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Joe Allbaugh: "they take a shot at the president indirectly through me, which is fine.... It just angers me that our professional journalists have accepted lower standards. I feel like Sergeant Friday: 'Just the facts, ma'am.' We can make up our own damn minds.".

Article Excerpt
You're notoriously press shy, You didn't give a lot of interviews while you were in the public sector, and certainly not since leaving your last government post.

That wasn't my job. I wasn't hired to be a press person. If they were going to hire a press person, it would have been someone a hell of a lot prettier than me. Most times there was no reason to step forward. There are a lot of people in the world who are talkers and a lot of people who are doers; I consider myself a doer based on what I've done in my professional life and the way I was reared on a farm in north-central Oklahoma. Every morning you got up, itemized the chores to be done, and got after it until the sun went down.

That's a reasonably neutral answer--in other words, it's not one that reveals any hostility toward the press.

I'm always leery of the press because we've reached a point in America where professional journalism has slipped a notch or two. The work that goes into good journalism is hard, and yet so many people take the easy path out, citing other articles instead of doing their own research, or Wikipedia, which is 99 percent wrong. I mean, my bio on Wikipedia is trash.

Take the opportunity to correct some of the stuff the press has gotten wrong over the years, I know, for instance, that you have an issue with the story about your being roommates with [former FEMA director] Michael Brown in college.

That's probably the biggest urban legend. We never went to school together. We went to different schools and graduated four years apart.

You did know each other previously, though.

We had met [in Oklahoma] in the late seventies or early eighties. He was working for the city of Edmond. He went to law school at Oklahoma City University and was a good attorney. That's why I hired him to be general counsel at FEMA. I had no idea he would end up as the director. It was a tough job to do. I think he was really given short shrift by 285 million Americans.

Make the case, because he's a punch line at this point.

He became a [means] through which everybody could wash their sins away for all the mistakes that were made leading up to and after Katrina. FEMA had been walking a very fine line for a number of years, even during my two years and thirteen days [as director]. But we had great professionals...