A local Katrina vulture

One source of the alleged experts the media employs in stories is the fax machine. It helpfully spits out an endless parade of self-promoting authors, college instructors, retirees and others with the time and inclination to talk to the press about their area of expertise. As you might imagine, these are something of a mixed bag, running from actual experts any media outlet would be thrilled to use as a source to folks desperately trying to recoup their investment on a vanity press-published book via some free publicity. If you’re lucky, they’re local — an expert from outside the High Desert is all but useless to me. (An expert living or working in Hesperia is obviously the real goal.)

Today, we got our first of these trying to portray themselves as being relevant to the Hurricane Katrina disaster. Now she was from the High Desert, so bonus points there, but only the most desperate journalist would have used her area of theoretical expertise — and I say theoretical, since a quick Google would have turned up the same information she had in her three page fax, minus the promotion of her (apparently vanity press-published) book. Not only did her information seem uncompelling at best, it had only the most tenuous link to what was going on in the areas ravaged by the hurricane.

Hundreds, perhaps thousands of people are dead, and this woman is trying to use their deaths to recoup her investment on her booklet.

We passed on calling her.

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