Harry Shearer discloses how journalism really works

Here's Harry Shearer's talk that looks like part of the promotional tour for his "Big Uneasy" documentary about New Orleans' encounter with Katrina. (if you prefer video here is the link)

This is, perhaps, less controversial than our current preoccupation with Russian / "Fake News" items, but is really essential to understanding the way the press actually functions. Shearer cites a narrative he calls "the template" as the basis of stories. In other words, the editors decide what they want written and solicit facts to confirm that. In the case of New Orleans' flooding, and several others, the facts say something different than the template.

It's a little long, but worth the effort...

NATIONAL PRESS CLUB LUNCHEON WITH HARRY SHEARER
SUBJECT: MEDIA MYTHS IN MAJOR NEWS COVERAGE
MODERATOR: MARK HAMRICK, PRESIDENT, NATIONAL PRESS CLUB
LOCATION: NATIONAL PRESS CLUB BALLROOM, WASHINGTON, D.C.
TIME: 12:30 P.M. EDT
DATE: MONDAY, MARCH 14, 2011

....So those of you who are familiar with our luncheon speaker series here at the
National Press Club probably know that the format calls for this to run about an hour in
length. Well, this is particularly difficult and challenging today for the simple reason that
getting through a proper introduction of our speaker, reviewing all of his
accomplishments, accolades and activities, could probably take up the entire hour. But
that would be not what you're here for.

Our guest is an actor known for, among other things, the many character voices
for “The Simpsons” including Mr. Burns, Smithers and Principal Skinner. He’s been a
regular cast member on “Saturday Night Live,” and his many movie credits include “The
Right Stuff, “The Fisher King,” “The Truman Show,” “This is Spinal Tap,” and “The
Mighty Wind,” among others. He's an author, director, a satirist, a musician, a radio host,
playwright and a record label owner. He’s a Los Angeles native who began his acting
career during his childhood making appearances on “The Jack Benny Program.” It was
then that he got to know the great Mel Blanc, who did a few voices in his day as well.
He appeared in the pilot of “Leave it to Beaver,” in the role that would eventually
morph into that of Eddie Haskell. True story. Got a lot of applause on that. Very well
remembered. For the past few years, though, he’s been writing about the causes and
aftermath of the 2005 New Orleans flood. On this subject and others, he’s a regular
contributor to Huffington Post. He also made a feature length documentary titled “The
Big Uneasy.”

I was fortunate enough to meet him last fall during a screening of that movie here
in town, and that's when we discussed having him here today. Before that, some of the
stories, titled “Crescent City Stories,” told about the hurricane’s aftermath via online
video, were very compelling, they're still there. You can see those on the website,
mydamnchannel.

Harry’s focused a fair amount of attention on the news media’s handling of the
Katrina story. And as some of you may know, one of my priorities this year is to use our
luncheon series to focus more on journalism; that's something we did just a week ago
with Vivian Schiller, who at the time was head of National Public Radio. (Laughter) As
we know now, she's since resigned. While some of the subjects we're going to discuss
today have serious themes, I know we're all looking forward to enjoying the unique sense
of multifaceted humor that's just one of the many gifts that our guest speaker has been
blessed with. Please give a warm National Press Club welcome to Harry Shearer.
(Applause)

MR. SHEARER: Thank you very much. Good afternoon, good morning central
time. I'm honored and delighted to have been invited to appear here at the National Press
Club today. In fact, just to get this out of the way right at the top, I'd venture to say that
this whole occasion is excellent. (Laughter) And I do want to pledge to you that, unlike
another recent guest at this podium, nothing I say today here will be contradicted by one
of my executives in two days in a video sting, mainly because I have no executives. All
right, so I've ripped off Rupert Murdoch and tossed a brush back pitch at Vivian Schiller,
we can now get down to the business at hand.

First, I want to say as a New Orleanian, my heart goes out to the people of Japan.
People of New Orleans know a little bit about what you're going through right now.
Ladies and gentlemen, as much as I was bewitched and besotted by comedy at an early
age, I was also fascinated and seduced by journalism. I can remember at age five, or
whenever it was my parents first trusted me with blunt little scissors, cutting out and
collecting the mastheads for all the different sections of the two daily papers we
subscribed to, the main criterion for which was whichever papers in L.A. were still
publishing and weren't The Times.

