I'm still waiting for that Epstein crossover moment

I'm still very behind on a lot of things I wanted to put on the blog this week. Probably won't get caught up for a while. But this is one for that if-I-don't-write-it-down-I'm-gonna-forget-about-it category. So here it goes.

Among the latest characters to pop up in the FNBC saga is real estate shark Gary Gibbs. (No, he is not the ex Saints defensive coordinator by that same name. Yes, I checked.) His case is one of several instances revealed so far where the bank appears to have been shoveling out new bad loans in order to cover old bad loans in the expectation that some external event might come about to turn everything around.

Regulators from the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. said in a notice filed last week that Robert Brad Calloway, a former loan officer and chief credit officer at First NBC Bank, submitted false or misleading documentation in order to make a series of loans to Diamondhead, Mississippi-based businessman Gary R. Gibbs that totaled $123 million at the time of the New Orleans bank's collapse.

The filing says that Calloway, along with First NBC'S former CEO, Ashton Ryan, got the loans to Gibbs approved when they knew he didn't have the necessary collateral, and that they also knew the money was being used by Gibbs to cover payments on existing loans instead of for Gibbs' business expenses, as was represented to the bank's loan committee.

In Gibbs's case one such external event may have been his successful conning of a former business associate's widow out of her inheritance. She has filed a civil suit seeking to recover those assets which, thanks to FNBC's collapse, now may technically belong to a vulture capital firm. 

In her civil case, Heisler is trying to keep assets that include a $2 million brokerage account, a shopping center in Metairie and a building at 844 Baronne St. from being seized by Girod LoanCo, the debt investor that bought a large portion of the First NBC loans sold by regulators last year, including the notes Heisler signed.

Girod LoanCo is a specially created company that is ultimately owned by TPG Capital, a $100 billion private investment firm co-founded by billionaire James Coulter.

Coulter, by the way, has been turning New Orleans's disasters into "opportunities" for some time now.  Here he is in 2010 dishing out advice to the 'treps at Idea Village.

Coulter told the crowd Friday  morning that there are three types of entrepreneurs: the natural, the coin flipper, and the rest of us.

The natural entrepreneur has the natural gift of gab and persuasion, which helps him find success in business. The coin-flipper is successful purely out of luck, while the rest-of-us are hard-workers.

It's not clear which entrepreneur type Coulter is supposed to be here.  If we're going by the way he describes himself to Forbes, we'd have to say he's the right-place-at-the-right-time-with-the-right-barrel-of-cash type.

I married a woman from New Orleans, so I had family here. Post-Katrina I had a number of friends call me up and say they wanted to do something to help the community – not just Habitat for Humanity or Red Cross, we’ve done that, but what can we do for the community. So we raised some money from one email and said to some friends: find some good places to put it.

One of the questions was how do you create something sustainable? And if you look at jobs here it’s likely that one of the real job creation engines will be entrepreneurship because it’s a place where people want to live.

Not so sure about that "job creation engine" of entrepreneurship in retrospect.  Unless the job we're talking about is grifter.  Post-Katrina New Orleans has been a ripe environment for those. They do like to call themselves "entrepreneurs," though. I think we've covered that a fair amount.   Maybe that's the type Coulter is.  That's more or less how this reads, anyway.

I think it takes an entire ecosystem, and to that end it has to attract entrepreneurs, and that’s about a lot of people under 30. I think the renaissance going on in education with TFA people coming into town provides a natural fuel for the city.

So the first thing you have to do is have the entrepreneurs, and the second thing is you have to have a funding system to help them. Now you see investors coming into town and investors that you didn’t know were in town showing up. The third is you have to create an infrastructure of support – the chamber of commerce and government really make it easy for entrepreneurship here. And lastly there needs to be a confidence that it can get done here. That’s part of what we’re seeing in that community that’s important – it’s exhibiting that confidence.

Coulter is the type of entrepreneur who was able to"create an infrastructure of support" within business and government circles by exhibiting a lot of confidence in order to turn the "fuel" provided by things like school charterization into a "renaissance."  Got it.  Anyway, now he owns a bunch of assets that got sucked up in the collapse of the bank that financed many of the post-K con jobs you read about.  Good for him.

I wonder how many more of these stories and characters we will read about before the FNBC case is over. I do hope someone is researching the book. If done well something like that has the potential to connect a lot of interesting threads in this city. I promise I really was just joking the other day when I suggested that maybe somewhere in the pile of politically connected non-profits, start-ups, and university projects that exert so much influence on what happens in New Orleans, somebody might have some Epstein money laying around.  But, you know, maybe that's not all that far fetched....

