Saturday, January 28, 2006

New Abramoff Prosecutor...

... is Andrew Lourie, a career AUSA here in Miami. Lourie will take over the public integrity section of the Department of Justice for Noel L. Hillman who has been nominated for a federal judgeship.

A couple questions:

1. What's the story on Lourie?

2. Why isn't the local media covering the Abramoff story more closely? Is it me or does it seem like no one down here really cares about this stuff? Abramoff is front page news around the country...

8 comments:

Anonymous said...

Because Miami is Republican.

Anonymous said...

Because the Miami media is equally corrupt and most of its corps and all of its publishers were/are in bed with him and the stooges he bribed. The balance of the media is incapable of developing story line without copying it from someone else.

Anonymous said...

working in local news, I can tell you the Abramoff story is a tough one to report. #1, there are no pictures, and that doesn't make for good TV. #2, it's tough to get your hands on public records to help tell the story since the US Attorney's Office rarely releases anything and the clerk's office tends to be a nightmare to navigate. You might spend 4 days trying to get the files, then have a day to digest them, and slam something together for the evening news. However, I must say that Jay Weaver at the Miami Herald is doing a great job staying on top of this story. Look for it on the paper, before you see anything in depth on it on local TV.

David Oscar Markus said...

I agree that Jay is doing a great job with the coverage, but someone at the Herald is pushing the stories to the back of the local section. It seems to me that a lot of this stuff is front page national news...

Anonymous said...

Who? If you go to the Herald's web site and search on Abramoff, you get one story with a kr byline, and the rest are AP, or Washington Post, or even George Will. What good is it to have someone doing reports no one will find? Where's the investigative reporting on how our South Florida representatives might have been touched by Abramoff or his merry band? Suppose it isn't Abramoff himself but one of the K Street crowd hanging out with our local Republicans and dishing out smaller money for similar results--when would we learn about that? Even a somewhat clean bill of health would be an improvement over dead silence on the topic.

And, what do YOU think about impeachment now?

Anonymous said...

The earlier comment from one who works in local news just proves the point: No stories because there are no good pictures and a reporter would have to actually do some work to report the story!! Like a child who refuses to read because the material has no pics and requires thought. What would Woodward & Bernstein say? Worse still, what if they hadn't followed Watergate because there were no pictures and they had to actually be journalists in preparation for writing a story. It's sad that the First Amendment in South Florida is left to be preserved by the inept, incompetent, lazy, and corrupt. On second thought, it figures.

David Oscar Markus said...

Julie Kay writes about the Lourie stuff in the DBR today.

Anonymous said...

What about the picture of the guy in that flasher coat and hat? That is a pretty darn good picture....kudos to his defense team for thinking that getaway...uh...I mean getup, up. The prosecutor should blow that picture up to life size when sentencing comes around.

The media is scared to report on this story becasue they rely so heavily on thier "anonymous highly placed sources" in the republican administration that feed (or trickle) information to them for stories. If they lost that "source" then they would actually have to do some reporting.