When my moment came to be interviewed on TV by Art Linkletter, I confessed to
my habit of making my parents take me to the out of town newsstand in Hollywood
whenever possible. And for years, our mailbox was filled with dailies from Fergus Falls,
Minnesota, and other far-flung locales. A couple of days later, but didn't seem to matter.

When I entered college at the tender age of 15, my first stop was at the office of
the student newspaper, where I ended up as a senior editor. Thank you. Our only source
of income as a publication was, if we had the job of putting the paper to bed at night,
which involved working in a noisy old letterpress print shop where the entire staff except
for the foreman was comprised of what we used to call deaf mutes. My chance at the
editor-in-chief role was ruined by my refusal to disclose to the student council the identity of an anonymous grad student whose gentle satire on fraternity life I'd run on the
op ed. page. I was suspected of being anti-Greek.

I watched CBS reports and to David Brinkley reporting. I listened to BBC World
Service and to NBC’s riveting radio reporting on Hungarian revolution, riveted and
moved by the slow dying out of the voices calling for help. I was, and still am, a news
junkie. This is all by way of explaining that what I'm about to say comes not from hatred
of journalism, but from love of it. I've had zero nasty news stories written about me.
There's still time, but up to now. The only time I was in a tabloid involving sex, it was all
benign and all true. Details on request.

In short, no way am I here to bang the poor, put upon celebrity drum. I spent
much of my youth around journalism and journalists, I like their smarts and their dark
sense of humor. And yeah, you're right, now here come about a hundred paragraphs of
but.

In my youth, I worked for a while at the L.A. bureau of Newsweek. Now, I know
I'm conflating journalism and Newsweek, but give me a break here. Parenthetically, you
may have noticed that Newsweek recently listed my adopted hometown of New Orleans
as America's number one dying city. I'm proud to report that New Orleans has
reciprocated, honoring Newsweek as the nation’s number one dying magazine. But back
to the story.

One day while I was working at Newsweek, I got a call from the life and leisure
editor in New York asking for examples from bureaus around the country of what he
called rooftop living. Clearly, this fellow had returned to his 53rd floor office after a
somewhat bibulous lunch, stared out the window, noted some potted plants on nearby
rooftops and sniffed out a trend. Trends are what people like the life and leisure editor of
Newsweek had to sniff out before they started being listed hourly on Twitter. So, I
dutifully called the dean of L.A. helicopter traffic reporters, Captain Max, who told me
the obvious. “Son, L.A. has plenty of land. Nobody needs to put anything on their roof.”

There were a couple of exceptions, including a guy, John B. Zerlow, who had installed a
swimming pool and some Greek columns on the roof of his office building on the Sunset
Strip. So I interviewed Mr. Zerlow, wrote it up, leading my file with the cautionary note
that this behavior was exceptional in L.A. And then went off to cover a space shot.
A few days later, back from jet propulsion labs, I got the tentative version of the
whole rooftop living story from New York. The paragraph with my quotes began,
“Typically cutting edge, La-La land burgeons with rooftop living.” In those days,
burgeon was one of Newsweek’s favorite words. La-La Land was equally common and
equally unforgivable usage. Anyway, I called up the fact checker, a young Vassar girl, to
remind her of my cautionary note. “L.A.” I said pointedly, “was not filled with rooftop
living.” “Got it,” she said. The following Monday, the story appeared in a magazine and
La-La Land still burgeoned.

I used to tell this anecdote just out of simple amusement at the way a story
conceived in New York became a template and we reporters on the ground were basically
quote machines to fill in the blanks. Nowadays, it seems to me this behavior has, if
anything, spread to far more serious parts of the news whole than the life and leisure
section, and with apologies, it is burgeoning there.

I should point out that the press release for this talk says I'm accusing the media
of myth making today. I'm actually saying something a bit different. Myths, I think, are
manufactured out of whole cloth. What I'm calling a template is based on facts, some
facts, a partial collection, the first dusting. It then becomes adopted as the narrative; the
mental doors lock shut, and no further facts are allowed in.

