‘Heck of a job’

Wildfires in the US State of California have dominated American news coverage. To meet the pressing demand for information the US disaster management agency called a press conference to which no reporters could attend then proceeded to pretend it was a press conference, using staff as fake reporters. Emergency management now includes managing media.

Last weeks’ US Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) press conference (Tuesday October 23) wasn’t a press conference at all. Media representatives were invited with 15 minutes (Washington Post) or 20 minutes (Bloomberg) notice to the agency’s Washington DC headquarters then offered a one-way telephone link-up: no questions. No reporters attended the press conference. Pool television video was provided and used briefly by networks.

But there were questions. All six questions posed to FEMA Deputy Director Vice Admiral Harvey E. Johnson, were from FEMA employees pretending to be reporters. “The questions were predictably soft and gratuitous,” wrote the Associated Press.

And the story of all this didn’t surface in US media for three days, first reported early Friday (October 26) by the Washington Post. “Heck of a job,” wrote Post reporter Al Kamin.

Using fake reporters isn’t new to the Bush administration, which continues to hold most media in contempt. In 2005 a political operative was ‘outted’ after asking President George W. Bush a ‘soft-ball’ question, posing as a White House reporter. The nature of the question caused regular White House reporters to ask a few of their own, such as “Who is that guy?” He had held White House press credentials for two years, usually difficult to get, under a fake name and the name of a fake news organization. 

Reporting on the California wildfires by semi-official Fox News sympathetically fanned the terrorist angle all week. Fox News anchors repeatedly referred to official sources indicating that terrorists could be starting the fires. The memo quoted, however, had been written more than three years ago, revealed in the Columbia Journalism Review (Friday October 26).

Beyond the ironic, the Washington Post noted that one of the FEMA employees asking questions was External Affairs Director John ‘Pat’ Philbin. Thursday was his last day with FEMA as he is taking up the post of head of public affairs with the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. - Michael Hedges October 27, 2007

Keywords:manipulating the media

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