On Tuesday’s All Things Considered, Mississippi governor Haley Barbour told NPR listeners that the news media are a bigger threat to the Magnolia State than the BP oil spill is:

The news media coverage did not differentiate from what was happening in Louisiana and what was not happening in Mississippi, Alabama, Florida. Even the president of the United States came down here and said exactly what I said. You know, the coast is beautiful, the beaches are pristine, the water is clear as a bell. And people shouldn’t be canceling their vacations.

Yet because of the news coverage, millions, billions, perhaps, of dollars were lost by people in the tourism industry in my state, Alabama and Florida. That’s not to minimize the size of this catastrophe, but it is to simply tell the truth.

If everyone would just tell the truth the way he is, Barbour insisted, it would all be tickety-boo.

Boo hoo.