Maybe you read Peter Maass’ remarkable article in The New Yorker in January
reporting on the icon story and image of the Iraq War, the toppling of Saddam Hussein’s
statute. What caught my attention about this meticulous piece of journalism was
recollections of reporters and photographers in Baghdad who kept trying to sell New
York editors and producers on the idea of turning around and looking away from the
statue, seeing the crowd of perhaps 300 people in the square watching U.S. Marines
doing most of the toppling. New York wanted none of it. The iconic image was the story,
and any reporting and photography which undercut its salience was less than unwelcome.

Here's Maass, “a visual echo chamber developed. Rather than encouraging
reporters to find the news, editors urged them to report what was on TV.” He quotes
NPR’s reporter in Baghdad in an oral history that was published by the Columbia
Journalism Review. “Anne Garrels recalled telling her editors they were getting the story
wrong. There were so few people trying to pull down the statue, they can’t do it
themselves. Many people were just sort of standing, hoping for the best, but they weren't
joyous.” Maass also quotes a news photographer in Baghdad, Gary Knight, who talked
with one of his editors on his satellite phone. The editor watching the event on TV asked
why Knight wasn't taking pictures. Knight replied, “A few Iraqis were involved, and the
ones who were seemed to be doing so for the benefit of the photographers. It was a
show.” The editors told him, “Get off the phone, start taking pictures.”

The past few months, we've seen something similar with regard to the State
Department cable leaks to WikiLeaks. A staple of most of the stories written about this
matter is the plain assertion that WikiLeaks dumped a quarter of a million cables on the
public record. It’s become a mime, a trope, a cliché, a lampoon of a travesty of a farce.
And as those who can count will attest, it’s wildly counterfactual. Last time I looked, it
was less than five percent of the cables provided to the website that have actually been
published. Your figures may vary slightly, but that's at best a micro dump. Yet data dump
has become the template and whether you admire or despise Julian Assange, your story is
probably going to include him. If not when you're finished with it, then when your editor
or producer is.

Then, there's a little matter of Katrina. As noted earlier, I'm an adopted New
Orleanian. When the big, scary spiral appeared on weather maps whirling across the Gulf of Mexico, I was in Los Angeles preparing to appear in a comedy film, “For Your
Consideration,” on DVD now. Gotta do it. But in every spare moment, and when you're
acting in a film, most of your moments are spare, I was glued to television, the internet,
my own sources, devouring the news from New Orleans, Google Earthing (sic) my home,
calling friends to make sure they were safe. The day after the movie wrapped, November
6th, I flew into a town where the only vehicles on the streets were Humvees. The
sidewalks were lined with tens of thousands of thrown-out refrigerators, and there was a
two mile long city block-wide three story tall mountain of flood debris on the median of
the main boulevard in a once-fashionable neighborhood. Hot water had just been restored
to the French Quarter. Daily mail service was months away.

In the weeks that followed, the local newspapers and TV news broadcast and
radio talk shows were understandably focused on every detail of the city’s near
destruction. And so they were filled with, among other things, constantly updated interim
findings from two independent scientific investigations into the catastrophic flooding of
New Orleans. Now, you probably remember the bold post-Katrina proclamations that
CNN and NBC and God knows who else, were establishing bureaus in New Orleans, and
the people assigned to those bureaus were, I'm sure, good folks, people who may have
seen unimaginable distress and suffering and horror in a modern, well almost modern,
American city.

Why, then, were those correspondents unwilling or unable to pass on what we
were seeing in our local media confirmed beyond dispute when the two investigations
released their final reports, both concluding that the flooding of New Orleans was not a
natural disaster, but a massive, manmade engineering failure, the greatest since
Chernobyl. By the way, the Pulitzer people noticed. The Local Daily won two prizes for
its flood coverage, much of which focused on those findings.

So, answering my own question, editors and producers in New York saw that
ominous spiral. They saw the hurricane slam into coastal Mississippi where Katrina
undeniably did major storm damage. They saw the windows of the Hyatt blown and the
Super Dome roof damaged. And then they saw New Orleans flood. And they saw, as
everybody except President Bush did, the video of the crowds at the dome and the
convention center. They put those first facts together and a template was born. Big storm,
city below sea level, poor black victims.

