'sanitary' the images are":

While there's plenty of footage showing collapsed buildings and roadways, crushed cars and landslides, the "rescued" quake victims dragged from the rubble before Chinese television cameras are uniformly limp, dazed, and amazingly clean. If one were of a suspicious nature, one might suspect there was some staging going on.

There also seems to be a lot of footage of soldiers moving supplies around in an orderly, efficient manner.

It seems all very reassuring, as I'm sure was intended. There is no question that the death toll will be both staggering and under-reported.

A totalitarian regime papering over its country's ongoing crises during an Olympic year? Maybe I should have called this post, "Recreate '38".

The New TeeVee blog embeds a video uploaded to YouTube taken during the midst of the horrific Chinese earthquake yesterday and notes:

The devastating earthquake in China today is just the latest crisis to showcase YouTube’s role as a primary source of firsthand accounts of breaking news. Last year, the video-sharing site gave us glimpses of the wildfires burning in southern California and of pro-democracy demonstrations in Myanmar. Now a video shot by a student shows us what it was like during China’s earthquake.

Meanwhile, Virginia Postrel adds:

From initial reports, the Chinese earthquake sounds pretty terrible. With magnitude of 7.9, it was 10 times as strong as the 1989 San Francisco quake and, according to U.S. Geological Survey stats (but not the LAT), more powerful than the 1906 quake that leveled San Francisco. And San Francisco, in either case, was much less populous than Sichuan province, which has 100 million people.

As bad as it was, however, the Sichuan quake would have been much worse had it occurred a few decades ago, when China was less open and prosperous and, thus, less resilient. As this MSNBC video points out a weaker 1976 quake killed a quarter million people. Back then, the Chinese government tried to suppress news of the quake, a stark contrast to today. Reading between the lins of this LAT report about local concerns, however, it seems Chinese government officials still don't quite know how to channel the charitable giving that inevitably follows such a disaster. But the Red Cross seems like a good start.

Back in 2001, in the aftermath of an Indian earthquake that killed 20,000, Jonah Goldberg also discussed the comparison between earthquakes in developed democracies and elsewhere:

Modern buildings have a tendency to fall down less than squalid tenements or shantytowns. Especially when you're rich enough to make them quake proof.

So again you ask, why is this relevant?

Well, if you listen to what the anti-globalization protesters are saying at the World Forum in Davos, Switzerland, or at my local coffeehouse, you'd get the impression that they have the best interests of poor people at heart. Of course, it turns out they don' t.

Globalization is generally something rich people are against and poor people are for, which is funny since rich people are supposed to be greedy and poor people are supposed to be content. This is true about both certain conservatives and liberals but for different reasons. Conservative anti-globalists and trade unionists fear what globalization will do to people inside our borders. That creates problems to be sure, but it's not nearly so evil as a certain breed of liberal nostalgia which wants to make the world safe for righteous tours of impoverished lands where noble savages still live in huts and starve with surprising regularity.

Okay so maybe most of them don't live in huts, but they do live in a crushing poverty that so many liberals think is preferable to being forced to eat at McDonalds or drink Starbucks coffee.

Modern buildings are also often a good place to be during hurricanes, much to the chagrin of some on the left.

Update: Via Instapundit on its brand new Pajamas-centric URL, Business Week explores firsthand earthquake blogging. That's something I'll be happy never to do again, and mine was nowhere near as severe as what Chengdu just went through.

Last year, there were 409 tornadoes:

"So far some 730 tornadoes have touched down this year, more than double the number for all of last year."

—ABC's Bill Weir on yesterday's Good Morning America, who--of course--blames the "more than double" increase on global warming.

I doubt Cindy Crawford would argue with those calculations.

(Nor would this fellow, but for different reasons.)

So I'm sitting with my wife, having dinner in our favorite local Italian restaurant, minding our own business, when at about 8:05 Pacific time, this interrupts and really harshes our collective mellow:

The U.S. Geological Survey reports that a 5.6 earthquake based in the Alum Rock area of San Jose hit at approximately 8:04 p.m.

Bay residents as far away as Sacramento and Sonoma reported feeling the tremor.

There were no immediate reports of major damage or injury.

The USGS reported at least seven aftershocks, all measuring less than magnitude 2.0.

USGS seismologist Steve Walter said the quake hit the Calaveras fault.

Drudge had the police gumball on for a time, and the local television stations will spend the rest of the evening making a huge deal about it, but in Milpitas, a suburb of San Jose, and seven miles from the quake's epicenter, things seem to be in pretty darn good condition: the electricity's on in the house. The cable modem is (needless to say) working. The books are all on the shelves, and none of the Remy Martin 1738 hit the floor.

No nuke, no foul, right?

Update: Earlier today, I had interviewed Virginia Postrel for this week's PJM Political on XM. And apropos of tonight's shakin' all over, here's one of my favorite columns from her, on "Resilience vs. Anticipation".

FEMA fakes a press conference--but why?

I was about to add this as an update to the post below on Hollywood's attitude towards America and war, but it's worth branching off on its own. Allahpundit writes, "Wildfire victims getting what’s coming to them, says [George] Carlin":

No need for grandiose outrage here. He’s been saying stuff like this for decades. In fact it’s a core part of his act, which is why he’s allowed to skate. I offer the clip not as fodder for indignation but because it’s a nice little window into Carlin’s persona: the bitter hippie, broken-hearted by the failure of the 60s, whose idealism has since decayed into a cynicism so black and weary that revanchist, schadenfreudean sentiments like this now escape his lips without the slightest stutter. And of course it’s all paired with the most touchy feely, cringemaking New Age back-to-the-land nonsense about being “in balance with nature” the way the Indians are. Thus the paradox of the malignant self-styled humanist: We need to join hands and tap into the spiritual creatures within — and if we don’t, then he hopes your house burns down.

In his look at Rupert Murdoch's ever-growing media empire, Steve Boriss writes:

Businessman Murdoch knows that success is about keeping customers happy — an obvious idea that is thoroughly rejected by the journalism dogma that pervades his competitors. This dogma insists that audiences are not customers at all, but “citizens” who must be provided with a pure stream of objective truths that only journalists know how to create. Moreover, this truth-flow is thought to be so precious and necessary to this country’s survival that journalists must be independent of pressures from anyone or anything — no pressures allowed from government, employers, business competition, corporate takeovers, advertisers, even the demands of their own readers with their questionable judgment and taste for sensationalism.

