Oh noooooo!

Those blonde ones are out to get me. They want me to be outraged so I drive off potential readers. Fine, now it's your turn. Navy pilots reprimanded for rescuing people.

You have to do the free registration, but it's the NYTimes, people. You want to be registered there.

Comments

  1. Someone definitely deserves a bitch-slap for that

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  2. My guess, knowing the government the way I do from a somewhat inside perspective, is that (like Homeland Defense), The Coast Guard and the Military are hurting for gas.

    [dammit Cece that had better not be a dead cat on your icon or I'm going to hurl.]

    The bitching about the press (having more ready cash than the feds) sucking up all the available jet fuel has been biblical in the rank and file. I have learned that nothing is ever as it seems in the press.

    Eventualy I should get the whole story out of my husband.

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  3. I'd love to hear the whole story, Ferfe.

    I've been the press in a tiny way. Very tiny. Yet I was enough of a journalist that I've been to a few conferences, big and small. I was surprised at how ethical reporters generally seem to be. They take their job very seriously and look down on any reporter who doesn't attempt to get both sides of any story.

    Of course they love themselves in a big way, perhaps that's stemming from the fact that many of them feel they have A Calling to serve the public. That means they are more honest than I thought they'd be but can give them that annoying Holier than Thou attitude.

    Surprising how many politicians feel that way too--that they have a Calling.

    But about the Katerina coverage--A couple of times I screamed "stop showing us the suffering babies, give them water!"


    On the other hand, if they hadn't shown us those babies maybe more babies would have died.

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  4. there are so many typos and missed periods in that last entry, if I were a good blogger I'd dump it and try again.

    Nawwwww......

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  5. ferfe--aren't there some sort of strategic supplies of fuel for emergency military use? Or is that too sensible?

    I looked at Cece's cat. It isn't dead, just drunk.

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  6. My cat is drunk. i would never kill a cat or show a pic of one. =)

    Cece
    ~mommy two two furbabies

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  7. For the record, I work for the Miami Herald. I still don't trust anything I read in the press.

    {Thank God! Yeesh, Cece - it looks dead! I hyperventilated there for a few. All better now.}

    The Military, the Coast Guard and the Feds have a budget they have to adhere to, and gas is just one color of money. When they run out, and there have been several years when Customs did not have any money for gas by September and could not launch a plane or helicopter unless it was an emergency until October first. What month is this? Oh yeah, September. Budget crunch time. In order to go over budget, different departments require approval by Congress.

    On crisis planning: If Castro dies. Do you have any idea what hell on earth will open up here in the Keys and Miami if and when Castro dies? They have been co-ordinating with the local governments for two years now to stock up gas, RV's, position gofast boats and -- God help us -- weapons in anticipation of that crisis. Why? Because every Cuban with a boat is going to gas it up and head to Cuba to reclaim their homes and get their relatives. One sister of a very famous Cuban talk show hostess told me she is tasked with getting to the family mansion (now a hotel in Havana) using the stash of money the family has set aside to buy it and dig up the floor in a specific room to get the family wealth back from the ground where they buried it. It will be chaos when Castro dies.

    There will be no gas for law enforcement to buy. There will be no place for the extra personel to stay. Food does not just magically appear in an economy that stocks daily rather than long term because the longer commodities sit in storage the less profit the vendor makes.

    Did they plan for a Hurricane in the gulf to that extent? I have no idea. I only know what plans are coming together for South Florida for anything and everything because we don't ever want another Andrew. We learned our lesson from the Mariel boat lift.

    Damn. That was a lecture. Sigh. If I put you to sleep ... it wouldn't be the first time for me.

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  8. not even close to boring--it's fascinating and terrifying.

    When Cuba goes, do you think the uproar will be entirely in Cuba or will it hit Miami right away too?

    Wow. How come no one's writing skeery novels about it? Or have they and I've missed them?

    So I was way off target with the bigger name journalists? They only do the ethics schtick for conferences?

    I've only worked on magazines and small town papers. Our greatest sins tended to be laziness, phoning rather than doing in-person interviews. That sort of thing--or maybe picking the smirkier picture of the mayor.

    I wrote feature junk. The most controversial *news* article I ever wrote was about a contested radio tower. Yawn. zzzzzzzzzzz

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  9. There is always a bias in press reports. We are human. It can't be helped.

    Miami will go nuts the instant he draws his last breath. Everyone will know and many are ready and waiting.

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  10. ooh BIAS. Oh yeah, absolutely. Sure.

    But that's not the same thing as having an agenda. I don't think journalists as a rule purposefully do crap like hide stories--and our leaders do (and always have).

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  11. They don't hide the story, they treat it like a puzzle and only reveal the pieces that make the point for thier view.

    The sin of ommission.

    I have one or two rules of thumb I go by when reading a story. The main rule is this: The amount of truth in an article is inversely proprtional to the amount of outrage it generates.

    On the other hand, if you tried to cram all the related and relevent details into a story, no one would be able or willing to read it.

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  12. Hmmm. Interesting and the puzzle pieces make sense. Heck, I know about loading a lede.

    But what about a situation that *should* provoke rage? Stories of famines that could have been prevented...even if you insert the whole history of the country and/or the agricultural reasons for the famine, one shot of a starving kid shoves the story into Outrage Territory despite any complex reasons for the death.

    Granted, the story that really got me started on this current tear wasn't actually an article. I listened to the FEMA director saying we had no word of the thousands of people in the dome...when all we'd been doing for DAYS was watching and listening to stories about them.

    How could that whole event be turned into something less outrageous? Less Geraldo? (Honestly, that man makes me wanna kick the dog.)

    Even if you spread blame around to the mayor and the governor and other local yokels...nope outrage still exists.

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  13. It was the convention Center and you don't even want to get me started on Brownie-who-will-never-grow-up-to-be-a-Girl-Scout poster man for cronyism FEMA director. Train wreck of a man, I must say.

    Evoking outrage without full disclosure of the surrounding facts leads to one thing -- Mogadishu, Somalia. The ends do not justify the means when you are playing on the lowest common denominator in the American public.

    But that's only my view of it. A case could be made to justify the means, but the person arguing it would have to leave out half of the disasters in world history to do so.

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