The Discerning Texan
All that is necessary for evil to triumph, is for good men to do nothing.
-- Edmund Burke
-- Edmund Burke
Tuesday, September 27, 2005
The Media's complicity in Katrina, Part II
Today, even the LA Times is admitting big media's complicity in making the Katrina tragedy worse than it had to be:
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.
"It just morphed into this mythical place where the most unthinkable deeds were being done," Bush said Monday of the Superdome.
His assessment is one of several in recent days to conclude that newspapers and television exaggerated criminal behavior in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, particularly at the overcrowded Superdome and Convention Center.
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."
It doesn't take anything to start a rumor around here," Louisiana National Guard 2nd Lt. Lance Cagnolatti said at the height of the Superdome relief effort. "There's 20,000 people in here. Think when you were in high school. You whisper something in someone's ear. By the end of the day, everyone in school knows the rumor — and the rumor isn't the same thing it was when you started it."
Follow-up reporting has discredited reports of a 7-year-old being raped and murdered at the Superdome, roving bands of armed gang members attacking the helpless, and dozens of bodies being shoved into a freezer at the Convention Center.
Hyperbolic reporting spread through much of the media.
UPDATE: Michael Heidt is mad as hell about this--and who can blame him? It is hard to refute his contention than in its hypebole, the MSM was exploiting race to make a point that was completely false:
Katrina didn’t just wash away hundreds of homes and businesses; it washed away the cheesy veneer of multiculturalism that the Left has been using to cover its own racist tendencies. The MSM aided by various victim-identity groups continue to peddle the meme that Bushitler McHalliburton intentionally withheld life saving disaster relief from the Gulf region in order to punish intransigent blacks that refused to vote GOP last time.
Furthermore, they ostensibly contend that the more robust federal response to Rita is to help white Texan rednecks and rub poor black New Orleanian’s noses in it. The stories of horrific conditions of filth, murder, rape and mayhem emanating from the Superdome and the Convention Center and dutifully reported without batting an eye by MSM anchors now seems to have revealed the real racists.
Shep Smith, Anderson Cooper, Geraldo et al not to mention the Kossacks, DU, and every other vermin of the lefty web all gleefully reported the completely false stories of gangrapes, throat slitting of children, bodies stacked like cordwood, and any other tale of grisly, inhuman activities. Why? Because they really think that the poor blacks of New Orleans and elsewhere are savages, capable of unspeakable acts of gore and only one missed welfare check away from total devolution to an underclass of genocidal maniacs.
As it turns out, only a handful of people died in the Superdome by natural causes, and the murder rate in New Orleans (which is admittedly too high) remained essentially flat during the week of Katrina.
Stories of blacks reverting to their cannibal instincts were lapped up without even the most cursory fact checking because racist liberals already thought that blacks were intellectually and morally equivalent to the savages that inhabit their African homeland. They proved the anecdote that if you keep saying something that is untrue enough times, people will start to believe it. FEMA started believing it and ordered 25,000 body bags when maybe a thousand will be needed.
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.
"It just morphed into this mythical place where the most unthinkable deeds were being done," Bush said Monday of the Superdome.
His assessment is one of several in recent days to conclude that newspapers and television exaggerated criminal behavior in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, particularly at the overcrowded Superdome and Convention Center.
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."
It doesn't take anything to start a rumor around here," Louisiana National Guard 2nd Lt. Lance Cagnolatti said at the height of the Superdome relief effort. "There's 20,000 people in here. Think when you were in high school. You whisper something in someone's ear. By the end of the day, everyone in school knows the rumor — and the rumor isn't the same thing it was when you started it."
Follow-up reporting has discredited reports of a 7-year-old being raped and murdered at the Superdome, roving bands of armed gang members attacking the helpless, and dozens of bodies being shoved into a freezer at the Convention Center.
Hyperbolic reporting spread through much of the media.
UPDATE: Michael Heidt is mad as hell about this--and who can blame him? It is hard to refute his contention than in its hypebole, the MSM was exploiting race to make a point that was completely false:
Katrina didn’t just wash away hundreds of homes and businesses; it washed away the cheesy veneer of multiculturalism that the Left has been using to cover its own racist tendencies. The MSM aided by various victim-identity groups continue to peddle the meme that Bushitler McHalliburton intentionally withheld life saving disaster relief from the Gulf region in order to punish intransigent blacks that refused to vote GOP last time.
Furthermore, they ostensibly contend that the more robust federal response to Rita is to help white Texan rednecks and rub poor black New Orleanian’s noses in it. The stories of horrific conditions of filth, murder, rape and mayhem emanating from the Superdome and the Convention Center and dutifully reported without batting an eye by MSM anchors now seems to have revealed the real racists.
Shep Smith, Anderson Cooper, Geraldo et al not to mention the Kossacks, DU, and every other vermin of the lefty web all gleefully reported the completely false stories of gangrapes, throat slitting of children, bodies stacked like cordwood, and any other tale of grisly, inhuman activities. Why? Because they really think that the poor blacks of New Orleans and elsewhere are savages, capable of unspeakable acts of gore and only one missed welfare check away from total devolution to an underclass of genocidal maniacs.
As it turns out, only a handful of people died in the Superdome by natural causes, and the murder rate in New Orleans (which is admittedly too high) remained essentially flat during the week of Katrina.
Stories of blacks reverting to their cannibal instincts were lapped up without even the most cursory fact checking because racist liberals already thought that blacks were intellectually and morally equivalent to the savages that inhabit their African homeland. They proved the anecdote that if you keep saying something that is untrue enough times, people will start to believe it. FEMA started believing it and ordered 25,000 body bags when maybe a thousand will be needed.