Unlike today’s journalists, Murdoch will respect his audiences’ tastes and seek to fulfill their needs. If he sees an opportunity, he will not hesitate to offer news that is sensational, titillating, or compatible with viewers’ worldviews. He will provide them with handsome men and strikingly beautiful women to look at. He will draw them in and make them feel good about being a part of a community, delivering news that makes them proud to be an American, a stockholder, or a conservative. He will not run news that is negative, cynical, and despairing, or that runs-down cherished institutions to which his audiences identify.

The attitudes displayed by "Bobos In Paradise" such as Carlin, and journalists such as Bobby Caina Calvan and Rebecca Aguilar all stem from the same mid-sixties wellspring of nihilism-cum-narcissism--which means such a worldview is now well over forty years old. In contrast, what Boriss describes as Murdoch's attitude towards his customers, while not always clearly reflected in his product, is a surprisingly refreshing change of pace. Naturally though, it's those who would benefit the most from adopting it who are, by their very nature, far too cynical to notice.

As Hugh Hewitt writes, the legacy media would love turn the southern California fires into Katrina Mark II, but "they don't have that chance given the accessibility of thousands of observers and lots of local media to the actual facts on the ground."

"Trust but verify" may have worked fine for the Gipper and the Soviet Union, but when it comes to the MSM, verify, and even then don't trust 100 percent.

Update: "Harry Reid Blames California Wildfires On Global Warming...Before He Denies He Said It", which sounds very much like the Democrat Senate majority leader is inadvertently attempting to transfer Iowahawk's "Top Scientists Warn: Sea Gods Angry" routine onto dry land.

Bryan Preston compares and contrasts; Glenn Beck loses it.

Jesse Walker of Reason has a list of helpful hints for those hoping to win their own Nobel Peace Prize--"Al Gore did it--you can too!"

Update: Kathy Shaidle brings it all back home:

Another Alfred -- Nobel -- endowed his famous prize as a "Winchester House" style conscience sop. He'd invented dynamite, to blast away rock during mining. Naturally, dynamite's until-then-unmatched ability to blast away human beings was discovered shortly thereafter, to Nobel's eternal shame.

Luckily, he didn't live to see the prize handed out to Arafat...

If Al Gore is a decent man, thirty years from now, having finally admitted he was wrong about global warming, he will endow a new prize, to be presented annually to a man or woman who tried to undo the incalculable damage done by An Inconvenient Truth.

I hereby nominate Bjorn Lomborg as its first recipient...

Meanwhile, I can think of no better way to commemorate this special occasion than by directing you to two other sites:

* re-read Hugh Hewitt's classic litany of Gore's lies, "Gorelero", which only goes up to the year 2000.

To paraphrase Arthur C. Clarke, read the whole thing, follow the links, repeat the dosage.

Jonah Goldberg has a must-read piece in NRO today. Two years on, he describes how a devastating hurricane and a near-universal institutional case of BDS caused one of old media's most infamous moments:

Few of us can forget the reports from two years ago. CNN warned that there were “bands of rapists, going block to block.” Snipers were reportedly shooting at medical personnel. Bodies at the Superdome, we were told, were stacked like cordwood. The Washington Post proclaimed in a banner headline that New Orleans was “A City of Despair and Lawlessness” and insisted in an editorial that “looters and carjackers, some of them armed, have run rampant.” Fox News anchor John Gibson said there were “all kinds of reports of looting, fires and violence. Thugs shooting at rescue crews.” These reports actually hindered rescue efforts, as emergency crews wasted valuable time avoiding phantom snipers.

TV reporters raced to the bottom to see who could moralistically preen the most. Interviewers transformed into outright scolds of administration officials. Meanwhile, the distortions, exaggerations and flat-out fictions being offered by New Orleans officials were accelerated and amplified by the media echo chamber. Glib predictions of 10,000 dead, and the chief of police’s insistence that there were “little babies getting raped,” swirled around the media like so much free-flowing sewage.

It was as though journalistic skepticism of government officials was reserved for the White House, and everyone else got a free pass.

It was very much a throwback to the most lurid days of America's newspapers during the Hearst-era of yellow journalism. Or as I wrote back in October of 2005:

In 1981, Janet Cooke was a Washington Post reporter who wrote a Pulitzer Prize-winning story of an eight year old heroin addict. She was eventually forced to return the prize, when when it was discovered that Cooke cooked the books and invented Jimmy out of whole cloth. (Walter Duranty's Pulitizer is still on the books, incidentally.)

Asked about Cooke in an interview, new journalism pioneer Tom Wolfe replied:

It reminded me of when I first went to work on the New York Herald Tribune and they were still laughing over the ship-of-sin scandal from prohibition days. An informant had told the Herald Tribune that there was a ship of sin operating outside of a three-mile limit off of eastern Long Island. On board you could get liquor and dope and sex. So the Tribune sent a reporter out. He didn't find the ship, but he did find a saloon in Montauk, and he phoned in about five days' worth of the most lurid stories in the history of drunk newspapermen. Half of New York City gasped and the other half rushed out to eastern Long Island to rent motor launches, until it was discovered he had made up the whole thing. These things happen about every three or four years; some reporter gets caught piping a story out of his skull...Phony stories are going to be written every once in a while, so long as you give reporters the trust that you have to give them.

Especially when you send them down to New Orleans to report on the aftermath of a hurricane when there's a conservative president in office.

Around that time, Hugh Hewitt told PBS's News Hour:

Well, [Keith Woods, dean of the faculty at the Poynter Institute, a school for journalists in Florida] just said they did not report an ordinary story; in fact they were reporting lies. The central part of this story, what went on at the convention center and the Superdome was wrong. American media threw everything they had at this story, all the bureaus, all the networks, all the newspapers, everything went to New Orleans, and yet they could not get inside the convention center, they could not get inside the Superdome to dispel the lurid, the hysterical, the salaciousness of the reporting.

I have in mind especially the throat-slashed seven-year-old girl who had been gang-raped at the convention center -- didn't happen. In fact, there were no rapes at the convention center or the Superdome that have yet been corroborated in any way.

There weren't stacks of bodies in the freezer. But America was riveted by this reporting, wholesale collapse of the media's own levees they let in all the rumors, and all the innuendo, all the first-person story because they were caught up in their own emotionalism. Exactly what Keith was praising I think led to one of the worst weeks of reporting in the history of American media, and it raises this question: If all of that amount of resources was given over to this story and they got it wrong, how can we trust American media in a place far away like Iraq where they don't speak the language, where there is an insurgency, and I think the question comes back we really can't.

