Subtitle: The Media Dropped a Big, Warm, Steaming Load in America's Living Room When Covering Katrina
When he media reported on the "violence" that happened in New Orleans after Katrina, the levee breaks, and the resulting floods, they reported a lot of things that were "sensational".
Now that things have calmed down a bit, the reality of some of those "sensational" reports is starting to come out.
(I received this link in e-mail).
Rumors of deaths greatly exaggerated
Widely reported attacks false or unsubstantiated
6 bodies found at Dome; 4 at Convention Center
By Brian Thevenot
and Gordon Russell
Staff writers
After five days managing near-riots, medical horrors and unspeakable living conditions inside the Superdome, Louisiana National Guard Col. Thomas Beron prepared to hand over the dead to representatives of the Federal Emergency Management Agency.
Following days of internationally reported killings, rapes and gang violence inside the Dome, the doctor from FEMA - Beron doesn't remember his name - came prepared for a grisly scene: He brought a refrigerated 18-wheeler and three doctors to process bodies.
"I've got a report of 200 bodies in the Dome," Beron recalls the doctor saying.
The real total was six, Beron said.
Of those, four died of natural causes, one overdosed and another jumped to his death in an apparent suicide, said Beron, who personally oversaw the turning over of bodies from a Dome freezer, where they lay atop melting bags of ice. State health department officials in charge of body recovery put the official death count at the Dome at 10, but Beron said the other four bodies were found in the street near the Dome, not inside it. Both sources said no one had been killed inside.
At the Ernest N. Morial Convention Center, just four bodies were recovered, despites reports of corpses piled inside the building. Only one of the dead appeared to have been slain, said health and law enforcement officials.
...
"I think 99 percent of it is bulls---," said Sgt. 1st Class Jason Lachney, who played a key role in security and humanitarian work inside the Dome. "Don't get me wrong, bad things happened, but I didn't see any killing and raping and cutting of throats or anything. ... Ninety-nine percent of the people in the Dome were very well-behaved."
...
"I had the impression that at least 40 or 50 murders had occurred at the two sites," he said. "It's unfortunate we saw these kinds of stories saying crime had taken place on a massive scale when that wasn't the case. And they (national media outlets) have done nothing to follow up on any of these cases, they just accepted what people (on the street) told them. ... It's not consistent with the highest standards of journalism."
Earlier on, I started to question what was being reported.
The first questioning of reporting that I saw, was done from the The Guardian.
Murder and rape - fact or fiction?
Gary Younge in Baton Rouge
Tuesday September 6, 2005
The Guardian
There were two babies who had their throats slit. The seven-year-old
girl who was raped and murdered in the Superdome. And the corpses laid
out amid the excrement in the convention centre.
In a week filled with dreadful scenes of desperation and anger from
New Orleans following Hurricane Katrina some stories stood out.
But as time goes on many remain unsubstantiated and may yet prove to
be apocryphal.
New Orleans police have been unable to confirm the tale of the raped
child, or indeed any of the reports of rapes, in the Superdome and
convention centre.
Adding to that, you have some conservative pundits saying that Katrina exposed "the failure of the welfare state." Meanwhile, what seemed to get lost in the events were some very basic facts:
Addressing the "learned helplessness" because of "the failure of the welfare state", let me quote from the first article again:
"We're not prisoners of war - y'all are treating us like evacuees and
detainees!" he recalled one of them shouting.
But many others sought to quiet such voices. On the deck outside the
Dome on Sept. 1, the day before buses arrived, preachers took it upon
themselves to lead the agitated crowd in prayer and song.
"Everybody needs to help the soldiers," Baldwin recalled one of them
saying. "We're all family here."
About 15 others joined the medical operation, as people collapsed from heat and exhaustion every few minutes, Baldwin said.
"Some of these guys look like thugs, with pants hanging down around
their asses," he said. "But they were working their asses off,
grabbing litters and running with people to the (New Orleans) Arena"
next door, which housed the medical operation.
And, to close this out, for now, re-read this first hand account.
What I hope to have done was to show how the media was irresponsible in the coverage of Katrina. The 24 hour news cycle did a large disservice to the people of New Orleans, Mississippi, and other affected Gulf States.
The media gave a portrait of people that was wrong, and I must say, racist. They showed the "poor Blacks" but didn't show the "poor whites". This story became a "poor Black" story instead of an affected people story.
Yet again, the media chose to portray the Blacks in the area as poor, lawless, and out of control. And it wasn't just the "liberal" media who did it. It was the "conservative" media as well.
When I have time, I'm going to do more on the media and Katrina, addressing it more from the race angle.
Do you remember seeing news film coverage of the Civil Rights battles where a white man is telling a reporter that they wouldn't have any race problems if the media weren't involved?
Well, after viewing the media irresponsibility at work during Katrina, I think I have some understanding of that point of view.
More later.
Posted by at September 26, 2005 09:37 PM | TrackBack20 years later, most Americans believe Farrakhan called Judaism "a gutter religion." The day the controversy broke, ABC News played a video of the portion the speech in question, and it was clear that he didn't say what was attributed to him, yet I never saw that clip aired again, and no one ever went back and straightened it out.
Michael Irvin was accused of raping a woman, and he was so adamant that the charges were false, he dared the media to re-run it, re-play it when the facts came out. 2 days later, when the woman was found to have submitted a false police report, many in the media went back and said, "my bad."
Posted by: brotherbrown at September 27, 2005 06:53 PM
If you were evera part of a story from beginning to end and then read it in the press you will soon realize that the media plays a key role in a free society.The media must be deversified to get the truth,some reporters will not go in to certain area's and laziness creep in "make it up".
Posted by: tootsie at September 27, 2005 10:36 AM