In the past four weeks, two international media houses have stated – accurately – that the Army Corps of Engineers is responsible for the levee breach events of August 2005.
The two examples are noteworthy because in both cases, the flooding details were quite outside of the point of the story.
And in both cases, the details were included as established facts; household knowledge if you will.
In a Reuters story discussing Brad Pitt’s philanthropy in a poor New Orleans neighborhood, reporter Rob Walker wrote,
“After Katrina, [Brad] Pitt decried the injustice of the Lower Ninth Ward suffering because a federally guaranteed floodwall had failed.”
In a Bloomberg Businessweek story discussing revenues to Gulf states from royalties on offshore drilling, reporter Nichola Groom wrote:
” The changes [to revenues] followed national outrage over the administration’s botched emergency response to catastrophic flooding from the systematic failure of the federally constructed levee system in New Orleans.”
