Brownie Points

This is precious. The San Jose Mercury News, in the above the fold headline, now says that former FEMA dirctor Michael Brown didn't deserve to be held up for ridicule. That he issued a warning to President Bush and Michael Chertoff about the impending disaster of hurricane Katrina.

And just who is doing the ridiculing, why the Mercury News. From their editorial of September 11 2005:

"So, it turns out that Federal Emergency Management Agency Director Michael Brown, or ''Brownie,'' as President Bush called him, was not doing ''a heck of a job,'' as the president claimed Sept. 2. Not that the White House would admit anything was amiss. It simply stripped Brown from his role managing relief efforts in the Gulf Coast on Friday and shipped him back to Washington."

The new evaluation comes by way of a Knight Ridder survey of 'disaster experts'. According to the story the experts said that upon viewing the video tape released this week, "...most believe that Brown should not be the scapegoat for the administration." That's a curious construction. First the Mercury News says Brown was the "butt of late-nite TV jokes and a punching bag on Capitol Hill", next they'd have you believe it was the Bush administration sending comics out with anti-Brown material. Brown wasn't a scapegoat of the administration. He was scapegoated by the press. He was a liability to the administration because news organizations created that impression. Knight Ridder is telling readers that they lied about Brown, and as if to demonstrate how it all works, they lie about the lie.

Let's get this straight. Much of the American media got the Katrina story horribly wrong. Based on that Michael Brown's reputation suffered. They now admit to falsely reporting on the former head of FEMA. The more recent effort on behalf of Brown is simply to throw more mud at Bush--it's now a full time obsession.

As long as Knight Ridder had the disaster panel assembled they might have asked for an assessment of the sorry prospects for their publishing empire.