All Blog Posts from Public Eye

It's Thursday, and that means it's time for the Public Eye Chat. This week's subject is CBS News’ “The Early Show” Weather Anchor and Feature Reporter Dave Price.

Matthew Felling: Key West, Aspen, Outer Banks, Savannah … what’s the summer been like, aside from adjusting your watch every two days?

Dave Price: That’s the fun of doing what we get to do. We get to tour around the country and visit great places. We get to meet the people who watch the show or meet people who haven’t. It’s like being an ambassador for “The Early Show.”

Matthew Felling:When it comes to TV news, the morning shows have a different relationship with their viewers, more intimate. Do you see that?

Dave Price: It’s absolutely more intimate. When you’re doing morning TV, you’re with your audience as they’re getting ready to start their day. You’re having breakfast with the people. You have the opportunity to develop more of a relationship with them because they’re often watching for a longer period of time. We’re not doing a half-hour broadcast. We’re not only doing hard news. And we have the ability to build a long-term relationship. Every day we start our days together.

Matthew Felling: Were you a night owl in a prior life?

Dave Price: It’s funny. I grew up a night owl. Always woke up late. Never got to class on time in college. But since I’ve been doing morning news for 11 or 12 years, I’ve grown to love the morning. The earlier, the better. And to be honest with you, I’d much rather do a program that operates with a little more flexibility than a traditional evening broadcast.

Matthew Felling: You and I probably have different definitions of the word ‘morning.’ How early do you have to get up?

Dave Price: There’s no normal time, because when I’m in New York it’s one time, when I’m in Central or Mountain or Pacific it’s something else. It varies because of where we broadcast from, and it also varies due to circumstance. Am I in a blizzard somewhere on the side of a road? Am I in Cancun in the middle of a hurricane?

This week, we were in Cancun. The broadcast morning started at three in the morning. We were out in the streets, making sure our broadcast was set technically and passing along up-to-the-minute information; broadcasting through the day for CBS News television; providing news updates for local affiliates; providing radio reports for CBS network radio; doing specialized reports for CBS stations across the country in New York, Chicago, Los Angeles. Then at nightfall, I was on the radio all night with Sky News in Great Britain and CBS Up To The Minute up through the night and then the CBS Morning News until we went on the air again with “The Early Show.”

Read full post…

The Skinny, Hillary Profita's take on the top of the news and the best of the Web, appears daily here on Public Eye and on the "Evening News" page at CBSNews.com.

The nation's major newspapers dwelled at length on what everyone is suggesting was a snub by Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki – who abruptly cancelled a meeting with President Bush yesterday – and the White House denies was a snub. "The White House insisted Mr. Bush was not upset and had not been snubbed," writes the New York Times. " 'Absolutely not,' said Dan Bartlett, counselor to the president."

The cancellation follows yesterday's leak in the The New York Times of a classified memo from NSA Adviser Stephen Hadley that expressed doubts about Maliki's leadership. White House officials "insisted the document had nothing to do with it."

The cancellation also occurred following turmoil in the Iraqi government yesterday, when a bloc of lawmakers loyal to Shiite leader Moqtada al-Sadr boycotted their duties "to protest Maliki's decision to meet with Bush," writes the Washington Post.

Everyone mentions Bartlett's quote response to the suggestions of a snub, that: "No one should read too much into this." The Los Angeles Times, however, does read into it, writing that "the surprising change of plans suggested more was at work than a scheduling matter among friends," as Bush rarely alters his plans.

"Senior Bush aides offered at least four explanations for the cancellation," writes the LAT, "finally dispatching a more junior official to tell reporters late Wednesday that Maliki and Jordan's King Abdullah II had decided mutually that a three-way conversation was not necessary."

Bush and Maliki met this morning privately and in a joint news conference and "said they agreed to speed the training of Iraqi security forces, and they pledged to continue cooperation between the U.S. and Iraq to stem violence."

Read full post…

With the anniversary of Hurricane Katrina upon us this week, media outlets are dispatched throughout the Gulf Coast revisiting all of those locations that have become iconic reminders of the disaster that befell the region one year ago. Correspondent and “Saturday Early Show” anchor Tracy Smith revisited three New Orleans families that she originally encountered covering the story last year and we spoke with her about the experience of tracking them down. (You can watch her segment from the “Early Show” by clicking on the video player on the left.)

In discussing plans for coverage of this week’s anniversary, “The Early Show” wanted to revisit some of those memorable locations from a year earlier, “so I suggested that we pick a few people to follow up with,” said Smith. No sooner than she’d opened her mouth with that suggestion, however, she realized that there were two families she had in mind that she wasn’t sure she’d be able to get a hold of.

Read full post…

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.

Read full post…

If you get your news from more than one source (as most people with access to the Internet and TiVo likely do) the significance of the Associated Press’s scoop on videos and transcripts of several Bush Administration teleconferences immediately before and after Hurricane Katrina might have become a bit confusing.

While The Washington Post and The Los Angeles Times featured front page stories:

Washington Post: Video Shows Bush Being Warned on Katrina: Officials Detailed a Dire Threat to New Orleans

Los Angeles Times: Bush Is Warned on Katrina in Video: Footage of a briefing full of dire predictions renews criticism of the government's response

New York Times readers wouldn’t have stumbled upon the story until A16, indicating it was somewhat less important. Their angle was also quite different: “Unaware as Levees Fell, Officials Expressed Relief,” read the headline. The lead refers to a transcript from the day Katrina hit, noting that it “shows that hours after Hurricane Katrina made landfall, federal and state officials did not know that the levees in New Orleans were failing and were cautiously congratulating one another on the government response.” That seems a far cry from the lead in the LA Times and Post stories, which read much like that of the Associated Press...