Now, almost nobody who covered Katrina was from or familiar with the peculiar
geography of New Orleans. I realized that on day one when I saw a CNN reporter on
Girod Street in the central business district begin his standup with the words, “I'm here in
the French Quarter.” Which then, as now, was a quarter mile away. Logistics had its own
allure. The convention center and dome were a short drive from the major off ramp of
Interstate 10, a largely flooded Lakeview and Gentilly and Broadmoor neighborhoods,
the one majority white, the others racially mixed, were farther away spread out over a
confusing grid where parallel streets intersect.

Farther still, the eastern suburban county, St. Bernard Parish, had its entire
housing stock, 100 percent, flooded out, its white working class residents on roofs for
four days without food and water in the searing heat. But strangers didn't know where St.
Bernard was, or how to get there, if they even knew it existed. So the people on the roof
in St. Bernard never were on television.

Sea level, Dr. Richard Campanella of Tulane University, did an exhaustive study
and released his findings two years after the disaster. Even now, half of populated New
Orleans, that excludes the wildlife refuge within the city limits, is at or above sea level.
Areas that flooded in 2005 were below, above and at sea level. In short, sea level did not
determine whether you still had a home or a pile of sodden debris, perhaps, with a
drowned parent in the attic. Your main guarantee of protection was maximum distance
from the structures of the hurricane protection system. Okay?

To the cause of the flooding. Those two investigations, headed by eminent
scientists and engineers, reached strikingly similar conclusions. Pervasive design and
construction flaws over 4 ½ decades under administrations of both political parties, in
that so-called hurricane protection system, mandated by Congress and assembled under
the exclusive jurisdiction and control of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. Had the
system been competently put together, one of the authors of the report from UC Berkeley
said, the result of Katrina in New Orleans would have been quite different. “Wet ankles.”

But by the time all these facts were on the public record, the strangers had long
since moved on. The correspondents in the New Orleans bureaus were busy covering
stories in Houston and Birmingham and Miami, almost as if the New Orleans bureau was
just the Atlanta bureau downsized and moved to a lower rent neighborhood. And a
template had hardened into a granite-like lobe in editors and producers brains.
There is one other facet in all this. In 2006, in June of that year, I asked Brian
Williams why, despite his obvious concern for the city, his viewers still didn't know why
New Orleans had flooded. He told me this, “We just think the emotional stories are more
compelling for our audience.” But a bias towards sob stories is as old as William
Randolph Hearst’s first hard on for an actress. (Laughter) The tendency of the template to
rule over facts, even when those facts as in the case of the statue toppling or the city
flooding, come from your own correspondents or from eminent independent authorities
when the facts don’t even require expensive investigations, but merely paying attention to
the public record. That tendency is only increasing in the face of dozens of daily
deadlines and ever-tighter budgets. You can't stay on a story for very long; and when you
come back, as everybody did to New Orleans for the fifth anniversary last fall, there's
now corporate institutional ego involved in defending the template against the assault of
new information.

After all, the networks, cable and broadcast, bragged big time about the ballsiness
of their Katrina coverage. Anderson Cooper actually wagged a finger in Senator Mary
Landrieu’s face. Exactly how do you go about retracting a boast? This would all be just
interesting fodder, perhaps, for a CJR forum were these templates not so powerful in shaping public understanding of major events. The notion that thousands of Baghdadis
were toppling the statue of the tyrant served as the metaphor for an administration’s claim
that the invaders would be greeted as liberators. By the time everyone realized the
mistake, a little insurgency was going on.

The template’s version of the New Orleans story, a manmade disaster transformed
and triply marginalized as a freak weather event happening down there in that wacky,
corrupt town and mainly victimizing poor black people meant a rapid withering of
political will to tackle the real problem before the creator of the disaster, the
unreconstructed Army Corps of Engineers, had been handed $14 billion to do a bigger
version of the system with, we are learning, some of the same flaws. It’s interesting to
note in that context that no official or engineer within the Army Corps suffered any
negative career consequences, not even so much as a month’s docked pay, for causing
this disaster, but that the heads of the two independent investigations, and a whistle
blower inside the corps, have had very unpleasant consequences for standing up and
being lonely truth tellers. As Republicans used to say during the Clinton drama, “That's a
good lesson for the children.”