And yet, despite all that, as Jonah notes:

During last week’s bonfire of Katrina navel-gazing, there was virtually no mention of the hyperventilating and inaccurate media reports, even though these facts are by now well-established. Terms such as “rape gangs” and “snipers” do not appear in virtually any of the mainstream media’s retrospectives. It’s as if it never happened.

Why? I think the answer is complex, but three factors are surely involved. One, the media are often good watchdogs of government but rarely of themselves. While recycling old complaints about government is permissible, dwelling on your colleagues’ failures — or your own — just isn’t done.

Two, the media have convinced themselves that they did a wonderful job of covering Katrina, showering themselves with awards in response. Dan Rather spoke for his colleagues when he said, “Everybody across the board did such a good job.” It was one of the “quintessential great moments in television news ... right there with the Nixon-Kennedy debates, the Kennedy assassination, Watergate coverage, you name it.”

One could argue that each of those moments demonstrated fundamentally-flawed coverage on the part of television networks that claimed at the time to be throroughly objective and unbiased, during an era when the American public still largely believed such journalistic traits were possible.

CBS's Don Hewitt later admitted that through lighting, make-up and camera angles, he gave Kennedy preferential visual treatment in his first, now legendary debate with Nixon. As James Piereson wrote in Camelot and the Cultural Revolution, when compared with the facts of the event, the media's biased narrative in the immediate aftermath of Kennedy's death was in its own way as muddled as their decades-later Katrina coverage. And television's role in Watergate was largely through the passive airing of static congressional hearings. The real legwork was done by two newspaper reporters who were unknowing patsies of an FBI turf war battle spearheaded by "a disaffected sidekick of J. Edgar Hoover, an old-school G-man embittered at being passed over for the director's job when the big guy keeled over after half-a-century in harness", Mark Steyn wrote in 2005.

Those flawed earlier moments reveal both the big three networks' biases, and in CBS's case, there's a direct line from Don Hewitt giving JFK a friendly video assist to CBS's Dan Rather inventing phony documents to attempt to give a much later JFK his own helpful leg up.

The distributed citizen journalism of the Internet came to national prominence (and earned its nickname) as a result of catching that last imbroglio, but it helped that it was one big easy-to-follow story involving one superstar anchorman, not the thousand tiny cuts of the media's New Orleans debacle.

Of course, Dan Rather still can't understand what--if anything--he did wrong in September of 2004. And as Jonah notes, the rest of his comrades don't believe they made any mistakes a year later. History (and a Cuban-exile) says otherwise about Dan. In the age of the Blogosphere, what will the general public's perception of the legacy mass media during Katrina ultimately be?

Nicole Gelinas writes "Two years after Katrina, New Orleans desperately needs law and order":

As Reverend Nguyen The Vien, pastor of one of eastern New Orleans’s churches, told me earlier this year, “We’re here and we’re rebuilding”—with or without federal assistance. Indeed, Nguyen and his parishioners seemed to treat the subject of government help almost as an afterthought: it may help pay the bills if it ever arrives, but it’s not expected. After Katrina, neighbors fixed up Nguyen’s church under his direction so that they would have a “home base” for eating, sleeping, and showering. Then they set to work rebuilding houses, one by one. Residents of many other neighborhoods—white, black, and Asian—have done the same. As New Orleanians have found out the hard way, the work is backbreaking, but not impossible.

What individual New Orleanians can’t do by themselves is fix the city’s long-broken attitude toward criminal justice. Over and over again during my February trip to New Orleans, I heard how demoralized residents feel when they buy and install new appliances, pipes, and furniture for their flooded-out houses, leave for a day or two, often to temporary homes—and return to find their hard-earned new handiwork ripped out and stolen.

For generations now—and this is the city’s deepest problem—New Orleans has hobbled along without a real law-and-order presence. Criminals graduate from petty crimes to burglary to drug-dealing to carrying illegal weapons to gang robberies to murder, and face few consequences at any stage. The police, and especially the prosecutors, are ineffectual. Since Katrina, things have gotten much worse, in part because criminals, finding life difficult in cities that enforce the law, have returned to the Big Easy in numbers disproportionate to those of law-abiding citizens. Mayor Ray Nagin doesn’t try to fix things, perhaps because, as he often says, he believes crime is a social problem, rooted in a lack of opportunity for poor youth.

The Bush administration has deployed extra federal law-enforcement agents to try to get the worst criminals off the street. The state of Louisiana, meanwhile, has sent the National Guard to patrol half-empty neighborhoods. But just as the U.S. military can only do so much in Iraq when Baghdad’s local government is ineffective, the federal government can’t do much in New Orleans until the city’s local government changes its attitude and behavior. Residents have no reason to think that criminal behavior has predictable negative consequences, because Nagin and New Orleans district attorney Eddie Jordan have failed to make clear that people who commit crimes in New Orleans will be prosecuted.

But President Bush can use federal dollars to try to convince them to do it. In his speech in New Orleans on Wednesday, Bush should announce that he’s ready to ask Congress for $500 million over two years to overhaul New Orleans’s police and prosecutorial forces. But he also should say that the money is contingent on a pledge from Nagin and Jordan that their city’s Number One priority will be law enforcement. Bush should also tie the federal money to measurable results: rational arrests (from quality-of-life crimes all the way up to homicide), effective prosecutions, and, ultimately, fewer crimes.

It’s an enduring mystery why Bush hasn’t used the Katrina disaster to show the world that America can rebuild a major city using a bedrock conservative principle: law and order first. Democrats are welcome to propose the same idea, of course. Obama, Edwards, and Clinton have all mentioned New Orleans’s crime problem in their recent speeches. But they often tie it to a lack of staff and equipment in the city after Katrina—as if it’s a question of rebuilding something that was lost, instead of building from scratch the most essential component of any city’s success. Until politicians understand that basic difference, spending more money—or bragging about past billions spent—while tolerating intolerable conditions in a first-world city is nothing short of disgraceful.

Paging Mayor Giuliani--your next stump speech awaits.

Pretty amazing color footage of "Galloping Gertie", the Narrows Tacoma Bridge disaster of 1940:

It makes a dramatic companion piece to these more placid color still photos from the first half of the 20th century.

