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FEMA Sorry for Faking News Briefing
theodp writes "The Federal Emergency Management Agency's No. 2 official apologized Friday for leading a staged news conference Tuesday in which FEMA employees posed as reporters. All the while, real reporters listened on a telephone conference line and were barred from asking questions. In the briefing, Vice Adm. Harvey E. Johnson Jr., FEMA's deputy administrator, called on questioners who did not disclose that they were FEMA employees, and gave replies emphasizing that his agency's response to this week's California wildfires was far better than its response to Hurricane Katrina in August 2005."
How is the Five Year Plan going? Good, I bet.
Sorry... sorry... WTF!!!!
Sorry isn't gonna cut it... try mass resignations!
A government organization went on national TV and intentionally tried to fool millions of Americans into believing a lie so that they didn't look bad.
Oh wait... never mind... I forgot, this is the USA. And we are talking about the government after all. The idiot who thought this up should run for President!
Flying Spaghetti Monster I cant wait until our government acts with our best interests in mind... hell I'd be happy to see it happen just once before I die.
Sometimes the best solution is to stop wasting time looking for an easy solution.
In what world did FEMA think that the truth would not be almost instantly exposed? Who are they employing in the PR dept.? The Three Stooges?
First of all... your the director of external affairs... Yep you should have stopped it... SO WHY THE FUCK DIDN'T YOU.
Second, your working very hard to establish credibility and integrity... by trying to trick us into thinking your credible and trustworthy... that's exactly what you DON'T do to establish credibility and integrity.
Finally... I would say that doing exactly the wrong thing hasn't undermine your credibility and integrity, you didn't have any to begin with... this simply ensures that you never will until the current >20% has been eliminated, everyone in that conference resigns, and your agency actually handles a disaster like it knows what it is doing.
It is kind of ironic that FEMA, the agency that is supposed to clean up disasters, actually turns every disaster it is involved in into a bigger disaster through it's absolute incompetence and piss poor public image.
Sometimes the best solution is to stop wasting time looking for an easy solution.
The Three Stooges are way smarter than these guys.
:-)
The Three Stooges were firemen, and in the army, and plumbers, football players...
My mom says I'm cool.
I would HOPE you could manage to improve your response in an area that still has power, water, sewage and transportation. I live in San Diego, I know people that have had their homes lost, but to compare this with Katrina and give themselves a pat on the back is absurd: the vast majority of the city and infrastructure of this county were completely unaffected. There were outages and near failures, but you didn't have to go far to get back to power, water, sewage and transportation. Heck, if you got tired of the evacuation site at Qualcom? The airport and cruse ship terminals were still open, just take a trip, or just hop on the trolley and go downtown for a nice dinner out. These fires have certainly devastated a lot of people's homes, I have a good freind that has nothing left but his car and a USB flash drive, but this hasn't been the sort of region wide crippling of the storm and floods of Katrina.
The difference being that California wildfires happen every year, almost like clockwork. The hurricane that devistated New Orleans and the coastal regions of Mississippi, while perhaps inevitable, had not occured until that point.
In essence, FEMA is not there to simply help out with expected situations, though that may be part of it. No matter the nobility or necessity, however, it is there, primarily, for unexpected emergencies, and it is simply not doing that job at the moment. Consider the juxtaposition between the rich socialites who have lived in the wildfire-prone region of California for so many years, and the disgustingly poor, predominately black population of New Orleans, who have lived there because their parents lived there, and because they cannot afford to move or live anywhere else. It all boils down to wealth disparity, and who benefits from it. I would encourage everyone to consider that.
"We may face a scorched and lifeless earth, but they're accountable to their shareholders first."
Insert self-referential sig here.
Just asking.
This is a tech site you know, not Zonk's personal playground.
See, this is why, faults and all, the USA is loved around the world. It's like watching your goofy cousin make a fool of himself at the wedding reception.
Well
First off, I think this less of an "I'm sorry" situation, but rather "I'm sorry I got caught".
But regardless of whether they are truly sorry for this fiasco, they STILL don't get the problem. It's not that they staged a news conference, it's why they staged the conference that is the issue. They don't care about "emergency management", they only care about *public relations*. And while they claim that things are so much better than Katrina, this mock press conference only proves that nothing has changed.
On the positive side, Kanye West might be heartened to learn that it isn't just black people -- George Bush doesn't care about *anybody*.
The parent made exactly the points I was to make. I'll add that the FEMA leadership lost what ever points they earned for not screwing the pooch this time around due to their complete lack of transparency. It's been bad enough with the unattributed propaganda videos the Administration has passed around to the media over the last six years, but faking a news conference for a heavily covered story? Gee-zus. They'd have looked more honest hiring Kevin Nealon.
Luke, help me take this mask off
You think this isn't standard in an administration which lied to start an illegal war and bullied its allies about it?
Slashdot: news from nerds.
is traveling abroad, and I told her that FEMA had staged a press conference, with all the gory details, over a Skype chat. She thought I was joking... but it didn't take as much to convince her as I thought it would, and that... that is what happens when cynicism=real life. What. The. Fuck.
She's in Shanghai right now giving company training, getting disrespect from her students because she's 5'4", blond, and female (most of all); and there's nothing she can do about it because the double standard nowadays is that we as Americans MUST respect everyone else's culture but they are allowed to do fuck all to us in their homeland and in ours and we must respect that lest they perceive insult... When our own government makes a mockery of itself in full view of it's constituents then how are we any different from any hard-line, third-world, dictator state?
