Media Disgrace

Worldwide, reports went out that there was anarchy in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. While there was tremendous suffering in the city, the lawlessness was GREATLY exaggerated and a pack of rumors were completely fabricated.

Rumors often run wild in times of crisis. However, when the news media report the rumors as facts, there's a problem.

The September 4, 2005, New York Times trumpeted the fabulous reporting of Brian Williams on Hurricane Katrina. The paper declared his work a "career-maker."

As it turns out, Brian Williams and others solidified their journalistic credentials as befitting tabloid TV.

BATON ROUGE, La. -- Maj. Ed Bush recalled how he stood in the bed of a pickup truck in the days after Hurricane Katrina, struggling to help the crowd outside the Louisiana Superdome separate fact from fiction. Armed only with a megaphone and scant information, he might have been shouting into, well, a hurricane.

The National Guard spokesman's accounts about rescue efforts, water supplies and first aid all but disappeared amid the roar of a 24-hour rumor mill at New Orleans' main evacuation shelter. Then a frenzied media recycled and amplified many of the unverified reports.

Frenzied is an excellent way to describe the state of the media after Katrina.

Do you think that there's a chance Oprah will do a show on how irresponsibly Louisiana officials and the media behaved?

Is she upset about their actions which directly led to greater hardships for the hurricane victims?

...The New Orleans Times-Picayune on Monday described inflated body counts, unverified "rapes," and unconfirmed sniper attacks as among examples of "scores of myths about the dome and Convention Center treated as fact by evacuees, the media and even some of New Orleans' top officials."

Indeed, Mayor C. Ray Nagin told a national television audience on "Oprah" three weeks ago of people "in that frickin' Superdome for five days watching dead bodies, watching hooligans killing people, raping people."

Journalists and officials who have reviewed the Katrina disaster blamed the inaccurate reporting in large measure on the breakdown of telephone service, which prevented dissemination of accurate reports to those most in need of the information. Race may have also played a factor.

The wild rumors filled the vacuum and seemed to gain credence with each retelling — that an infant's body had been found in a trash can, that sharks from Lake Pontchartrain were swimming through the business district, that hundreds of bodies had been stacked in the Superdome basement.

Where were all the investigative reporters? Wasn't anyone able to get to the truth?

Nagin was tossing around unsubstantiated reports like a writer for Newsweek.

...Times-Picayune Editor Jim Amoss cited telephone breakdowns as a primary cause of reporting errors, but said the fact that most evacuees were poor African Americans also played a part.

"If the dome and Convention Center had harbored large numbers of middle class white people," Amoss said, "it would not have been a fertile ground for this kind of rumor-mongering."

What a thoroughly racist statement!

Amoss said that middle class white people are more capable of sorting fact from fiction than poor African Americans.

Can you imagine if Bush said that?

Some of the hesitation that journalists might have had about using the more sordid reports from the evacuation centers probably fell away when New Orleans' top officials seemed to confirm the accounts.

Nagin and Police Chief Eddie Compass appeared on "Oprah" a few days after trouble at the Superdome had peaked.

Compass told of "the little babies getting raped" at the Superdome. And Nagin made his claim about hooligans raping and killing.

State officials this week said their counts of the dead at the city's two largest evacuation points fell far short of early rumors and news reports. Ten bodies were recovered from the Superdome and four from the Convention Center, said Bob Johannessen, spokesman for the Louisiana Department of Health and Hospitals.

(National Guard officials put the body count at the Superdome at six, saying the other four bodies came from the area around the stadium.)

I've said it before. Nagin is no Giuliani. I wonder how much suffering could have been prevented or at least alleviated more quickly if a better qualified individual was the mayor of New Orleans.

At least Compass resigned on Tuesday.

Nagin's reaction:

"It's a sad day in the city of New Orleans when a hero makes a decision like this. He leaves the department in pretty good shape and with a significant amount of leadership."

A hero?

Right.

...The media inaccuracies had consequences in the disaster zone.

Bush, of the National Guard, said that reports of corpses at the Superdome filtered back to the facility via AM radio, undermining his struggle to keep morale up and maintain order.

"We had to convince people this was still the best place to be," Bush said. "What I saw in the Superdome was just tremendous amounts of people helping people."

But, Bush said, those stories received scant attention in newspapers or on television.

Gee, sounds similar to the MSM's coverage of conditions in Iraq. There's no time to report the good news of schools and hospitals opening, but plenty of time to dwell on Abu Ghraib.

The "inaccuracies" of the media made matters worse for hurricane victims in the Superdome. The media were actually doing a disservice and adding to the problem.

It's funny how often the Drudge Report, which for the most part is a page of links, is degraded by the MSM. Matt Drudge and his "Sludge Report" is looked down on as sensationlist rumor-mongering.

Who's rumor-mongering now???

Members of the MSM are agenda-driven. They cannot say that they are better than Drudge or better than tabloid reporters.

They have very, VERY little to be proud of regarding their coverage of Hurricane Katrina. Let's face it. It has been shown to be an utter embarrassment.