Good response, Rande.
BTW, here's an LA Times article on the media's coverage of Katrina, as reprinted in the AJC. IMO, not only did such irresponsible coverage damage the image of NOLA (not that it needed help in having a bad reputation), but it also 1) contributed significantly to the difficulty of the rescue and relief effort; 2) stirred up a nationwide bout of open partisan hostility; 3) stirred up racial tensions by making it appear i) that no one cared enough to try to help poor blacks in NO and ii) that the poor blacks themselves were little more than animals fighting with each other over the means of survival rather than helping each other as best they could in a bad situation; and 4) painted a severely biased picture of what was going on there that unjustifiably damaged public confidence in the federal government to come to the aid of local authorities in emergencies. Never, in all the TV coverage from the SuperDome, did I see even a hint that this National Guard officer, Maj. Ed Bush, and his unit were anywhere near the dome until the people there were already heading out in numbers on buses. It was all "we reporters are here risking our lives to cover this and help people - where is the government?" Well, apparently just off camera. Except, of course, for Nagin and other local officials who were ON camera elsewhere feeding the fear and hype.
HURRICANES' AFTERMATH: Post-hurricane tales of anarchy lack credibility
Phone outage is blamed for false reports
Susannah Rosenblatt, James Rainey - Los Angeles Times
Friday, September 30, 2005
Baton Rouge, La. --- Maj. Ed Bush recalled how he stood in the bed of a pickup truck in the days following Hurricane Katrina, struggling to help the vast 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 of 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 this week of the Superdome. His assessment is one of several in recent days to conclude that newspapers and television exaggerated criminal behavior after 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 "The Oprah Winfrey Show" three weeks ago of people "in that frickin' Superdome for five days watching dead bodies, watching hooligans killing people, raping people."
Lack of communication
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 also may have 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.
Follow-up reporting has now discredited reports of a 7-year-old being raped and killed at the Convention Center, 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. Fox News, a day before the major evacuation of the Superdome began, issued an "alert" as talk host Alan Colmes reiterated reports of "robberies, rapes, carjackings, riots and murder. Violent gangs are roaming the streets at night, hidden by the cover of darkness."
The Los Angeles Times adopted much the same tone the next day in its lead news story, reporting that National Guard troops "took positions on rooftops, scanning for snipers and armed mobs as seething crowds of refugees milled below, desperate to flee. Gunfire crackled in the distance."
The New York Times repeated some of the same reports of violence and unrest, although the newspaper usually was more careful to note that the information could not be verified.
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution focused on reports of looting and how authorities tried to deal with it. New Orleans Police Chief Eddie Compass, who has since resigned, told the newspaper that individuals were being raped and beaten.
Televised images and photographs affirmed the widespread devastation in one of America's most celebrated cities.
"I don't think you can overstate how big of a disaster New Orleans is," said Kelly McBride, ethics group leader at the Poynter Institute, a Florida school for professional journalists. "But you can imprecisely state the nature of the disaster. ... Then you draw attention away from the real story, the magnitude of the destruction and you kind of undermine the media's credibility."
Times-Picayune Editor Jim Amoss cited telephone breakdowns as a primary cause of reporting errors, but he said the fact that most evacuees were poor blacks 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."
Death toll short of reports
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 & Hospitals.
Of the 864 recorded hurricane-related deaths in Louisiana, four are identified as gunshot victims, Johannessen said.
The New Orleans Police Department launched an investigation Thursday into whether some of its officers participated in the giant looting spree that overtook the city, as some media reported.
The media inaccuracies had consequences in the disaster zone.
Bush, the National Guard spokesman, said 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 some newspapers or on television.
-Information from The Associated Press contributed to this article.
ajc.com
|
