Thanks to Dr. Frank Venturo for passing this link along. CNN, which is providing us with an unusually good job of reporting (given how abysmal they have been at times in the past few years) stacks the sanitized government version of how well things are going in N.O. up against other, more dramatic eyewitness accounts.

For instance:

FEMA Chief Michael Brown on uncollected corpses: “That’s not been reported to me, so I’m not going to comment. Until I actually get a report from my teams that say, ‘We have bodies located here or there,’ I’m just not going to speculate.”

Evacuee Raymond Cooper: “They had a couple of policemen out here, sir, about six or seven policemen told me directly, when I went to tell them, hey, man, you got bodies in there. You got two old ladies that just passed, just had died, people dragging the bodies into little corners. One guy — that’s how I found out. The guy had actually, hey, man, anybody sleeping over here? I’m like, no. He dragged two bodies in there. Now you just — I just found out there was a lady and an old man, the lady went to nudge him. He’s dead.”

And this:

Brown on the hospital situation: “I’ve just learned today that we … are in the process of completing the evacuations of the hospitals, that those are going very well.”

CNN’s Dr. Sanjay Gupta: “It’s gruesome. I guess that is the best word for it. If you think about a hospital, for example, the morgue is in the basement, and the basement is completely flooded. So you can just imagine the scene down there. But when patients die in the hospital, there is no place to put them, so they’re in the stairwells. It is one of the most unbelievable situations I’ve seen as a doctor, certainly as a journalist as well. There is no electricity. There is no water. There’s over 200 patients still here remaining. …We found our way in through a chopper and had to land at a landing strip and then take a boat. And it is exactly … where the boat was traveling where the snipers opened fire yesterday, halting all the evacuations.”

I sympathize with Brown’s obvious desire to control things as best he can, but if I ever teach PR again, I think this becomes the case study for why spokepeople need to shoot straight.

In short, right now he has less credibility than a magic 8-ball, and will never again in his public life be somebody you’d so much as ask for the time.

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