Anyone surprised Walter Isaacson called Joi Ito's book "brilliant and provocative"?

— Evgeny Morozov (@evgenymorozov) September 7, 2019

Are the schools right?

Hey look Mitch Landrieu was on a panel about cities and "leadership" with Dean Bacquet and Walter Isaacson and... *yawn*....

What? Oh yeah, here's the thing.  I'm always amused at the way Mitch defenders are quick tell you to STFU about the mass charterization of our public schools that happened during his time as a "leader" here. "#Actually the mayor doesn't control the schools!" they will tell you. This is technically true. But we all understand that the mayor is a powerful figure and a policy thought  leader in his own right. It matters which side he takes on a question like that.  Mitch was always a vocal supporter of the charter movement. To this day he still touts it as a success story.

Anyway the thing that gets me here is the minute his fans find themselves in front of a friendly audience, they're all too happy to throw him some credit for this thing he supposedly doesn't control.

Walter Isaacson, a former Time editor and best-selling author, credited many of the improvements in New Orleans to progress during the last eight years, saying that Landrieu took over a city “so financially messed up.” A friend of Landrieu, Isaacson called Landrieu “the best mayor we had probably in the history of New Orleans.”

“He got the budget right, he got the schools right and what we need in this country is people who solve problems the way mayors do,” Isaacson said.

Are the schools right? A lot of parents, students and teachers who don't happen to be extremely wealthy media figures would disagree.  More specifically, did Mitch Landrieu get the schools right, himself? His own defenders might not even agree that this is possible... if they listen to their own arguments.

"Obvious gross misunderstanding"

I don't know if I could count the number of times I've expressed skepticism over the efficacy of "inclusionary zoning" rules as a remedy for the affordable housing crisis.  Typically, when these policies are implemented, the formula doesn't set aside nearly enough units to meet the need. And more often than not, they actually serve as a kind of token for rationalizing.. or even subsidizing.. more luxury housing for rich people. Worst of all they're an easy out for decision makers looking to claim they have done something about housing and an excuse for stopping there.

Having said all of that, we have to recognize the unique corner the City Planning Commission finds itself painted into this week. The legislature and the governor have given them what amounts to a "use it or lose it" ultimatum.

In August, the New Orleans City Council tasked the CPC staff with studying three types of “inclusionary zoning” policies as part of the creation of a so-called “smart housing mix,” revisiting the results of a 2017 study that recommended the city adopt similar rules.

Those recommendations were shelved. This year, Gov. John Bel Edwards vetoed a measure that would prevent municipalities from instituting their own inclusionary zoning requirements, only on the condition that New Orleans decide whether it wants them, otherwise he’ll plan to sign similar legislation next year.

Even so, the commissioners are reluctant to act. Last month Mitch Landrieu's good buddy Walter Isaacson wondered out loud if housing problem would just go away on its own thanks to "market forces."  Now it's one thing for us to be suspicious that this one policy choice is itself not much better than laissez faire trickle down approach. It's something else entirely for the Planning Commissison to actually prefer trickle down as the ideal. So circumstances have conspired such that housing advocates are left with no choice but to fight tooth and nail to keep this marginal tool on the table.

Housing NOLA executive director Andreanecia Morris tells Gambit that even with the report’s recognition of the housing problem, and the years-long argument for mandated affordable housing creation, advocates face an uphill battle with a commision with an “obvious, gross misunderstanding of the circumstances as well as the need of a solution that could be brought to bear.”

“Will we exhibit the courage necessary to take up the challenge from the governor to bring this much needed program into reality?” Morris asks. “And will we consistently enforce it?”

Morris is being nice, there. We would characterize Isaacson's position as having been born more out of hostility than "misunderstanding."  Either way, CPC is going to take up the "smart housing mix" report on November 13.  Probably will be off in some broom closet or something at City Hall. The Greater New Orleans Housing Alliance has more information here.

Property > people

Sometimes the parody writes itself.

At least 16 self-storage projects are in some phase of development in the New Orleans area, according to real estate investors and industry analysts. The boom will add well over 1 million square feet of new storage space — enough square footage to cover all of Canal Street from the Mississippi River to Interstate 10.

The recent boom in New Orleans is part of a national trend, driven by shifts in the real estate market, low interest rates, and the search by investors for a high-yielding investment that will hold up even in recessions.

