Katrina and the media

Rapes.  Murders.  Gang violence.  Cannibalism.

Katrina was a reporter's dream: so many juicy, bloody stories to cover, each more shocking than the last.  Jack the Ripper meets Sodom and Gomorrah amidst the Plagues of Egypt.

Trouble is, most of the stories weren't true.

With so much of what was breathlessly reported from New Orleans now having proved to be wildly exaggerated or flat untrue, what does this mean for all the judgments that have been made in the past several weeks?  FEMA and especially outgoing chief Michael Brown were roasted for their slow and inept response.  The people of New Orleans are regarded in some quarters as a pack of thieving, murderous savages.  Their government, including Mayor Nagin and Governor Blanco, are thought to be almost criminally incompetent.  Race relations have been damaged.

Is it time to reevaluate?

Yes.

It's also time to start looking at who was really responsible for the hysteria over Katrina.  It seems to me that the finger points to one guilty party: the BM.  They took every rumor, every hysterical ranting of every nutcase or distraught official and reported it without bothering to check to see if it was true or not.  Mark Steyn has written about this in today's Washington Times:

Dan Rather was on "Larry King" the other night and was asked about the Katrina coverage. Say what you like about Dan, but he knows his meteorological phenomena. I've always thought there was something quintessentially American about Dan's hurricane editions of the CBS news -- not the part of the show where he's reporting on the actual hurricane, but the bit where he says "And today's other headlines," as if it's the most normal thing in the world to be reading "The Dow closed 19 points down today" while wrapped around a lamppost in your sou'wester with a rusting doublewide flying over your shoulder.

Yet Hurricane Dan professed himself delighted with his successors. "They took us there to the hurricane," he told Larry. "They put the facts in front of us and, very important, they sucked up their guts and talked truth to power."

Er, no. The facts they put in front of us were wrong, and they didn't talk truth to power. They talked to goofs in power, like New Orleans' Mayor Ray Nagin and Police Chief Eddie Compass, and uncritically fell for every nutso yarn they were peddled. The media swallowed more bilge than if they'd been lying down with their mouths open as the levee collapsed. Ten thousand dead. Widespread rape and murder. A 7-year-old gang-raped and then throat-slashed. It was great stuff -- and none of it happened. No gang-raped 7-year-olds. None.

Most of the media are still in Dan mode, sucking up their guts and congratulating themselves about what a swell job they did during Katrina. CNN producers were advising their guests to "be angry," and there was so much to get angry about, not least that no matter how angry you got on air Anderson Cooper was always much better at it. And Mayor Nagin as well. To show he was angry, he used a lot of profanity. "That... Superdome," he raged. "Five days watching dead bodies, watching hooligans killing people, raping people."

But nobody got killed by a hooligan in the Superdome. The problem wasn't rape and murder, but the rather more prosaic lack of bathroom facilities. As Ben Stein put it, it was the media that rioted. They grabbed every lurid rumor and took it for a wild joy ride across primetime. There was a real story in there -- big hurricane, people dead -- but it wasn't enough, and certainly not enough for damaging George Bush.

As Steyn points out, if the BM got it so wrong on Katrina, how can we trust their reporting on Iraq?  Or, really, on anything else?

Comments

[Ari Kaufman]

The media is cognizant of the fact that Bush-bashing, racial dividing and showing America is chaos sells. They don't care about being honest nor reporting the whole story; they just want ratings and exposure. Kind of like college professors.
DocJim, you should check out the comments on my blog from some of the liberal apologists right now. Classic and typical.

[Matt Brown]

Reporting on the news happens so fast these days, it's no wonder that reporters don't get all the facts - they may not have the time to get them. Of course, what sells better - "everyone acting calm at the convention center" or "murder, rape, and mayhem at the convention center"?

[LC Scotty]

But Jim, they've got tons of layers of fact checkers. That's why they're exempt!! Exempt from reality...

[docjim505]

Ari and Matt,

Yeah, it's pretty disgusting that the media adheres to an "if it bleeds, it leads" mentality. It's even more sad that so many news consumers seem to want that.

Scotty,

HAH! I'd like to think that media types cringe when they're reminded of that quote, but I doubt that they have sufficient sense of shame.