And, of course, the template forged in this country influences coverage and
understanding around the world. No less than the BBC World Service introducing a
feature on the reform of the New Orleans police earlier this year, led with a sentence that
said, “Hurricane Katrina tore through New Orleans.” I sent an email advising them of the
factual weakness of that language. Two weeks later, the same feature ran on the BBC’s
domestic radio network, Radio 4, and in that intro, Hurricane Katrina still tore through
New Orleans. Must have been all the rooftop living.

The good news about what I'm saying is I think that the usual debate about
mainstream news coverage can, as the practitioners assume, be dismissed as moot. There
are political pressures on both sides. Most journalists are vaguely liberal; most media
owners are not so vaguely conservative. The far more pervasive biases, I suggest, those
of logistics, of parachuting in and asking cab drivers, “What's the mood here?” and of
templates formed in far away offices are subtler and far more intractable. PolitiFact, after
all, isn't every fact and it probably can't ever be.

A brief digression. A few months ago, a State Department source talked to the
Washington Post about the problem of coping with corruption in Afghanistan. He
complained of an endemic attitude there, what he called a culture of impunity. When I
made my documentary about the flooding of New Orleans, what I found was the U.S.
Army Corps of Engineers, which undergoes no meaningful Congressional or outside
oversight, so it tends to repeat its mistakes always at a higher price point. I came to
conclude that the corps operates in its own culture of impunity.

Now back to our topic. Journalists don’t always shrink from criticizing their
colleagues from sins of co mission, two words, Judy Miller, but the sins of omission, of
editors and producers filtering out facts that interfere with the narrative, the template that
they've adopted, are rarely called out by colleagues. Peter Maass needed ProPublica to fund his reporting on the Saddam statue toppling. Aren't the editors and producers who
insisted on the news-free repetition of the story they were seeing on TV as culpable for
misleading the country about the war as Judy Miller? And I had to come over from the
comedy world to tell the story of what really happened in New Orleans. Anderson
Cooper still insists he’s keeping them honest. So where's the accountability? If I
understand the system correctly, readers and viewers are supposed to vote with their
dollars and their remotes for the superior sources of information; market forces at work.

So that means the very people whom the template robs of information are somehow
supposed to know what they've been deprived of and to enforce market discipline against
the editors and producers responsible. You know what that sounds like to me? Like a
culture of impunity.

And now I take off my scrubs and my reflector. I'm no doctor and I don’t even
play one on TV. I do play an insanely greedy industrialist and political manipulator with
major media interests, but that doesn't seem relevant.

Returning to the medical metaphor, maybe I can diagnose correctly, I sure can’t
prescribe. If you ask me what I would suggest to solve the situation I've outlined, let me
point out that except for certain lapses into magazine writing and documentary
filmmaking, I chose to leave journalism several years ago. That was my solution to the
problem. Something tells me it probably won’t work system wide. As to that larger
situation, I do want to conclude these remarks with a cogent, three-word suggestion:
release the hounds. Thank you very much. (Applause)

MR. HAMRICK: Thank you for that. A few questions from our audience as
well as maybe a few that I've devised on my own, and we hope to have a pleasant mix of
those two, sort of transparency offered for you there. Early this morning, I was sent an
email that alerted me about the Washington Post story which sort of wasn't necessarily a
setup of today’s speech, but it did maybe put some things in context, particularly with
respect to a timeline. And it talks about you going to Capitol Hill to sort of do the
legislative piece, I guess, to this. Can you talk about what that involves and what your
hopes are there and what kind of reception either you've had in the past in talking about
as it described, I think, decommissioning the Army Corps of Engineers?