In "Dead On Arrival", Jonah Goldberg writes the postmortem for Live Earth:

"If you want to save the planet, I want you to start jumping up and down. Come on, mother-[bleepers]!” Madonna railed from the stage at London's Live Earth concert Saturday. “If you want to save the planet, let me see you jump!”

You just can't beat that. What else could capture the canned juvenilia of a 48-year-old centimillionaire — who owns nine homes and has a “carbon footprint” nearly 100 times larger than the norm — hectoring a bunch of well-off, aging hipsters to show their Earth-love by jumping up and down like children? I suppose she could have said, “Now put your right foot in / Take your right foot out / Right foot in / Then you shake it all about…. That's what climate change is all about.”

Actually, I think the “Hokey Pokey” makes more sense.

But, hey, I don’t want to bash Live Earth, which is not to be confused with Live Aid (1985, dedicated to eradicating African famine) or Live 8 (2005, promising to relieve African nations’ debts). So with the African continent so well-fed — and debt-free! — who can blame the Celebrity Concern Industry for moving on to its next big success?

The avowed point of Live Earth was to ... can you guess? That’s right: raise awareness about global warming. Considering the energy required to put on the show, the nine Live Earth concerts doubtlessly raised more CO2 than awareness. NBC’s three-hour televised version got trounced by “Cops” and “America’s Funniest Home Videos.” Moreover, surely most of the people who attended or tuned in already knew about global warming before they saw the video tutorial about Ed Begley Jr.’s eco-friendly home and sanctimony-powered go-cart.

Still, if fans had somehow missed the global-warming story entirely, imagine how befuddled they must have felt while listening to Dave Matthews sing the glories of cloth diapers. And, assuming they didn’t hit the mute button when Czech supermodel Petra Nemcova came to the stage, one wonders what any climate-change ingenues might have made of her remarks. The model, who nearly was killed in Thailand by the 2004 tsunami, explained that she “didn’t feel hate toward nature” because of the tsunami. “I felt nature was screaming for help.”

Maybe Petra was simply trying to fly under radar with a subversive Iowahawk reference...

"Floods are judgment on society, say bishops".

Not hurricanes?

Clayton Cramer asks, "Remember in 1984, where Winston's job was to revise newspapers of the past to keep up with the ever changing present?"

This is very interesting. A couple years ago, during the Katrina disaster, I linked to a CNN report and quoted it:

Overnight, police snipers were stationed on the roof of their precinct, trying to protect it from gunmen roaming through the city, CNN's Chris Lawrence reported.

One New Orleans police sergeant compared the situation to Somalia and said officers were outnumbered and outgunned by gangs in trucks.

"It's a war zone, and they're not treating it like one," he said, referring to the federal government. ...

One of my readers ran into that posting of mine--and noticed that the CNN report at that link no longer said anything like that. It was much, much more upbeat. Nothing about the police snipers on the roof. Did I copy the wrong link? Did I have a brief attack of delusion, and make something up?

The earliest archived version on the Internet Wayback Machine of the article that Clayton is referring to is dated December 10th, 2005, three months after the story originally ran. If that date is correct (and I'm not familiar enough with the Wayback Machine's inner workings to know if retroactive airbrush touch-ups and other types of post-facto rejiggering are possible), it sounds like it may have been revised sometime in the fall of 2005, after news agencies first began to realize (largely thanks to bloggers, and those who were actually on the scene) that Katrina wasn't their finest hour of reporting after all.

(Although try telling Big Media that: as recently as last month, while Hugh Hewitt was discussing NBC's Weekly World News-style hyping of Virgina Tech shooter Cho Seung-Hui, he noted, "Steve Capus...the president of NBC News, who I debated on Monday about the quality of Katrina coverage, which he called one of the media’s finest hours".)

Of course, all sorts of things can vanish down the Memory Hole at CNN and Big Journalism in general from time to time, particularly when an expeditious course correction is required.

Tough to argue with this:

Sixty-four-year-old Vivian Westerman rode out Hurricane Katrina in her 19th-century house. So terrible was the experience that she wanted two things before the 2006 season arrived: a backup power source and a gun. “I got a 6,000-watt generator and the cutest little Smith & Wesson, snub-nose .38 you ever saw,” she boasted. “I’ve never been more confident.” People across New Orleans are arming themselves - not only against the possibility of another storm bringing anarchy, but against the violence that has engulfed the metropolitan area in the 19 months since Katrina, making New Orleans the nation’s murder capital.

"The cutest little Smith & Wesson, snub-nose .38 you ever saw"? Man, Tammy Bruce fans are everywhere.

No, that's not an intense NFC/AFC interconference pro football game; it's an interesting comparison of two recent natural disasters of biblical proportions and the responses therein. Don't miss it.

(Via Maggie's Farm. And for an equally interesting comparison of regional responses to less severe natural disasters, flashback to this great Virginia Postrel article from the mid-1990s.)

Update: Speaking of Denver, they'll be having another Blogger Bash on February 16th. If you're in the area, don't miss it--as they say in their ad, You--Yes You! You Control The Bar Tab!

And speaking of which, sadly belated best wishes to VodkaPundit's Stephen Green--get well, and start blogging again, soon!

Another Update: "Seneca the Younger" of Flares into Darkness shoots out the Denver/New Orleans meme:

A few minutes Googling revealed that it was actually written about a blizzard in North Dakota, right after Katrina. I'm almost positive I got it by email then, although I haven't tried searching my email for it; in any case, it's in itself a bit of an exaggeration, since North Dakota (and Colorado) called out the National Guard, and ND also solicited and got a disaster declaration from the Federal Government. (The link it to a Snopes article; you can find details there.) On the other hand, while it's an exaggeration, it's got a touch of sense to it; there was no sign of the paralyzed dependency that we saw in New Orleans. We bitched about the snow, but we didn't ask where FEMA was to help people stranded in the snow.

As "Seneca" writes, "It's kind of interesting to watch it go past. It's very interesting when you think about the 'plastic turkey' and similar stories --- it's a demonstration of how a good story, a 'meme' propagates".

I'm reasonably sure the Blogger Bash is real, though.

Bryan Preston of Hot Air has a long, detailed post analyzing how Republicans lost the midterms:

What cost the GOP its majorities in Congress and statehouses? Nancy Pelosi and her wing of the Democrats are running around as though the elections validated their hard left view of the war and the world, but according to James Carville’s Democracy Corps, this election did no such thing.