The $32 billion dollar self-storage industry has grown by roughly 4.5 percent annually in recent years, significantly faster than the broader economy. In the last year, investors have added $4 billion in new storage spaces.

I especially love the image the Advocate chose to illustrate the extent of the square footage since the river-to-I10 is also a rough description of where most of the above sea level land is located around here.

Anyway, the city of New Orleans... like much of the country... is in the throes of a desperate affordable housing crisis.  Meanwhile capital has decided the best, highest, use of scarce real estate is building big lifeless crates to store things rather than house people.

That has helped push up rental rates on existing spaces. Real estate consultant Kevin Hilbert said investors have begun waking up to the fact that rents on some local storage units “are on a par with” suburban luxury apartments.

“Some storage companies can get $300 a month for a 10-foot by 10-foot unit,” he said. “You can get a pretty nice apartment for $3 a square foot.”

And self-storage, which generally consists of a warehouse divided into “rooms” of varying size, requires only a fraction of the maintenance and other costs that apartment buildings incur.

Real estate investors typically borrow most of the money they use to invest in properties, so low interest rates are allowing them to borrow cheaply.

Not a thing wrong with that market-driven system, right? Not according to  City Planning Comissioners Robert Steeg and Walter Isaacson who had this to say when considering a modest inclusionary zoning plan this month.

Commissioner Robert Steeg asked the CPC staff whether the city would be better “using a carrot rather than a stick” to attract affordable development through tax incentives, and whether there are “any empirical studies or data driven analysis as to which of those two methods works best.”

Isaacson also asked whether the “large amounts of new housing units proposed and coming onto the market” may end up dropping prices into affordable ranges “just by market forces.”

Market forces are going to have us all living in orange metal sheds, I guess, but that's the best we can do.

Update:  This afternoon your friends at CPC just voted to pass a recommendation to allow the Motwani-Sonder STR Strip on Canal St.  on up to City Council. As we've noted previously, the councilmembers don't seem to give a shit about protecting your housing stock from predatory capitalism either.  A lot of people have spent several years and a lot of hard work trying to convince them to give at least a little bit of a shit.  That hasn't worked.  I honestly have no idea if anything will.

Upperdate:  Okay now we can see why this all passed CPC so easily today.  The mayor, the DDD, and a few council members already had the fix in on it. 

Cantrell took a more critical view of the state of Canal Street. She remains concerned about cleanliness and the presence of vagrants often seen sleeping in the street.

"We have great, great space -- we know that and it's historic. But we have to do better," Cantrell said. "Even with pressure washing the buildings, you drive Canal Street, it's nasty. ... It still feels grimy."

Weigle said that in addition to Sonder's deal involving the three Motwani buildings, the Downtown Development District is exploring creative ways to get other buildings back in commerce. On the 800 block of Canal Street, Weigle said there's a plan to combine the vacant upper floors of three separately owned buildings into a new entity that would preserve the property rights of the first-floor owners who want to continue earning revenue from their respective retail spaces.

Love tooo preserve the retailers' property rights. But not nearly as much as we love "quality of life enforcement." 

Weigle said quality of life issues are also going to be key to improving Canal Street. The Downtown Development District is expanding its staff of public safety rangers from six to eight rangers during peak hours and evenings, and from two to four during the 6 a.m. to 10 a.m. shift. The district has also created high priority areas for quality of life enforcement.

Its new enforcement efforts will target obstructing a public passage, public drunkenness, unlawful use of loudspeakers, aggressive panhandling and bicycling on the sidewalks, Weigle said.

Basically, they're gonna scrub the buildings down, hollow them out, and turn them all into vacation rental properties which they will protect the investment value of by aggressively rooting all us drunks, panhandlers and bicyclists out of the neighborhood.  This is Dizneylandrieu on steroids and I'm all out of answers as to what is to be done. For a minute or two we were kind of hoping it would make a difference if we just asked our elected reps to remember the poor folks a little bit when they made their land use decisions. But it's clear they don't give a shit.  Not sure what happens next. 

Whither Ron Forman's big expensive video board?

Oh look we're "pressing pause" on something again.

New Orleans officials are pressing pause on plans to demolish and rebuild the Canal Street ferry terminal, having dramatically underestimated construction costs.

Though the Regional Transit Authority budgeted $14 million for the first phase of the terminal project, the lowest bid for the work came in at $26.6 million, forcing the agency back to the drawing board.

