Harry Shearer’s keynote address at the Rising Tide bloggers conference Saturday was a sobering one. “We’ve lost the media war,” he said, speaking of New Orleans and the way Katrina’s story has been told. Rather than being a story of the federally neglected protection mechanisms – the floodwalls and the disappearing wetlands – and how their failure in the face of Katrina caused 80 percent of the city to flood, the media has told it as the story of poor people who suffered catastrophically after a freak natural disaster. That narrative has sapped much of the political and countrywide will to do what’s necessary to make sure that New Orleans isn’t similarly flooded again.

By now, most of us who hoped Barack Obama would be more of a leader in the recovery effort than his predecessor have become skeptical. Shearer told a story that further gives us reason to believe that now as then, we’re on our own.

               

At HuffingtonPost.com, Harry Shearer’s latest blog post highlights a new strategy for dealing with the construction and design errors that led to Katrina’s flooding:

WWL-TV, a television station that actually appears to take the phrase “local news” with an unusual (for this country) degree of seriousness, is reporting that Corps employees have been logging on to nola.com, a main news aggregating and commenting website for local news, to denigrate critics of the agency:

“What stuck out though was the wording of the comments, in many ways mirroring the news releases from the corps of engineers,” (former nola.com editor in chief Jon) Donley said.

…Donley said he also noticed these users who attacked corps critics were using corps equipment. He made a spreadsheet of the activity over six weeks at the end of December and beginning of January.

“During that six-week period, there were nearly 700 comments from corps IPs, the same group of people I had been watching for over two years,” Donley said. “So this was not an isolated incident.”

               

In today’s Huffington Post, Harry Shearer analyzes President Bush’s speech yesterday in New Orleans:

As disturbing as the words he spoke were the words Bush never mentioned: in almost half an hour of remarks citing indications of progress in New Orleans since the disaster and citing the work that still needs to be done, the President never uttered the words “coastal restoration.” When he bragged that he had, after protracted urging by the Governor and the state’s Congressional delegation, allowed Louisiana to repay the federal share of levee rebuilding over thirty years instead of three, he said he didn’t think the state should have to choose between better levees and “other” urgent programs. What is the urgent program the state is free to spend the money on? Coastal restoration, the rebuilding of the wetlands being lost at the rate of a football field every hour or so — but the state’s spending plans fall considerably short of what’s needed to repair the buffer that protects New Orleans from more severe hurricanes, an area that also serves as the source for 40% of the nation’s fresh seafood. If we can’t even utter those words, can we face the task of repairing “the mistakes of the past”?