What cost the GOP its power? Iraq? Foley? Look at page 6 of Democracy Corps’ post-election report. The GOP’s fortunes fatally cratered in the Fall of 2005, and were recovering ever since minus a couple of blips this year. What happened in the Fall of ‘05?

Katrina. That storm turned out to be the hurricane that changed history.

As Preston writes, "Combine 9-11 and Katrina, and the Bush administration has had to deal with two of the worst disasters in American history, one brought on by foreign aggression that was years in the making, and one the wrath of nature."

Near the start of the media's wretched Katrina coverage, which had painted the Superdome as the site of numerous rapes, and had fictitious snipers shooting at rescue helicopters, Mickey Kaus presciently noted that, "In short, Katrina gives [the media] a way to talk about Iraq without talking about Iraq." And they milked it for all that it was worth. Preston adds:

There’s a lesson in all of this, that’s an old one but an important one to remember: Demagoguery wins, and more so when it comes in the middle of a horrific disaster. Also, lies do indeed travel halfway around the world before the truth gets its boots on. By the time the story of New Orleans buses surfaced (only to be buried by the AP and ignored by the national media), the disaster had been framed as a Bush failure and the damage was already done. The media’s later mea culpa did nothing to change the basic narrative that already had a life of its own.

Which confirms something that Peggy Noonan wrote in August:

The other day ABC News's Internet political report, The Note, argued that President Bush, in his then-upcoming veto statement and other presentations, had better be at the top of his game if he wants his party to hold on to Congress in 2006. "[Mr. Bush] is going to need to be focused and impressive, not easy pickings for the Rich-Krugman-Dowd-Stewart axis."

As I read I nodded: That's exactly true. What was significant is that The Note did not designate as Mr. Bush's main and most effective foes Pelosi, Dodd, Reid, Biden, et al. Mr. Bush's mightiest competitors are columnists and a comedian with a fake-news show.

This is one reason the media is important. (Not "are important." Language evolves; usage changes; people vote with their tongues. It's not the correct "return to normality"; it's the incorrect "return to normalcy." It's not "the media are" it's "the media is." People see the media as one big thing.)

One big reason the media is important is that they change things. And they lead. On 9/11 itself it was the media--anchors, reporters, crews sent to the scene, analysts--that functioned, for roughly 10 hours, as the most visible leaders of the United States. The president was on a plane; the vice president was in the bunker and on the phone. It was on-air journalists who informed, created a seeming order, and reassured the public by their presence and personas and professionalism.

So they're important. But very recently it seems to me they're important because it is from the media that Mr. Bush's most effective opposition--attacks on his nature and leadership, attacks on his policies--comes. Among the Democrats an op-ed columnist has more impact than a minority leader.

It is common wisdom that newspapers are over. But when the most powerful voices against a powerful president at a crucial time are op-ed jockeys, newspapers are not over. Or perhaps one should say paper may be over, but news is not.

Rich Lowry has further election postmortems, here.

Update: Related thoughts on Republicans and the media, from a Hollywood (conservative) perspective.

Another Update: Dr. Helen explores the psychology of the big-screen TV:

My patients, regardless of political party, often come in and parrot to me the news they hear on tv without question. You know, the Dems are great, the Republicans evil and such. When I watched the news just now with Nancy Pelosi and Wolf Blitzer, it seemed that they were right in my media room, talking to me personally. TV encourages people to think by linking images in their brains. Are these images stronger and more persuasive on a big screen with high def like the new ones out than they were on the smaller less clear ones? Now that tvs are getting cheaper and cheaper as well as bigger and clearer, will the emotions of viewers become even easier to manipulate? And if so, how will that play out in a medium that is captured by the liberal media? As tv's get bigger, clearer, and cheaper, will we start to see blue everywhere?

That sounds like an environment tailor-made for a story like Katrina, which, while, as Kaus noted, was a way for the media to "to talk about Iraq without talking about Iraq", also had a similar fog-of-war type environment. It gave the media the opportunity to craft the most lurid stories possible, along with enormous amounts of plausible deniability afterwards.

Life (as always) imitates Iowahawk--In late December of 2004, the word's most famous squirrel smoker satirically wrote:

Washington, DC - Pointing to the devastating weekend Indian Ocean tsunami that left over 24,000 dead, an international blue ribbon committee of climatologists and ecoscientists today issued a stark warning that man-made pollutants have increasingly "make water spirits angry."

The blunt conclusion prefaced a 2300 page meta-analysis of hundreds of scientific studies and computer models detailing links between human industrial activity and wrathful eco-deities. Entitled "Fire Bad: Fire Very Bad," the report warns that the planet faces additional catastrophies unless drastic regulatory action is taken to appease Earthen-furies.

"Unclean money devils anger sacred water spirit Tai-Waku," explained Martin Knudson of Scripps Oceanic Institute. "He now call angry to son the whale, 'make slap with anger-tails! Bring vengeance-surf to villagers!'"

While most empirical evidence supports the theory of wrathful whale-tail slappings, some scientists are exploring alternative hypotheses for the weekend tsunami. Ecobiologist Jane Geary of UC Santa Cruz points to mounting evidence that the ocean spirit-world may have been driven to gastrointestinal rage by gas-guzzling SUVs.

"Thunder-wagon make smoke cloud of greenhouse gas," explained Geary. "hungry Tai-Waku eat smoke from thunder-wagon, pass giant wind with mighty fury."

Peter Novak, chief science officer of the Sierra Club, dismissed Geary's "Divine Fart" theory, arguing it was more likely that SUVs had triggered the tsunami via a spirit underword sexual encounter.

"Wheels of thunder-wagons wake up Big Earth Spirit-Mother, make to crazy tingle in hairy child-place. She now go to water lair of Tai-Waku, make big angry love on tectonic plate," said Novak. "Big Earth Spirit-Mother say, 'if ocean rocking, don't come a-knocking.'"

Although they disagree on the precise causes of the wrathful spirit world, scientists were largely unanimous in recommending immediate global regulatory action. Remedial steps suggested in the report include ratification of the Kyoto treaty, elimination of automobiles, volcanic altars for virgin sacrifices, creation of a sustainable urine-based economy, and improved faculty dental benefits.

"If not act now, it too late," said report editor Paul Erlich of Stanford University.

Erlich, whose 1978 best seller "Ice Time Come Soon" is widely credited with saving millions of lives by warning of the massive age of glaciation that threatened Earth during the 1980s, said inaction might anger the spirit world further.

"Me not know when Tai-Waku make wrath again," said Erlich. "Me need more grant money."