Officials said they will come up with a new, more affordable design over the next few months. And the terminal, initially on track to be razed in September, will instead be bulldozed by this time next year.

It's the phrase of the year. Off the top of my head I can recall LaToya wanted to "press pause" on her appointment of Warren Riley to Homeland Security. Kristin Palmer said she wanted to "press pause" on short term rental licenses. Sewerage and Water Board recently recently hit the "pause button" on a bond sale. Can we please press pause on pressing pause for a while? I think we have hit the quota.

Anyway, this pause is kind of a surprise. At least to me it is.  The whole course of this ferry re-fit has looked like spending more money on providing worse service. Why (sorry) press pause on that now? The explanation in the article has it that difficulties arising from the location of the construction site and the timing of the project caused the price to go up.  Also they go out of their way to say it is definitely not Audubon's fault.

The higher cost estimate does not factor in the addition of the $7.3 million bridge, a project that is being managed separately by the Audubon Institute.

That implies Audubon was paying for the bridge. I don't think that's true but I could be wrong. This says the city was planning to pay for it out of "(Hurricane) Katrina insurance proceeds that were unobligated." And this says that Audubon had asked to spend $2 million of that on a "video board" which Forman later said they wanted in order to "'dress up' the bridge with 'artwork, lighting or whatever it is.'" We have no idea whether or not that's ever going to be part of the plan now. We do like what Kristin Palmer has to say about that, though. 

Councilwoman Kristin Gisleson Palmer, one of the most vocal proponents of adding the pedestrian bridge, said the agency should consider simply renovating the old terminal rather than rebuilding it. She said the focus should be on helping commuters rather than building something that might impress tourists.

“I’m not so concerned about the tourists having a pretty vista,” Palmer said. “I am more concerned, quite frankly, about getting people to work.”

Meanwhile, Forman has plenty of other ways to suck money out of the city via the riverfront as Audubon has a cooperative endeavor agreement to operate whatever they do with the Esplanade wharf area. Walter Isaacson says there's gonna be some sort of music venue there. He also says he made that up. 

Isaacson tells Gambit he doesn’t know what the plans are and was pointing to the park project as an example of the city’s vision of tourism expansion, with the wharf turning into something “like Crescent Park or the Moonwalk or other public parks, where there’s venues for art and music and tourism.” As for its specific use as a music venue, “I obviously don’t know for sure, because there have been no hearings or proposals on it,” he said.

We were supposed to hear more about that at a City Council committee hearing today. No word on how that went yet.  More to come after the pause, I guess.

Update: Here is where the money is supposed to come from to develop the new park. 

The deal between Audubon and the city calls for the nonprofit to develop the site as a park and raise $15 million for its development.

So far, Audubon has put together $13 million: $9 million from the Ernest N. Morial Convention Center; $2 million from New Orleans & Co., the city's rebranded convention and visitors bureau; and $2 million from Audubon itself.

The port is expected to help raise the remaining $2 million from private sources.

They don't know what it's going to look like yet but they say there will be "significant public input" before that happens so be on the lookout for some 10 AM meetings on a random Wednesday or whatever in the future.

Upperdate: Another point from that article is that the neighborhood associations are already worried about the "disruptive" effects of an event venue like what Isaacson described in that Time piece.  As a footnote to that issue we can look back at last year's election  season when both candidates for mayor talked up the possibility of such an amenity specifically for its revenue generating potential so we'll see how that goes.

Uppestdate: This morning, the Advocate has edited the lede to their article about the ferries from "New Orleans officials are pressing pause.." to "New Orleans officials are going back to the drawing board.." probably in order to gaslight the readership.

How to win friends and influence people

Mitch Landrieu has a reputation for working well with others.

For all his accomplishments, though, Landrieu is wearing thin on political insiders. Since winning a resounding re-election in 2014, he has furthered his reputation for brooking little dissent or pushback, even from longtime friends and political allies, who privately say he will launch into tirades over the phone without even saying hello.

“If you’re not 100 percent with him on his agenda, then he’s 100 percent against you,” said Jeff Arnold, who represented Algiers in the state House for 14 years until 2015. “I call him a 100 percenter. I was probably with him on 95 percent of city matters. But I wasn’t with him on Algiers and on the firefighters, so I became his sworn enemy. My philosophy is that I didn’t burn bridges. Mitch is a burn-the-bridges guy.”

A range of black political leaders interviewed for this article said the mayor has lost their support because of his high-handed ways, but none would say this on the record.