Read full post…

If you get your news from more than one source (as most people with access to the Internet and TiVo likely do) the significance of the Associated Press’s scoop on videos and transcripts of several Bush Administration teleconferences immediately before and after Hurricane Katrina might have become a bit confusing.

While The Washington Post and The Los Angeles Times featured front page stories like this:

Washington Post:Video Shows Bush Being Warned on Katrina: Officials Detailed a Dire Threat to New Orleans
Los Angeles TimesBush Is Warned on Katrina in Video:
Footage of a briefing full of dire predictions renews criticism of the government's response.

New York Times readers wouldn’t have stumbled upon the story until A16, indicating it was somewhat less important. Their angle was also quite different: “Unaware as Levees Fell, Officials Expressed Relief,” read the headline. The lede refers to a transcript from the day Katrina hit, noting that it “shows that hours after Hurricane Katrina made landfall, federal and state officials did not know that the levees in New Orleans were failing and were cautiously congratulating one another on the government response.” That seems a far cry from the lead in the LA Times and Post stories, which read much like that of the Associated Press...

Read full post…

This week's bad news for President Bush – these days it seems that a week doesn't go by without some bad news for the president – is that the Associated Press has obtained a video of federal disaster officials warning Bush about the potentially disastrous impact of Hurricane Katrina before the storm hit the gulf coast. (Video here.) As liberal bloggers have been gleefully pointing out, the video contradicts Bush's claim that he didn't "think anybody anticipated the breach of the levees" in New Orleans. (Conservatives, meanwhile, argue this is no big deal, since Bush was told the levees could be "topped," not breached.)

According to Editor and Publisher, questions are now being raised about how the AP got the video. The New York Times account includes this section:

While transcripts of other videoconferences before and after the storm hit were provided to Congressional investigators months ago, the Aug. 29 video and transcript could not be found by FEMA officials. Employees at a regional FEMA office in Atlanta found a tape a few days ago, and a transcript was delivered to Capitol Hill on Tuesday, officials said.

The only real speculation I've come across as to the identity of the person who leaked the tape is that may well have been embattled former FEMA director Michael Brown, who appears on the tape voicing concerns and comes out of this looking relatively good. "I'm glad it's coming out because despite the media reports and the general perception that I was a dummy that didn't know what I was doing, I knew exactly what I was doing," he told WUSA. Still, there is no evidence tying Brown to the leak.

Read full post…

We’re reminded by The Washington Post today that the investigations into the government response to Hurricane Katrina are not going to end anytime soon. And with millions of e-mails, documents and records to sift through, you can be pretty sure it’s going to be awhile before a clear picture emerges of which officials knew what when and where many of the breakdowns occurred – if it ever does. But you can be sure of one thing – we’ll get plenty of isolated examples of embarrassing, bad or seemingly negligent behavior.



We’ve already gotten a healthy taste of some of those examples and they’ve become a big piece in the finger-pointing battles between federal and state/local entities and Republican-Democrat sniping. They’ve also been fodder for the media to ridicule elected and appointed officials. Perhaps that’s been deserved to some extent, but far too many in the press and public are ignoring the reality of how today’s world operates – a world they’ve been complicit in helping create.

Read full post…

“Images of desperate victims have irked the government, already under fire for a slow response.” It reads like so many of the articles written about media coverage following Hurricane Katrina. But this line is the subhead of an article in today’s Christian Science Monitor, and the subject is not Katrina, but Pakistani television’s coverage of the aftermath of the country’s earthquake.

Pakistan's earthquake, while at once a story of national tragedy, is also the coming of age story of the country's fledgling private television channels. Their unflinching coverage of the disaster, beamed into millions of homes on a scale unseen in Pakistan's history, showcases an era of unparalleled media freedom and influence.

Only state-run television used to exist in Pakistan, until 1999, when the Musharraf administration distributed licenses to private television operators, part of an effort to “counteract Indian satellite television in Pakistan,” writes the Monitor. And the power and influence that the young Pakistani media is now enjoying bears much similarity to what some media-watchers viewed as a sort of re-birth of American media following coverage of Katrina. Much like coverage of the hurricane’s aftermath, the images broadcast by Pakistani media “are indelibly pressed into the national consciousness. …Their coverage, whether intended or not, has also pointed out the shortcomings of the government's response, particularly through clips that featured angry villagers lambasting the military.” It's an interesting look at how the media is evolving elsewhere in the world.

Read full post…

As a team, public officialdom and the media can make for quite a hype machine. For a reminder, you need look no further than that hussy Katrina, which captured the nation’s attention and continues to tug at its heart. But with distance from the storm comes more clarity and some interesting questions.



Today we learned that the federal cost of relief and rebuilding in the wake of Hurricane Katrina is likely to be substantially lower than some of the earlier estimates. Rather than the $200 billion figure that had been thrown around in the aftermath of the catastrophe, the Congressional Budget Office now says the total is likely to be less than $150 billion. Yes, I know, those aren’t staggering figures for folks in Congress who are now used to working closer to the trillion-dollar mark. Still, as the late Senator Everett Dirksen famously observed, “a billion here, a billion there, pretty soon it adds up to real money.”

Read full post…