It's interesting in reading this article how all the various commentators and *cough* reporters on FOX News, like Palin, basically picked up on the same false information regarding international help and/or the Jones Act and went on to report it like it was the truth.
Just goes to show once the media circus gets an idea in it's collective head no one, least of all the talking heads before the cameras, has the smarts to double check the story's source by doing a little good old fashion journalism, like background research and/or on-site reporting.
Of course to be fair I've seem the same shit on other networks too. And it is this kind of crap that scares me cause it was one of the reasons Bush and Co. was able to convince the American people about the WMD's in Iraq, and other so-called factual reasons for going to war. Only one newspaper syndicate, whose name at the moment escapes me (Scripps Howard?
), actually did the kind of background checking on this "so-called proof" presented by the White House to see though the "big lie" that the rest of the media, including the WP, NYT, LAT all swallowed hook, line and sinker.
In a lot of respects from what I see on the TV and elsewhere this on-going story in the Gulf is suffering quite a bit from the same kind of sloppy and shoddy reporting.