MR. SHEARER: Oh, decommissioning is what you do with nuclear plants, not
with a federal agency, and you need guys with masks to go on and decommission. This is
a first. You know, I'm not a lobbyist, I'm not an activist, I'm a passivist (sic); not pacifist,
passivist. I like to sit at home and watch TV. I have some people who are arranging some
meetings with me on the Hill. We explain in the movie, thanks to those who’ve studied
the corps far more that I have, including a wonderful journalist who used to work in this
town, is now in Miami, Michael Grunwald, who did a fabulous five-part series in the Post
in 2000 on the corps. The corps is the creature of Congress. The corps is the way it is
because Congress likes it that way. The corps in its civil works projects here in this
country, not its military projects, is basically an earmarked driven institution. So
congressmen appropriate for a specific project, coincidentally, in their district and the
corps builds them.

The corps has now been hollowed out to the extent that they don’t do most of
their own work, so private contractors are engaged. So you have this sort of iron triangle
of contractors who give money to elect congressmen, they get corps contracts.
Everybody’s happy except the recipients of the projects.
Me personally, I'm delighted to go to the Hill and talk to members, but personal
opinion of a guy from the comedy world, I don't think anything’s really going to change
until serious effort is expended by the executive branch.

MR. HAMRICK: So your documentary’s been out, I don't know what, about
five months, something like that?

MR. SHEARER: Yeah, it was just shown for one night, now it’s really out.

MR. HAMRICK: So the substance of that material has been released to the
public and now I guess you're going to engage in a series of screenings around the
country. What kind of traction do you feel that essentially this thesis has been gaining?

MR. SHEARER: Close to the vanishing point so far because of what I was
talking about in my remarks, the desire of-- you know, the major media came to New
Orleans, we were there. Hey, come to talk us, we've got an interesting story for you, the
other side of what you've been reporting for the last five years. Very few of them took the
bait. Brian very kindly made a remark in passing on the panel on Meet the Press about
the film, but didn't say much about what it contained. Katie did nothing, Diane did
nothing, NPR did nothing. Bye-bye, Vivian. PBS did a nice piece on “Need to Know.”

That's about it. So we're still trying to get attention.

This is not a career move on my part, you know, this is about changing the
country’s awareness of what happened to a major American city. And also because this is
not just a New Orleans story, as we point out in the film. The corps doesn't single out
New Orleans for special treatment. They do a little bit, the New Orleans corps district is
worse than most. But, there are more than 100 cities in this country where the corps has
levee systems that are protecting them. Several of them know they're in trouble. Dallas,
they've been told that their levees are built on sand. Sacramento, California, it’s well
known inside the corps, if not in the area, that that levee system is not in the greatest of
shape. And, of course, Sacramento sits atop the entire California water system. So, it’s
going to be a big story when that happens. I'd make your plane reservations now.

MR. HAMRICK: So someone here is asking who are the reporters that you
admire and respect who have covered New Orleans, if there is one? They're putting it in
plural. And who and what news organizations are getting it right, closes the question.

MR. SHEARER: I think John Schwartz and the Times have done some really
good work in New Orleans. Cain Burdeau at the AP from time to time has done good
stuff. Mark Schleifstein and John McQuaid of the Times Picayune, those are the guys that
won the Pulitzer’s. That's the gold standard for me. There's also a local newspaper,
weekly, in New Orleans, the Gambit Weekly that does good work. Those are mine.

MR. HAMRICK: So you've talked a little bit about, and the movie I think
depicts this, about how Congress isn't, in the way you view it, set up to sort of act as the
appropriate intermediary for the American people in policing this problem. What about
local and state officials in New Orleans and Louisiana? We hosted Governor Jindal here a
couple of years ago. He was certainly very vocal, I recall, after the BP oil spill about
some stuff he thought should be done. What's your view of how the locals view the
problem and what should be done?

MR. SHEARER: He got some good TV time during BP, didn't he? The problem
is locals can scream and shout, but the corps has exclusive jurisdiction over this, was
given it by the Congress when Congress mandated the building of the system after
Hurricane Betsy. The corps has something else going for it. In 1927, Congress passed the
Flood Control Act, which gives the corps blanket immunity from any legal consequences
of flood control projects that it builds. That's why there has not been a race to the
courtroom following the flooding of New Orleans. Because in most cases, lawsuits have
been thrown out because the corps has blanket immunity.

