THE WASHINGTON POST looks at Katrina myths and the damage they did:
Five weeks after Hurricane Katrina laid waste to New Orleans, some local, state and federal officials have come to believe that exaggerations of mayhem by officials and rumors repeated uncritically in the news media helped slow the response to the disaster and tarnish the image of many of its victims.
All the journalistic self-congratulation over the Katrina coverage appears to have been misplaced.
UPDATE: Reader Alan Gray points to this passage from the WP article:
“The television stations were reporting that people were literally stepping over bodies and violence was out of control,” said Blanco press secretary Denise Bottcher, who was at the governor’s side. “But the National Guardsmen were saying that what we were seeing on CNN was contradictory to what they were seeing. It didn’t match up.”
Sound familiar? As Gray observes: “New Orleans today, Iraq tomorrow?”
Yeah. With all the resources they threw at this story, they blew it, big time. It does make you doubt their coverage from Iraq, and, well, everywhere else.
ANOTHER UPDATE: Matt Welch has much more on this:
We are now into Week Two of elite news organizations’ re-evaluation of the New Orleans horror stories they helped transmit to the world in the first seven days after Hurricane Katrina devastated the Gulf Coast. It was known already by September 6 that tales of evacuee ultra-violence in refugee centers like Baton Rouge and Houston were both false and strikingly similar to one another, but it took much longer to begin clearing the muck from the Big Easy.
Welch follows with a long interview with Major Ed Bush of the Louisiana National Guard. Read the whole thing, but here’s an excerpt:
Well, I worked hand-in-hand with, and got to know very well, Major David Baldwin, who was the commander of our special reaction team, [and]…certainly a principal player in keeping the security of the Dome. I mean his guys patrolled every inch of it, 24 hours a day. We constantly had moving patrols—outside, inside, through, on the field, in the bathrooms. And I said, “You know I’m hearing all this crap about bodies in the bathroom, and this and that. Are you finding any bodies?” And he said “No.”
He said, “You’ve got to help us; people are scared to death.”
They were scared to death because of what they were hearing on radio broadcasts and cable-news-fed rumors. If journalists were held to the same standards regarding product defects that automobile manufacturers are, well . . ..