Seamus Heffernan, the senior policy executive of "ICE", England's Institution of Civil Engineers, emailed me a link to his review of An Inconvenient Truth, Al Gore's recent agitpropumentary, in which he spotted a similar "Fire Makes Sea Gods Angry" moment from the former vice president:

Lack of panache aside, Gore does outline his case clearly and powerfully. He explains the basics of the science around climate change (bare bones version: greenhouse gases trapped in the Earth’s atmosphere prevent the escape of the sun’s heat) and, in the film’s only real chuckle, drives this point home with an educational clip from Matt Groening’s Futurama.

Having now hooked his crowd, Gore goes to work outlining the real life examples to drive the reality of the situation home. The Darfur droughts, flooding in China, the melting ice caps, the baffling weather all are explained

Unfortunately, this is where Gore loses some of his credibility. He is most certainly safe on many of the examples he cites, but cannot resist going for the glamour shots. Standing before a giant photo of Mount Kilimanjaro, he laments its disappearing snow peaks. Unfortunately, Kilimanjaro has been losing snow for over a hundred years through a reduction in 19th century precipitation, not global warming. Ouch.

Gore goes one worse when he attempts to use Katrina (and accompanying gut-wrenching footage). It was easily the film’s most crass political moment. Katrina was a disaster, and even more crucially for Gore, an American disaster whose wounds have not yet come close to healing. In his rush to exploit this, he neglected homework from the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which said that “No systematic changes in the frequency of tornadoes, thunder days, or hail events are evident in the limited areas analysed". In addition, the "challenges globally in tropical and extra-tropical storm intensity and frequency are dominated by inter-decadal and multi-decadal variations, with no significant trends evident over the 20th century." In other words, the jury is out on whether or not global warming made Katrina any worse.

By claiming Katrina was unquestionably caused by global warming, he deftly shifts the blame for its severity onto the current administration (after all, they’re hardly big fans of the global warming hypothesis). Gore lets himself down by both grossly misstating the facts about hurricanes and climate change, while clumsily making the other aim of this film clear: the 2008 elections. Perhaps we should expect no better from a man who was quoted in Grist Magazine as saying it is ‘appropriate’ to overstate the facts related to climate change.

Perhaps.

In his latest "Citizen Journalist" video blog for Hot Air Jeff Goldstein asked Linda Seebach of The Rocky Mountain News her thoughts on this piece by Jeff Jarvis from last September. It was written at the height of what we now know to be the media's painfully botched coverage of Hurricane Katrina:

If we nitpick the facts and follow some rules some committee wrote up, we’ll be safe; we’re doing our jobs. No, sir, our job is to get more than the facts. Anybody can get facts. Facts are the commodity. The truth is harder to find. Justice is harder to fight for. Lessons are what we’re after.

Tim Russert lost sight of the story because he was embarrassed that bloggers caught a guest on his show with facts that were wrong. Russert’s proper response should have been to fix those facts quickly and clear but still pursue the real story. Instead, he chose to shoot the messenger who embarrassed him with the bloggers. He lost sight of his real mission.

The media was more than willing to jettison facts while covering Katrina, because it had a larger purpose in mind. Echoing something that Mickey Kaus spotted almost immediately last year in Big Media's Katrina coverage, Jonah Goldberg writes, "The anti-Bush chorus, including enormous segments of the mainstream media, sees Katrina as nothing more than a good stick for beating on Piñata Bush’s 'competence'":

The hypocrisy is astounding because the media did such an abysmal job covering the reality of New Orleans (contrary to reports, there were no bands of rapists, no disproportionate deaths of poor blacks, nothing close to 10,000 dead, etc.). It seems indisputable that Katrina highlighted the tragedy of New Orleans rather than created it. Long before Katrina, New Orleans was a dysfunctional city in a state with famously corrupt and incompetent leadership, many of whose residents think that it is the job of the federal government to make everyone whole.

The Mississippi coast was hit harder by Katrina than New Orleans was. And although New Orleans’ levee failure was a unique problem — one the local leadership ignored for decades — the devastation in Mississippi was in many respects more severe. And you know what? Mississippi has the same federal government as Louisiana, and reconstruction there is going gangbusters while, after more than $120 billion in federal spending, New Orleans remains a basket case. Here’s a wacky idea: Maybe it’s not all Bush’s fault.

And, as we now know, it also wasn't Bush's fault (or Cheney's, or "some star-chamber neocon", as Jonah writes) that Valerie Plame was outed. Fred Barnes writes:

It's as if a giant hoax were perpetrated on the country--by the media, by partisan opponents of the Bush administration, even by several Bush subordinates who betrayed the president and their White House colleagues. The hoax lingered for three years and is only now being fully exposed for what it was.

Last week, the Washington Post declared--three years after much of the starboard side of the Blogosphere--the Plame story a non-starter. Roger L. Simon has a detailed, thoughtful post on the implications of the Post's admission, and reading it, you can understand how these two seemingly disparate stories intersect, along with several other examples of the media's post-9/11 obsessions:

Read More »

Ray Nagin, class all the way:

On a tour of the decimated Ninth Ward, [New Orleans Mayor Ray] Nagin tells Pitts the city has removed most of the debris from public property and it’s mainly private land that’s still affected – areas that can’t be cleaned without the owners’ permission. But when Pitts points to flood-damaged cars in the street and a house washed partially into the street, the mayor shoots back. “That’s alright. You guys in New York can’t get a hole in the ground fixed and it’s five years later. So let’s be fair.”

Charming. As Allah writes:

A “hole in the ground.” “Fixed.” They were the tallest buildings in the United States, where nearly 3,000 died in a savage attack against our people on our soil. At least he got the length of time right without insulting the dead.

I’m fine with criticizing the politicians for dithering over rebuilding the Twin Towers, and especially fine with criticizing that monstrosity Trump called a “pile of crap” that was supposed to replace them. But calling Ground Zero a “hole in the ground” that’s still not “fixed” is, well, about par for the course for the king of the memorial motor pool.
But you know what? Nagin can be a total failure and run his mouth all he wants. It won’t matter. He still has a constituency that’ll back him no matter how many buses he leaves parked when the next storm hits.

Meanwhile, Real Clear Politics looks at "What the Media Missed" in its coverage of Katrina--which was plenty (when it wasn't inventing plenty of stories as well).

