The media lied and the poor agonized!

It seems the media is beginning to pick up on the story that the New Orleans Times-Picayune ran on Monday about the frenzied and inaccurate reporting of murder and rapes at the Superdome and Convention Center in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. This from the LA Times;

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.
"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."

Better late than never I guess...Of course will the media trumpet this information as much as the did all of the rumors. Of course not!

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."

Doesn't that make the media racist?

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.

So the fact that there was no telephone service means that all journalistic practices such as confirmation of stories, fact checking, go out the window and is replaced by reporting of unconfirmed and unsubstantiated atrocities such as a rape and murder of a 7 year in the Superdome or finding an infant in the trash or bodies stacked in the Superdome basement. How about Aaron Broussard's September 4th appearance on Meet The Press and his now competely discredited account of the death of his colleague's mother. All of this breathless, inaccurate reporting did nothing but fuel the negative reaction to the already slow federal response to the disaster.

As more and more of these reports come out debunking all of these myths and rumors about the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina that were reported as fact, the media has a lot answer for. The question is who will hold them accountable?