There is only one case that has proceeded. Interestingly, there's been a little bit
about it in the national press, I think both the Times and the Post wrote about the verdict
when it came down. A federal judge ruled in 150-page opinion that the corps was
criminally negligent by failing to maintain a navigation canal that it built for the
Mississippi River delta outlet which was responsible for the majority of the flooding of
St. Bernard Parish and the lower 9th ward. That came to trial only because that was a
navigation project and it was not covered by the Flood Control Act.

But I've wandered away from your question.

MR. HAMRICK: That's quite all right, we have time.

MR. SHEARER: I'm sorry. I forget what the question was, I wandered away.

MR. HAMRICK: It was the responsiveness of local and--

MR. SHEARER: Oh right, yeah. So they scream and shout. There's been, I
should say, given the amount of obloquy, thank you very much, that has come New
Orleans way in the wake of the disaster, a remarkable amount of civic action in the postflood
period in New Orleans. People of New Orleans reformed the levee district, they
reformed the tax assessor’s office, they reformed the district attorney’s office, they did a
lot of the heavy lifting to reform their city government. That's what they could do. They
could not make the corps, just to take one example, impose a factor of safety, that's
engineering speak for cushion, on the urban levee system that was as high as the factor of
safety the corps uses for rural dams. That's one of our little problems, is the corps has a
much lower factor of safety for a levee system that's supposed to protect a major metropolitan area than for a dam in the middle of nowhere. Nothing we can do about that
from the local level.

MR. HAMRICK: Here’s a specific question about the core, and this questioner
obviously knows more about this particular subject than I'm able to interpret. What do
you think of the corps’ work in channeling the Mississippi River?

MR. SHEARER: You know, the channeling of the Mississippi River is an
almost classic corps success story because in terms of the task they set for themselves,
they accomplished it really well. The Mississippi River levees have never failed, at least
in New Orleans. They may have failed upriver, I'm not aware of that, but they've been
great in New Orleans. It’s done what they set out to do. It is a classic corps success story
in that there have been untold, unintended negative consequences that the corps has been
either obvious to or late to arrive at.

So for example, when you levee the Mississippi River, you prevent it from
flooding. Well, that's a good thing. But the flooding in the Mississippi River distributed
every spring flood water and sediment over the delta, building the coastal wetlands of
Louisiana; the most verdant and fertile home for seafood and other creatures of that
environment in the entire North American continent.

When you levee the river, you begin starving the wetlands and they begin
shrinking and you have the first ingredient in the long term, slow motion disaster that is
enveloping southern Louisiana, the erosion of the coastal wetlands. Why is that
important, aside from if you like shrimp? Every mile of wetlands between the Gulf of
Mexico and the city of New Orleans bats down hurricane ferocity by a known quantity.
The wind coming over water, pick up energy. As the winds go over land, they lose
energy. We lose the wetlands, we lose one of our major protections.

MR. HAMRICK: Questioner asks how has the local New Orleans community
responded to the documentary?

MR. SHEARER: It wasn’t made for New Orleans. I assume the people in New
Orleans knew this stuff, so I was startled. The picture was supposed to play there for one
night, and it played for weeks. The major local radio talk show host, I saw him watching
the movie the first night and he couldn't sit down, steam was coming out of his ears. He
said, “You're going to be on tomorrow for the whole three hours.” He says, “Everybody
in the city has to see this movie.” People have been startled, I think-- they did not know
the story of the whistle blowing. The New Orleans media did not cover her, but they
knew the rest of the story. But it was in day to day drips and drabs. And nobody had ever
before come and put it together into a 90 minute package.

And in a way, I felt badly because last year was the first year of what everybody
around town thought of as the post post-Katrina period. We had gotten over the post-
Katrina period, we were now in the new era. We had a new mayor of the city. The Saints had won the Super Bowl, the city was almost levitating until the BP oil spill. And now I
come along and say, “And by the way, we're not as safe as we think we are.”

MR. HAMRICK: So this person says, and this is writing in the first person. “I
truly appreciate your informed opinions and stance on New Orleans and media. But do
you feel that more, or let’s say, more or fewer celebrities should be voicing their opinions
on issues of the day?” And I guess that gets to the question of if you look at the news
media in general, you could ask a broader question of do you think it’s fixated on
entertainment too much as well?