Austin Bay writes:

In the immediate aftermath of Hurricane Katrina I recorded a commentary for NPR’s Morning Edition that assessed the National Guard’s rapid response effort. I contended only the US could respond as quickly and successfully to the destruction of a major city. That commentary drew loads of flak.

However, according to Lou Dolinar at realclearpolitics.com the Katrina after-action reports demonstrate that the national media’s reporting (particularly television reporting) was impressionistic falderol, missing the big story of Katrina and missing the indicative details. National Guard units (from Louisiana and other states) and out of state responders got to critical areas in south Louisiana quickly and in force. They focused on search and rescue first– which is what they are supposed to do.

As Austin suggests, read the entire article.

Vanity Fair contributor Marie Brenner was recently quoted as saying:

[B]loggers often put forth the news with a partisan slant, she said, and "more and more Americans now receive their news through these partisan channels."

As opposed to the partisan channels of the legacy media itself.

Update: Jeff Jarvis has some prescient related thoughts:

At every journalism seminar like this, someone asks whether readers will trust a reporter covering an election after knowing how the reporter votes or what party she belongs to. I argue that the readers wonder and speculate about this anyway and so once it is out in the open, then the discussion can turn to the reporting: ‘Having said that I’m a liberal, now you can judge my work on its completeness, fairness, and accuracy.’ There is no agenda worse than a hidden agenda.

Of course, to be fair, it's not like Vanity Fair's agenda is all that hidden these days.

Will Collier of VodkaPundit attends the first post-Katrina New Orleans Jazz Festival. Just keep scrolling.

Back from New Jersey; regular blogging to resume tomorrow.

In the mail today was a Guitar Center flyer, with a page devoted to the "Music Rising Limited Edition Les Paul":

Following a visit to New Orleans late last week, U2's The Edge announced today the unveiling of Music Rising, a campaign to raise funds to replace the lost instruments and accessories of the musicians affected by the hurricanes that devastated the Gulf Coast region two months ago. Lead partners Gibson Guitar and Guitar Center Music Foundation have spearheaded the initial effort by collaborating on the design, manufacture and sale of an exclusive Gibson guitar with all proceeds going directly to the Music Rising program. The guitar will be available through Guitar Center. The instrument captures the essence of the Gulf Coast's musical tradition. A very limited quantity will be produced with all proceeds benefiting Music Rising and a pledge of $1 million in support. The Gibson Music Rising guitar features hand-painted designs using the colors of Mardi Gras. Each guitar will be individually painted and handmade so no two will be alike.

I know it's for a worthy cause, but...yuck! It's definitely painted in the colors of Mardi Gras, though: that top looks like the byproduct of what the French Quarter's streets are covered with after a particularly hard partying Fat Tuesday.

So what should a great Les Paul look like? Pretty much exactly like this.

(And this is what one should sound like, incidentally.)

Newsbusters discovers more interesting numerology on the left this week:

As was reported yesterday on NewsBusters, Democratic Senator John Kerry wasn't challenged on the Today show after he claimed that 53% of Americans don't graduate from high school. Well on this morning's Early Show, New Orleans Democratic Mayor Ray Nagin made an equally silly claim, "50% of all residents in the United States live along the Gulf Coast." I listened to the soundbite several times to ensure I heard him correctly.

As Tim Graham writes, "This must be why Louisiana and Mississippi are always picking our presidents".

AP reports:

The congregation of First Emmanuel Baptist Church drove from Baton Rouge, Houston and other points far and wide on Christmas, then walked past collapsed buildings and piles of storm wreckage to worship in their old church for the first time since Hurricane Katrina.

"This means everything. We've come home," said Lila Southall, the minister's wife. "My house is gone but I'm still home for Christmas."

Incidentally, tomorrow is the one year anniversary of the much deadlier Indian Ocean tsunami.

Update: "Asia marks one year to the day since tsunami hit, sweeping away 216,000 lives".

I know, I know, I like to kid. Of course they won't. Mickey Kaus hit it spot-on while it was occurring:

I don't think they were happy just because Bush has suffered a blow. I think it's because the hurricane and its New Orleans aftermath at least seemed to solve a big problem for anti-Bush commentators and politicians. Previously, they couldn't grouse about the Iraq War without seeming defeatist (and anti-liberationist and maybe even selfishly isolationist). Even the Clintons never figured a way out of that trap. But nature has succeded where they failed; it has opened up a way out, at least temporarily.

The aftermath is obvious, though, as The Only Republican In San Francisco notes (and geez, what a great name for a blog!):

The LA Times now reports that the deaths in NO were not disproportionately among the poor. The storm, and the response, did not discriminate.

Add this to the fact that black folks died in proportionally smaller numbers than whites. Quick stats are that black folks comprised 67% of the population but represented 59% of those who passed. White folks comprised 28% of the population but represented 36% of the deaths.

Everything you read about Katrina was wrong, and was, sorry, racist. An enormous amount of PR damage was done to the US, and race tensions were fanned without any factual basis. Will the MSM address this?

Pajamas has more, and Glenn Reynolds writes:

Hmm. Bogus reporting that inflames racial tensions. This could be as damaging to society as violent videogames. We need Congressional hearings!

What a slam dunk that would be for Republicans. And it'll never happen: they don't call 'em the Stupid Party for nothing.

Update: Greg Hanke emailed me a prediction he made on September 10th:

The MSM will never acknowledge that they exploited the situation to bash President Bush. Liberal bias means never having to say you're sorry.

But of course!

Meanwhile, Keith D. Milby writes:

Hurricane Katrina might have caused more damage than first realized. It appears that extensive damage might just now be coming to the surface that was done by the media coverage and that same coverage now seems to be causing damage to the media.

* * *

After all of this, how can the media ever be trusted with the facts. One can only hope that the media gets whats coming to it. If for no other reason than to rectify it's shameful reporting in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, so that it never happens again. If one award is given to any reporter for this shameful episode it will truly be a disgrace.

Like the Oscars, which was set up by the film industry in the 1920s to give itself awards for its own product, so many media awards are simply a self-congratulatory circle jerk. So I won't at all be surprised when the awards for Katrina coverage start rolling out--if indeed, they haven't started already.

Another Update: Instalanche! Welcome Glenn Reynolds' readers. For lots more on Katrina and the media, click here and just keep scrolling.

The Anchoress links to a powerful essay by Marvin Olasky on the racism displayed by the MSM in their coverage of Hurricane Katrina and writes:

When the retrospects of 2005 are playing, later in the month, the story of Katrina will be told again. Will the press tell it straight, even unto admitting just how shoddily they had done their jobs? Or will we get the racism rehash?

