So the Federal Emergency Management Agency is saying, after it got busted last week for having staffers pose as reporters at a staged news conference concerning the California wildfires.
It says it had only the best intentions — to get out important information concerning agency response to the disaster. The White House, meanwhile, maintains it knew nothing about the fake news conference and the fake reporters, but assures FEMA didn’t mean to do it. “I don’t think there was any mal-intent,” press secretary Dana Perino said. “It was just a bad way to handle it and they know that.”
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Of course FEMA knew what it was doing was a “bad way” to handle what it needed to do. This does not explain why FEMA went ahead and chose to handle things so poorly, though one suspects the agency rather hoped no one would notice.
The White House calls the incident an “error in judgment.”
But here’s another word for it: Lie. It was a lie and FEMA is apologizing only because it got caught.
As much as we would like to believe the White House’s hands are clean in this sorry incident, we can’t help but remember its history of faking the news as well.
In 2004, it supplied video news releases about the changes in Medicare, in which a paid lackey named Karen Ryan posed as a reporter. The piece’s origin — the Department of Health and Human Services — was never disclosed until the administration was busted.
Sadly, it wasn’t real journalists that did the busting, it was the government’s own General Accounting Office, which took exception to the use of government money to create propaganda. At the time, the HHS’ defense was that video news releases were “everywhere” in public affairs divisions.
FEMA’s lie isn’t as egregious as this one, but neither is it the harmless error the White House would have us believe. Here’s hoping it really will, as it pledged, “do better.”
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