Coast Guard Fires Blogger (Updated)

A couple weeks back I reported on the Coast Guard's new policy for official messages posted to the internet. The service was prohibiting its personnel from posting messages from senior officers unless they had been vetted by
Coastie HQ. In light of all the bad press the Coast Guard was getting for its disastrous Deepwater modernization scheme, I read the new internet policy as a possible sign of a impending crack-down on Coastie bloggers.

Some of these bloggers disagreed. But then, last week, a Coast Guard civilian contractor was fired for his blogging.

UPDATE 9:40 AM: Noah here. The Project on Government Oversight gives the rundown on the fired blogger, Mike McGrath. He worked for the Coasties for 26 years, off and on. On Coast Guard Report he describes what happened:

[I] was told that my position would have been downsized anyways within the next few months, my behavior on the blog sites just made it easier to make me the first to go*...*

Did I mention that I just had my performance evals completed within the last 2 weeks, scored perfect all across the board, got a raise (which I will never see) and that there was no indication from anybody that there was anything wrong occurring...

In January, McGrath described being told by his superiors to "back off" on his blogging:

I was sort of encouraged
(with some very strong negative overtones) to be careful about posting my personal information and my opinions on these blogs....I just wanted to report that I now understand what it feels like to have that experience; and to state emphatically that I won't be backing down.

McGrath's last blog entry before being fired described his frustrations with an unfinished Coast
Guard investigation into an incident in which his son "ended up dead."

But that's not the only controversy the Coast Guard is fighting off. It appears that the Coastie public affairs apparatus has faked a blog post on its own official site. Back to Axe for the latest ...

The "faked post" drama started on Friday when an entry entitled "The Seas Were Angry" (is that an unwitting *Seinfeld *reference?) appeared on the "Coast Guard Journal" at www.uscg.mil. The post described a daring rescue at sea by a Coastie chopper crew:

As we hovered overhead near the survivors, I prepared myself and my gear and was lowered from the helicopter into a challenging night time sea ... I’m Aviation Survival Technician First
Class Karen Voorhees, and this is my story.

Problem is, it might not be Voorhees' (pictured) story at all. At the Military.com forums on Tuesday, someone with the handle
"kvoorhees," claiming she was the Coastie featured in the story, denied writing the post (although confirming that the event itself took place):

*I did not write that "blog." I'm a wee bit mortified
(and other emotions not to be mentioned) that this PR event was posted under my name, without my permission. *

As the folks at Unofficial Coast Guard Blog point out, the Military.com forum post might be a fraud. I've sent an email to the Coast Guard to find out. We'll see if we ever get an official explanation. (Got it! See update.) In the meantime, don't believe verify anything Coast Guard public affairs tells you.

UPDATE 9:14 AM: I just talked to Voorhees. She says she was asked to write a statement about the rescue. It was that statement that public affairs adapted into a blog post. The problem was they didn’t check with her before publishing it. “They kind of sideswiped me. If they’d asked, there might have been a couple things I would have changed, but nothing huge.” So were those Voorhees’ exact words that appeared on-line? No, she says, but close. “There would have been a lot more swearing.”

UPDATE 10:12 EST: Just talked to Coastie spokesman Jim
McPherson. He says that the big problem here is that public affairs is new to these first-person blog posts. Voorhees’ original statement was not terribly literary — “It wasn’t even clear she had jumped into the water,” McPherson says. Editing was required. But it wasn’t made clear to Voorhees how her statement would be edited. “We'll do better,” McPherson says. He adds that the existing post is being updated to better reflect Voorhees’ actual words.__
__

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