Is there anything that moves slower than a government bureaucracy?

Actually, it seems that there is: the mainstream media.

Back on March 17, I posted a story about FEMA going after people who received duplicate or fraudulent Hurricane Katrina disaster payments. It was a followup to a February 13 story on the Government Accountability Office’s report on people defrauding FEMA. And despite their having access to the same sources I do — and a whole lot more — it’s taken the mainstream media until today to get a story out.

In order to catch you up: After Katrina, thousands of people received duplicate benefits from FEMA by mistake, and many even intentionally defrauded the system. Now after a GAO report released earlier in the year highlighted the fraud and waste, (something they’re very good at) FEMA’s trying to get the money back.

While there isn’t much new in the AP wire story, they do have numbers for Mississippi: $4.7 million in payments they want to recover from 2,044 people.

Here’s the difference: I got hold of a copy of the form letter being mailed out to such people, and on that, a statement from FEMA, and the prior reporting on the GAO report, I ran the story. I have no idea what the AP, Post, Times, Tribune, BBC, or any other mainstream media outlet was doing. I certainly didn’t see the story appear in any of those places. It did get picked up from here by at least one syndicated talk radio show, though, but that’s about it.

As I’ve said before, I know a few of you reading this are journalists working in the mainstream media. You might even have gotten hold of this same information at about the time I did. How does it happen that it takes over a month to get a simple story like this out? Or, to put it another way, what is your editor smoking?

In any case, stupidity like this demonstrates the power of what people are beginning to call “citizen journalism.” There are no column inches on the Internet. There is no time constraint in which to squeeze a video segment. In fact, unlike print media, the general rule is that the more stories you have online, the more money you make; consider that for every new page, you get extra ad space and more viewers. And the limits of data storage are largely theoretical these days.

There are differences, of course. I’ve had errors in my reporting, all very promptly corrected. I had one yesterday, in fact. A reader caught it within minutes, and I made the correction moments later. I also make no pretense of being unbiased. Rather, I disclose my biases so that everyone knows where I stand. I wish that all reporters would do this; we’d have a much more transparent and trustworthy press. And maybe several of them would finally realize that their biases are completely wrong. . . .

Yet more biased reporting coming tomorrow. Stay tuned.