Claims of a Snow Plowing Slow Down in New York City Turn Out to Be Untrue

Halloran was shovelling something;
a 'snow job' is the  polite name
for what was on that shovel

It was a big story in December, carrying over into the first few days of the new year.  My friends on conservative blogs tried to use it to target their usual bogeymen, the Unions.  The allegation was made by New York City councilman Dan Halloran that five anonymous individuals came to him claiming that New York City snow plow operators staged a deliberate slow down in protest to the demotion by financial cuts of snow plowing supervisors.  Halloran and the right wing media were the ones guilty of perpetrating a 'snow job': "snow job definition n. a systematic deception."

Claims were even made that lives were lost because of unplowed streets and the problems it created for emergency services. Those claims got a lot of coverage; the resulting investigations results did not. 

Four different investigations were launched, two at the city level, one at the state level and one at the federal level.  As we approach the end of January, those results have turned up no such snow plowing slow down, not ordered by Unions, not by individuals, not by anyone.

Here's what we do have.  Dan Halloran seems to have......oh, what's the word?  Oh yes, Halloran LIED. 

This appears to be another one of the right wing hoaxes that gets a lot of coverage on the front end.  Rupert Murdoch news media was all over this making a lot of noise about those Eeeeeeeeeeeeeeevil Unions as New York City residents were unhappy with the removal rate of a LOT of snow that affected that city. 

But as always, they don't follow up, they don't report the other side, and they sure as hell never print or broadcast corrections or updates that contradict their anti-Union narrative. Because they aren't NEWS organizations, they are propaganda organizations.

So here is what we have; as Penigma readers know, I like to go track down LOCAL news coverage for stories.  A lot of it is very, very good, and it tends to be more detail oriented when people live and work in the areas they are covering:
from DNAManhattan, back on January 14, '11, by Murray Weiss:

There Was No Conspiracy Buried Under All That Snow

Let’s get an important issue out of the way on the Great Blizzard of 2010.

There is no evidence of an orchestrated slowdown, job action or criminality by any sanitation workers or supervisors in Manhattan or in any of the outer boroughs during the snowstorm that crippled the city weeks ago.

Two of the city's district attorneys, Brooklyn's U.S. Attorney and the city’s Department of Investigation each launched probes into the sensational claims that there was a conspiracy designed to protest budget cuts by Mayor Michael Bloomberg.

The feds said they would take any conspiracy case that involved fraud to inflate overtime pay. City prosecutors planned to handle any charges involving violations of the state's Taylor Law, which forbids strikes and job actions by municipal employees.

But don't hold your breath for any legal drama. There is nothing to prosecute,

No one has come forward to investigators since the storm with the names or hard information to back-up the claims of a slowdown that were widely spread through the media.
And prosecutors opened their doors wide open for them. They even sent investigators to the office of Queens City Councilman Dan Halloran, who started all this by saying he heard of the slowdown from guilt-ridden workers themselves. Well, it seems Halloran may have gotten ahead of himself — he's backpedaling quickly.

He originally said five city workers came to him. When investigators visited him, he named two city Department of Transportation workers. Let's just say they basically contradicted his account, and leave it at that.

The three other city workers worked for Sanitation, he maintained. They came to him for legal representation, so he can't provide their names because of attorney-client privilege.

A story which is backed up by a second local source, here.

Halloran's claim of attorney client privilege may be true, but the privilege that may be in play is the protection of the councilman's ass from
 the consequences of his big mouth.....or whichever end he was speaking out of when he made his erroneous accusations (to use the more generous interpretation of them).  Even in the first week after he made the claims he was backpedaling, claiming that what he said was not actually what the five workers said to him, that they 'couldn't spell it out' the way he did. 

No. The real story is those city employees didn't say what Halloran - and all of Murdoch's propaganda machine - said they did.So what really happened?  Nothing to do with any union employees slowing down.  From the same story:

Harry Nespoli, the straight-talking Sanitation workers president, summed it up at the City Council hearing when he said the storm simply "got ahead of us.’"

And that's because the city was behind the storm from the beginning, with the mayor reportedly jetting off to Bermuda for the Christmas holiday, and his new deputy mayor, Stephen Goldsmith, who oversees police, sanitation, and fire, was heading to his Washington townhouse to spend the holiday with his wife.

So, why is it that the right wing blogosophere, and the right wing base that gets their information from these same sources, over and over and over again don't get angry at being ......what's the word? oh yes, LIED TO about these events over and over and over again?  WHY IS THAT?
It is an important question.  We need as a country, regardless of what our political preferences or allegiance to any party or to no party, to have reliable facts on which to base our opinions. 

Only some of us are fact based.  Far too often, the right is not, and the further right one gets, the less fact based they appear to be on a regular basis.  This transcends ideology; facts are facts; facts are where we begin to bridge the gaps of ideology on the right and left and come together.  So, why does the right work so very hard to avoid them in favor of a deliberate, calculated false narrative?  Apparently because they would rather have a source that claims to be news tell them what they want to hear, instead of honest information.

It's time the right held those sources accountable for accuracy, integrity, and thoroughness, instead of their willingness to believe lying rubbish without skepticism.

A grand jury is scheduled to be questioning Halloran about now.