Dueling Narratives At 20 Paces

For partisans on the right and left, the latest round of finger-pointing on Katrina was mostly viewed through the prism of politics, or, more accurately, from the standpoint of short-term political gain. For many on the left, the pre-Katrina preparations and warnings about the hurricane provided validation of their view of President Bush and his administration as a group of bumbling, incompetent bureaucrats who don't shoot straight. For those on the right, the hype over the briefings confirmed their belief in a liberally biased press pursuing an anti-Bush agenda with the barest of cover.

Reality, as usual, likely lies somewhere outside of these simplistic narratives, but the story helps bring into relief the enormous fault line existing between the government and the press today – and the atmosphere of mistrust that seems to go beyond the traditional institutional tensions.

Let's think about what the video of the briefing, which Mr. Bush participated in, that "surfaced" last week really told us – that officials knew Hurricane Katrina was a powerful storm that appeared likely to inflict very heavy damage on the Gulf Coast, including to the city of New Orleans. The purported smoking gun in the whole thing was a statement by meteorologist Max Mayfield that he couldn't say whether or not the protective levees around New Orleans would be "topped" or not, but it was a possibility. That statement would seem to directly contradict the president's statement after the storm that nobody "anticipated the breaching of the levees."

Does "topping" mean "breaching?" Not according to NBC's Lisa Myers, who reported this last Thursday: "Today Mayfield told NBC News that he warned only that the levees might be topped not breached and that on the many conference calls he monitored, nobody talked about the possibility of a levee breach or failure until after it happened." Administration officials and defenders spent a good part of last week saying the same thing and pointing to further evidence from the time that the governor of Louisiana told the White House the levees had not been breached when, in fact, they had (and the AP itself issued a "clarification" of the story).

Still, the briefing and other reports – including one in which former FEMA director Michael Brown said the president was asking specific questions about the levees – suggest that the attempt to say the prospect of such widespread disaster was not considered is a bit disingenuous itself. So where does all this leave us? In the same post-facto blame-game, that's where.

I seem to recall the days when all eyes were on Katrina as she made her way closer and closer to the Gulf Coast. I watched then as Max Mayfield, and legions of other meteorologists, warned that this was one big storm headed our way. I remember dire warnings for New Orleans if the full fury of Katrina were to hit there (as well as a bit of relief when it seemed to have missed). We all can remember the shock of seeing the utter devastation and the disbelief in the failings of the relief effort as well as the weeks of finger-pointing that followed.

So, did last week's revelation of this briefing advance this story anymore than all the reporting, congressional hearings and studies before it had already done? Not for me. All I learned is that, along with just about anybody in the country who bothered to turn on the Weather Channel or any cable news channel, a big storm was on its way and those in the government responsible for responding to natural disasters were talking about it. It didn't appear to me to cast any light on what went wrong between that time and the time we witnessed thousands of people suffering afterwards. It didn't address the real failures that occurred.

The video was just one more play in the blame-game. And there's plenty of that to go around. President Bush probably wishes he had not said that nobody anticipated the levee breaches because clearly that has long been a concern of sorts, way before Katrina. But he is surely not alone in the second-guessing department. The video also played into the media's "narrative," described by former White House aide David Gergen on CNN's "Reliable Sources" thusly:

What develops in the press often is a storyline, a narrative about a president or about another political figure, and the narrative about this administration has been developed -- as in the hunting accident, as on the ports, and now with Katrina -- they've been asleep at the switch. That their problem is not so much their ideas, their problem is their execution. They're not there. They didn't respond properly.

The Bush administration, seeking to limit leaks of classified information, has launched initiatives targeting journalists and their possible government sources. The efforts include several FBI probes, a polygraph investigation inside the CIA and a warning from the Justice Department that reporters could be prosecuted under espionage laws."

Some media watchers, lawyers and editors say that, taken together, the incidents represent perhaps the most extensive and overt campaign against leaks in a generation, and that they have worsened the already-tense relationship between mainstream news organizations and the White House.

"There's a tone of gleeful relish in the way they talk about dragging reporters before grand juries, their appetite for withholding information, and the hints that reporters who look too hard into the public's business risk being branded traitors," said New York Times Executive Editor Bill Keller, in a statement responding to questions from The Washington Post. "I don't know how far action will follow rhetoric, but some days it sounds like the administration is declaring war at home on the values it professes to be promoting abroad."