In an interview two years ago, Landrieu invoked the cliché that you have to break eggs if you want to make an omelet. “There are entrenched political interests in this state that have strangled the progress of the state and city for a long time that I have now tangled with,” he said.

Landrieu acknowledged having sharp words with some of those who have disagreed with him. He blamed it on his “impatience” and “passion.”

The scenario where even the ostensible allies who exist within Mitch's tent call him an asshole ("productive" or othewise) is familiar by now.  I do hope that at some time in the future we turn our attentions to the question of for whom he has been productive.  Because the most prominent characteristic of his time as mayor has been the spike in inequality.  Circumstances for the most desperate have worsened even as great fortunes have been made among the few to truly benefit from the city’s "recovery."

Mitch's friends in the political/professional class (in New Orleans they are one and the same)  can only grumble under their breath,  though, because they are among the beneficiaries. If you produce for the folks who matter, you can be whatever kind of asshole you want. It's the sort of thing that has worked for Mitch's elitist mentors which is why they are the most proud of him.

Isaacson also said the mayor could have a place at the Aspen Institute — which brings experts together to try to solve complex policy questions — or with the Bloomberg Harvard City Leadership Initiative announced two weeks ago, funded through a foundation created by Michael Bloomberg, the former New York City mayor.

The $32 million effort “equips mayors and their senior leaders with cutting-edge tools and techniques to more effectively tackle pressing management challenges faced in their cities,” according to its website.

“Michael Bloomberg is one of Mayor Landrieu’s biggest fans, and so is everybody at that foundation,” Isaacson said. “Mitch Landrieu is the only mayor that Michael Bloomberg speaks about with awe and excitement.”

The good news is, we may be at a point here in the wake of the rise of Trump style corruption where we're starting to realize that we will need a better kind of politics than mere Clinton-Landrieu style corruption in order to fight it. We're not quite there yet, but maybe we'll get there.

In the meantime this story about Mitch's diminished options may illustrate the end of an era. But only in a small way. Certainly there's plenty of money waiting for him on the cot at Aspen or whatever new think tank the donor class slaps together to churn out neoliberal bullshit for the next four of eight years. (The Calvin Fayard Center For Urban Resilience?)  Then again maybe we're missing a trick. Where else might Mitch go next?

Aspen you shall receive

These few paragraphs are from a column last week by Patrick Armstrong in Mid-City Messenger. Pat has been following, with growing trepidation, Mayor Landrieu's proposed amendments to the city Master Plan. Pat describes an administration in such a rush to make land use processes easier for developers that it's ignoring its obligation to promote open democratic decision making.

Instead of waiting on the public to get involved, technocrats consolidate and automate the process. The “experts” get to make the decisions, and if the public misses their chance to provide input, they should have been paying closer attention. Technocratic solutions remove the mess of democracy and make things easier, quicker, and cheaper for those who are most invested and connected and knowledgeable about the process. If the voters don’t like it, they can participate on election day – if they even show up to the polls.

Proposed amendments to Chapter 15 double down on resident non-participation by consolidating the big, messy, difficult democratic process into management by one small office at City Hall. Even if every city employee in that office has the best of intentions at heart, how long will it be before the sheer weight of this process demands less access from the public, and more decision making at the top?

That sounds bad. But what's it this all about, exactly? Well, it's a lot of stuff. If you want to read through all of the proposed amendments they're here on the city's website.  But what Patrick is most concerned about is the Chapter 15 neighborhood engagement process. Here's an Advocate guest column by Keith Twitchell explaining what that's all about.

Equally unquestioned is the utter disregard for community voice, as exemplified by both the process and the specifics. The most gratuitous example is the mayor’s proposal to completely write the Community Participation chapter in a way that eliminates all reference to a community-based civic engagement structure. Instead, the mayor wants to put resident participation completely under the control of the Neighborhood Engagement Office.

Given that it has only been two years since New Orleans got its first-ever community participation structure, the City Planning Neighborhood Participation Plan (NPP), why propose something that would limit engagement and the public’s voice? Though it has room for improvement (something the Planning Commission is working on right now), and will only reach its full potential when it is part of a comprehensive community participation structure, the NPP has already demonstrated on many occasions that bringing neighborhoods and developers together in a formal process benefits both.

Moreover, the administration’s reason for denying community voice is breathtaking in its solipsism and circular reasoning. In essence, they are saying “we didn’t give the people what they want, therefore they don’t want it.” This is like saying “I didn’t give you food, therefore you are not hungry.”