Wow that went south in a hurry. Sorry for that. Fema sucks.
There is simply too much glass..
No, for the foreseeable future these lard suckers will continue to do what they are told and our politicians will continue to be a bunch of corrupt and hypocritical bastards whose only goal is to grab all the money they can for themselves. I'm hoping to be comfortably dead by the time this state of affairs changes, since it will probably end in a global environmental disaster, riots after all the oil runs out or economic collapse along the lines of what happened with Russia in the 90's.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
It wasn't that FEMA lied, or FEMA screwed up (or that there are several dozen Presidential Executive Orders in place allowing them to supersede the Constitution, hijack transportation, communications, food and fuel supplies accross the whole country, including private and commercial farm land, etc (thanks to Komrade Klinton's handiwork)). All it takes is a "real big disaster". And given how inept "ordinary Americans" are at just about every damn thing that is involved in surviving a catastrophe (or just plain every day life) I am surprised it hasn't happened yet.
No, sireee, you had to get pissed because they got busted lying. This was an attempt to see how hijacking the press would work, is my guess. I don't recall if "commandeering" the press is yet among the executive orders, but the rest is in place.
Somehow, "I told you so" just does not seem to tell it.
" What luck for rulers that men do not think" - Adolf Hitler
That's it. They'll put up with enormous shit otherwise. So if you keep up the flow of cheeseburgers and TV, the dictators will rule forever. --Or until such a time as the rest of the world decides to invade or the whole system is so totally sucked dry that it collapses with a dry wheeze like Russia did at the end of the cold war. Yep, it's a grim situation. But it gets worse. . .
I'm not convinced that this is all about just simple control. Has anybody noticed there seem to be a lot more rocks falling out of the sky recently? I sure have. There's bigger stuff at stake here. All those miles of barbed wire enclosures don't get built for nothing. The next ten months are going to be interesting, to say the least. I hope for one of two things; that people wake the hell up and throw Bush and Cheney and crew in prison forever and reinstate a real government, or that we have a really, really good TV season in 2008 and that McDonnald's has a two for one special, because it's not just FEMA, --this Blackwater thing operating on American soil is totally freaky.
Excellent Youtube video [youtube.com] dealing with this stuff. . .
-FL
...the course to a totalitarian dictatorship/oligarchy, that is. Control the media... eventually, just make it up... it's happened many times before. Even if it's done in an ridiculous manner, the fact that there are people in charge of FEMA who think it's OK should set alarm bells ringing.
Goofy cousin with ICBMs, indeed. Not just goofy, but aggressive, arrogant and loud-mouthed as well.
Fortunately, your fascism will be a capitalist one, so it's OK!
For every expert, there is an equal and opposite expert. - Arthur C. Clarke
No revolution in sight...and don't expect one.
In the first few decades of the last century, labor unions were founded and became dominant in the US; by 1950 more than half of American workers were union, and, having won, the leaders turned to the next social problem, equal rights. Beginning in the mid-fifties, the same personalities, by and large, and methods were used to bring about legal racial equality, culminating in the Civil Rights and Voting Acts of 1964. In that year, the focus turned from unions and racial equality to (VietNam) war resistance.
Although both the Union and the Civil Rights movements survived many, many casualties in their struggle, they persisted until the goal was reached. Not so the the war resisters: the National Guard shootings of demonstrators at Kent State University, Ohio, stopped the "Peace" movement in its tracks.
Had the union or civil rights movements been abandoned because two people were killed in the resulting violence, nothing would have been accomplished.
Now, of course, no outrage is enough even to get our (US) citizens up in arms (pun intended).
The framers of our Constitution understood it was simply an *experiment* and once the government learned to game the people (as FEMA has apologized for) the people would replace it, having learned from the current experiment what pitfalls to avoid next time.
T. Jefferson reckoned the consititution ought to be replace every thirty years or so. We're WAAAYY overdue.
Liberty is fed with the blood of tyrants.
The rest of the world did not get the U.S. government they deserve. You've got an obligation to the countries which have been fucked over by the U.S. to set things right.
This is true, but the parent poster did not post the entire quote; he missed a very important two words, "...patriots and..."
The quote is actually, "The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants." Jefferson knew exactly what it took to overthrow a government, and did not ignore the costs to the rebelling side. People today like to ignore those words when they talk about revolution, because they don't like to think that they will actually have to pay the price themselves, and seem to think they will lose support by mentioning it.
J.
. . . and only half of what you see.
This is nothing new in the "News" biz. Remember Bush's phony Iraq videoconference with the troops where the "questions" were rehearsed beforehand?
Lest we think only government officials do this, or only Republicans, remember:
. . . NBC's "expose" of exploding gas tanks on pickup trucks using footage supplied by an advocacy group (funded by trial lawyers, btw) where incendiary devices were used to create explosions on cue?
. . . Dan Rather's phony National Guard memos?
Ask yourself how an author gets interviewed on 60 Minutes. Is it because CBS' parent company also owns the publisher? Why do so many "investigative journalism" pieces about corporate malfeasance get broadcast just before jury selection begins in the civil case? Why do so many trade magazine articles read like press releases (because they are)?
There is no objective standard for what "news" is. It's up to us to pay attention to the source and timing of the information we are being fed, and decide its value.