The Incredible Shrinking Story
The AP admits it got the Katrina video story wrong:
In a March 1 story, The Associated Press reported that federal disaster officials warned President Bush and his homeland security chief before Hurricane Katrina struck that the storm could breach levees in New Orleans, citing confidential video footage of an Aug. 28 briefing among U.S. officials.
The Army Corps of Engineers considers a breach a hole developing in a levee rather than an overrun. The story should have made clear that Bush was warned about floodwaters overrunning the levees, rather than the levees breaking.
The day before the storm hit, Bush was told there were grave concerns that the levees could be overrun. It wasn’t until the next morning, as the storm was hitting, that Michael Brown, then head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, said Bush had inquired about reports of breaches. Bush did not participate in that briefing.
That silence you hear is the sudden lack of attention on the part of the ‘progressive’ blogosphere…
At what point does this bait-and-switch approach to jounalism become a delibarate program of deception? You know me, I’m not particularly paranoid and I don’t want to believe that anyone in the press sets out to deliberately mislead, but the automatic bias of the vast majority of the members of the press leads them to make the wrong call over and over. They should know better by now. Unless they like what they’re doing…
The good news is that the old-style fixing of an incorrect page 1 headline with a small font page xx correction has been undermined by an uber-attentive blogosphere. And we are all the better for it. I remain hopeful that the long term effect will be to force these folks to take a little extra time to get the story right. But, not betting, just hopeful.
[...] More importantly, however, the AP, which ‘broke’ this dud of a story that has been in the wide open since November, has corrected its inital coverage that Bush was mistaken about the ‘breach’ of levies: In a March 1 story, The Associated Press reported that federal disaster officials warned President Bush and his homeland security chief before Hurricane Katrina struck that the storm could breach levees in New Orleans, citing confidential video footage of an Aug. 28 briefing among U.S. officials. [...]