MR. SHEARER: Charlie Sheen, Charlie Sheen, Charlie Sheen, Charlie Sheen,
Charlie Sheen, Charlie Sheen. Charlie Sheen, Charlie Sheen, Charlie Sheen. (Laughter)
Thank you. Charlie Sheen, Charlie Sheen, Charlie Sheen. We could go on that way for
the rest of the hour.

Look, I'm very careful. I was really scared when I made this documentary because
a guy from “The Simpsons” and “Spinal Tap” talking to me about engineering? Really? I
need to pay to see that? So what I say is not my opinion. I have no opinion. I have no
basis for forming an opinion. I go to the people in the movie and in my life who know
what they're talking about, they're leaders of these two investigations, this whistle blower,
John Barry, the author of Rising Tide, the seminal book on the 1927 flood. I pay attention
to what they say. I try to distill it so I can understand it, and then when somebody asks
me a question that's basically what you get. The building I walk fastest past when I was
going to college was the engineering building, for God sake, lest something rub off.

But the good news is that these people that I mentioned who are in the film and in
my life to some extent, are really good communicators and teachers and they made it
clear to me, made it comprehensible to me so that I could turn around and-- you know,
I'm not an opinionator (sic), I'm a passer-through. As to other celebrities, I think other
celebrities are like anybody else. If it seems like they know what they're talking about,
then they should be in the public sphere and maybe have a moment of attention. If they
seem like they're crazy and out of control and don’t know what they're talking about, they
should get hours and hours of prime time coverage. (Laughter)

MR. HAMRICK: I did catch your radio bit, though. I think last week you said
something like it’s more interesting to hear crazy people than sane people, something like
that?

MR. SHEARER: Yeah. Well look, I mean we didn't invent this, the English did.
They charged money to see the crazy people at bedlam, so we're the same folks.

MR. HAMRICK: So the next question, as a follow-up to the last one, asks are
you concerned about any potential repercussions about taking a political stance, I
suppose, on the receptivity of the audience toward your entertainment work?

MR. SHEARER: Well, “The Simpsons” is kind of on its own there, you know?
I don't think I'm hurting it by doing this, I hope not. I try to make what I'm doing in this
context nonpolitical in a sense, nonpartisan, because I think both parties bear
responsibility for what happened to New Orleans. Presidents of both parties have now
clearly sent a signal that they're not going to lift a finger to prevent what happened from
happening again. So, it’s easy for me to say I'm-- don't one side get mad at me because
I'm not picking on you. I think one reason, and I'm speculating here, so you can ignore
this as comedian opinion, I think one reason that the story about New Orleans, aside from
the habit of mind that I pointed out in my talk, hasn't gotten the traction it might have is
that the very fact that both parties have their oar in this water. Neither side gets any
political juice out of saying, “It’s their fault.” And that's what makes our system go, both
politically and journalistically. You can’t get a Democrat and a Republican to argue on
cable news that it’s your fault, and no it’s your fault, because it’s both their fault and
they’d rather just talk about something else.

MR. HAMRICK: And so you're doing essentially a tour with the movie. Now,
tell us where that will be and how long until it is released on DVD?

MR. SHEARER: We're going around the country, it opened in Dallas on Friday
night. I got to sit in the seat that Lee Harvey Oswald sat in when he was arrested, so my
butt is part of history. And it’s in the Texas Theater all week in Dallas. And then we're
opening up around the country throughout the spring and early summer.

Thebiguneasy.com website front page has a list of all the places where the film is
showing and when in theaters around the country.

And then we will make a DVD and COD and DVD deals, all those initials and
it’ll be out on line and maybe even on cable if they've got room for it, although HBO
said, “We've done New Orleans.”

MR. HAMRICK: Okay, so obviously people want to talk about your creative
work a little bit, have you talk about that a little bit. One person says, “You have said that
you think “The Simpsons” has declined in quality.” Could you just address that? Is that
true? Obviously, some episodes are better than others. Where does it stand now?

MR. SHEARER: That was a private communication (Laughter) that was leaked
to the New York Post owned by Rupert