Jim Amoss, Editor of the Times Picayune has replied to citizens who wanted to know more about an alleged coordinated effort by a group at the Army Corps of Engineers who were caught attacking citizen critics. Mr. Amoss’s email is in response to hundreds of phone calls, emails and petition signatures he received. The reply is re-printed here, special thanks to a supporter who forwarded it.
Please read Mr. Amoss’s response and leave a comment below.
Dear readers who have written to me in the past several days,
First, please excuse the impersonal format of this reply. Unfortunately, it’s the only practical way I can reach each of you who have written and whose email addresses I have pasted above.
I am the editor of the 172-year-old daily newspaper of New Orleans. We pride ourselves on intensely local coverage of the New Orleans metro area. Most of us, myself included, stayed in our New Orleans newsroom during Hurricane Katrina. All of us were deeply and personally stricken as we watched the floodwalls of the drainage canals, shoddily engineered by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, collapse and inundate our city. We were and continue to be in the vanguard of coverage of what went wrong, who was responsible and how a recurrence can and should be prevented. When an aspect of that story broke last fall — Corps employees sending negative comments about stories critical of the Corps posted on NOLA.com, our affiliated web site — we covered it. Please see the list of related stories at the end of this message.
I am a native New Orleanian. I deeply love my city. My parents and my brother lost their houses in Katrina. It took my wife and me two years to restore ours, in the Bayou St. John area. The editor of NOLA.com, James O’Byrne, had to have his Lakeview house demolished after it sat, inundated, for weeks.
The notion that either James or I or anyone in our news operations would deliberately withhold information lest it upset the Corps is both preposterous and deeply offensive. Therefore, please forgive me if I choose not to respond to or engage in dialog with the person who is spreading those allegations.
However, you who have written and who are readers of The Times-Picayune deserve to hear back from me. For those who know our newspaper only from a distance, I hope to acquaint you better with who we are and what we stand for. The following are links to material we’ve published relating to the Corps emails:
Http://blog.nola.com/editorials/2008/12/the_corps_responsibility.html
http://blog.nola.com/jarvisdeberry/2008/12/snipers_lurking_at_the_corps.
html
http://www.nola.com/news/t-p/letterstoeditor/index.ssf?/base/news-14/124
6425619220660.xml&coll=1
http://www.nola.com/news/t-p/metro/index.ssf?/base/news-34/1245389035317
980.xml&coll=1
If this story develops further, we will cover it, though, like most newspapers I’m familiar with, we don’t discuss in advance what stories we’re working on or what issues we’re investigating.
If any of you wish to follow up on this message, I’ll do my best to reply.
Thank you for your abiding interest in New Orleans and in The Times-Picayune.
Sincerely,
Jim Amoss, editor
The Times-Picayune
3800 Howard Ave.
New Orleans LA 70125