I can't tell if she's asking this rhetorically or not, but c'mon--the job of the press is to write the first draft of history. The one that never, ever, ever changes, no matter how much evidence is presented to the contrary.

A Pajamas Media round-up titled "What will Neo Orleans look like?" states that the one sliver of a brightspot from Katrina is that it gives New Orleans a chance to quickly modernize its infrastructure for the 21st century.

Not germane to the above topic, but certainly to Katrina itself, Michelle Malkin examines the real reasons for the failure of the 17th Street Canal levee in New Orleans.

Division of Labour links to an interesting graphic tracking the relocation of Katrina survivors.

UPI paints a Katrina-like picture of South Florida after Hurricane Wilma's devastation:

MIAMI, Oct. 24 (UPI) — Hurricane Wilma's race across South Florida and the Keys left at least seven people dead and millions without power.

The eye of the hurricane hit the west coast at dawn near Naples. Wilma, which subjected Mexico's Yucatan Peninsula to almost three days of battering, moved so fast that by 1 p.m. the eye was northeast of Palm Beach.

But the powerful storm packed winds of up to 120 mph. It lost a little power as it moved overland but sustained winds of 105 mph were recorded in West Palm Beach.

By Monday evening, seven deaths had been reported, The New York Times said. Gov. Jeb Bush warned residents to stay inside, reminding them that many hurricane-related deaths occur after a storm has passed.

The dead included a man in Coral Springs, near Fort Lauderdale killed by a falling tree; two men in Collier County, one crushed by the roof of his house and the other dead of a heart attack, and a woman killed in a car crash while trying to escape the storm, the Times reported.

The Miami Herald said that a man in Palm Beach County died when he tried to move his car and a woman died of heart failure after being crushed by a glass door.

New Orleans Saints owner Tom Benson has been looking for a reason to leave the Big Easy for years; has the combination of Katrina and sell-out crowds in San Antonio created the Perfect Storm for Benson?

SAN ANTONIO (AP) -- Mayor Phil Hardberger reiterated his resolve to bring the Saints to San Antonio permanently, saying he wanted to close the deal before next season begins.

Hardberger, part of a sellout crowd at the Saints-Falcons game Sunday in San Antonio, said Sunday that Saints owner Tom Benson agreed to serious talks with him, probably at the end of this season.

Benson ``understands that we will sit down and talk,'' Hardberger was quoted as saying in a story in Monday's San Antonio Express-News. ``That is his desire as well. I'm pretty comfortable in saying he wants to be here.''

Attempts to reach Benson by telephone Monday were not successful. Team spokesman Greg Bensel declined comment.

The Saints are under contract to play at the Louisiana Superdome through 2010, but certain provisions allow them to opt out before a Nov. 29 deadline.

Gov. Rick Perry watched Sunday's game with Hardberger from Benson's suite and said he agrees the Saints should relocate to the Alamo City and is open to the state offering some type of financial assistance.

Damage to the Superdome by Hurricane Katrina prompted the Saints to practice in San Antonio and play three games in the city's 65,000-seat Alamodome. Four other games were moved to Baton Rouge, La., where ticket sales have been sluggish.

Can Texas handle three NFL teams? California and New York certainly manage to.

Or not.

Ed Morrissey looks at yet another big media enviro-scare that wasn't:

Remember the "toxic soup" that flooded New Orleans, the one that the media widely reported was so polluted that mere momentary exposure could burn the skin and create potentially mortal illness for Katrina victims? As with the widespread gunfire, rapes, and murders, the toxic soup turns out to be another media myth. The Washington Post reports that an extensive look at the floodwaters reveals that its composition appears equivalent to floodwaters anywhere else.

As Ed writes:

Of course, this is good news for the people of New Orleans who had to suffer from exposure to the water, but other than that, it makes little difference. The damage caused to structures comes from the water itself, as well as the mud and silt that come along with it. The rot that sets into structures throughout the basin will likely require total or near-total reconstruction efforts.

It does, however, demonstrate the toxic combination of hyperbolic media and sensational events. Not content with reporting the news that happened before their eyes, media outlets had to reach beyond the news to report events that never happened, all without doing even basic research to determine the veracity of their reports. How difficult would it have been for NBC or the New York Times to get a test of the water before unleashing reports on the so-called toxic soup? How about getting reporters to verify accounts of rapes and murders by the score before airing such rumors to a repulsed nation?

Yes, that would be a good first step. As I wrote last week:

I wonder which version history will ultimately remember--the media's Weekly World News-style first draft, or what actually happened. Sadly, something tells me it will be the former.

(With apologies to Peter Gabriel for mangling the title of what's actually a pretty nifty song.)

Tammy Bruce has a simple suggestion for New Orleans' Mayor Nagin.

(Via Roger L. Simon, who demands that I eat more sushi. Can't argue with that--though precise implementation risks violating the independent contractor clause in my Pajamas Media agreement...)

Iowahawk writes:

America's sociologists are perplexed: despite damage that surpassed New Orleans, why was there no looting in Mississippi? Magnolia Stater and Katrina survivor JSS3 sends some photo data that may help solve this mystery.

Heh.

In 1981, Janet Cooke was a Washington Post reporter who wrote a Pulitzer Prize-winning story of an eight year old heroin addict. She was eventually forced to return the prize, when when it was discovered that Cooke cooked the books and invented Jimmy out of whole cloth. (Walter Duranty's Pulitizer is still on the books, incidentally.)

Asked about Cooke in an interview, new journalism pioneer Tom Wolfe replied:

It reminded me of when I first went to work on the New York Herald Tribune and they were still laughing over the ship-of-sin scandal from prohibition days. An informant had told the Herald Tribune that there was a ship of sin operating outside of a three-mile limit off of eastern Long Island. On board you could get liquor and dope and sex. So the Tribune sent a reporter out. He didn't find the ship, but he did find a saloon in Montauk, and he phoned in about five days' worth of the most lurid stories in the history of drunk newspapermen. Half of New York City gasped and the other half rushed out to eastern Long Island to rent motor launches, until it was discovered he had made up the whole thing. These things happen about every three or four years; some reporter gets caught piping a story out of his skull...Phony stories are going to be written every once in a while, so long as you give reporters the trust that you have to give them.

Especially when you send them down to New Orleans to report on the aftermath of a hurricane when there's a conservative president in office.