On top of this, the mayor has heard directly from the people that they want more community participation, not less. At a Neighborhood Roundtable last summer, with the mayor present, Chief Resiliency Officer Jeff Hebert was specifically asked if the process of developing the city’s Resilience Strategy might provide an opportunity to move forward on establishing a formal, communitywide, community-based civic engagement structure. The entire roomful of nearly 100 neighborhood leaders broke into applause in support of the question.

Thus the argument is not only specious, but flies in the face of direct evidence to the contrary. And throughout the administration’s amendments, the theme is to move away from a community-included approach to planning and development, and move toward a technocratic, top-down, “we know best” philosophy.

Hardly surprising given everything we know about how this mayor operates. We need only refer to his recent big-footing of the process over short term rentals for the most obvious example. But there are more and this Master Plan process is particularly egregious. The October slate of public meetings on this have passed  but there will be more to follow.  Here's one that takes place in the middle of the day on Election Day. Can't imagine an overflow room at that time.  Anyway note the purpose of these changes and the wording.

The Mayor’s Office of Resilience and Sustainability (ORS)  is recommending major changes to the Future Land Use map to open up development opportunities and a mix of uses and housing types in Gentilly. The suggestions of the ORS aim at preparing adaptable infrastructure for landscape in flood risk and loosening up Future Land Use categories, in shifting from a value of the preservation of current neighborhood character and use over to the continued viability of neighborhoods.

The ORS said in a report that current Future Land Use categories in Gentilly are likely too restrictive for incoming residential and commercial demand that the City expects to see in public funds more than $140 million.

A meeting about these zoning changes will take place on Nov. 8 at 1:30 p.m. in the Homeland Security Conference Room 8E16 in City Hall, located at 1300 Perdido Street. Those who can’t attend the meeting can send comments to  cpcinfo@nola.gov.

In other words, their policy goal is to give up worrying about the needs of the people who live here currently and shift priorities over to the demands of future investors. In the opening to Patrick's column, he starts off with a tongue-in-cheek bit about "technocrat" as an epithet.

Technocrat. Noun. An obscure insult used to describe a politician who promotes progress through innovation and technology at the expense of the way things have always been done. The term is most often seen on the left or liberal side of the political spectrum to describe Democratic elected officials deemed insufficiently protective of liberal or progressive interests and who attend the Aspen Institute a few times too many.

Sure, har-har. It's that that us dirty lefties might lay off a bit if  only they'd give us a moment to catch our breath.  For instance, here's today.

Mayor Mitch Landrieu has nominated author and former Time Magazine editor Walter Isaacson to New Orleans' Planning Commission, according to a statement from the mayor's office.

Isaacson, who also served as CEO of CNN, is currently the CEO of the Aspen Institute of Washington, D.C., and splits his time between there and New Orleans.

A native of New Orleans who once shucked oysters on Bourbon Street, Isaacson is also known for being Apple founder Steve Jobs' biographer and for his 2014 book, "The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution."

In other words, these critical matters of democratic process vs technocratic gentrification will be deliberated on by a part time resident who is the literal CEO of the freaking Aspen Institute. How are us jokers and doomsayers supposed to even keep up?  It might start to get funny again when Mayor Torres replaces Isaacson and the entire CPC with an app.  But let's not give away all of our ideas now. 

Happy Iraq Day

Walter Isaacson is a big jerk.

Walter Isaacson is pushed hard by Moyers and finally admits, “We didn’t question our sources enough.” But why? Isaacson notes there was “almost a patriotism police” after 9/11 and when the network showed civilian casualties it would get phone calls from advertisers and the administration and “big people in corporations were calling up and saying, ‘You’re being anti-American here.’”

Moyers then mentions that Isaacson had sent a memo to staff, leaked to the Washington Post, in which he declared, “It seems perverse to focus too much on the casualties or hardship in Afghanistan” and ordered them to balance any such images with reminders of 9/11. Moyers also asserts that editors at the Panama City (Fla.) News-Herald received an order from above, “Do not use photos on Page 1A showing civilian casualties. Our sister paper has done so and received hundreds and hundreds of threatening emails.”

And the lesson  is, a responsible media executive who receives marching orders from his corporate sponsors should always go along to get along. There will be plenty of time to say "oops" later. The important thing is that everyone continues to see you as a responsible person.

Also tough; it's important that people see you as tough.