TIM GRAHAM: The Anniversary of Bush-Trashing Hurricane Katrina ‘News.’
One reason that many Republican voters took a shine to Donald Trump in 2016 was the way he showed no respect to the national chattering classes of the Democrat-media complex. George W. Bush was a kinder, gentler Republican – and they compared him to Hitler. No matter which flavor of Republican was elected, the “objective” media savaged him.
We’ve reached the 20th anniversary of deadly Hurricane Katrina in the Gulf of Mexico, which killed an estimated 1,836 Americans. But misinformation landed first. NBC and MSNBC tremendously hyped Democrat Mayor Ray Nagin’s Today show estimate of 10,000 dead in New Orleans.
Appearing on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, NBC anchor Brian Williams offered a sermon: “These were Americans, and everyone watching the coverage all week, that kind of reached its peak last weekend, kept saying the same refrain: How is this happening in the United States? And the other refrain was, ‘Had this been Nantucket, had this been Boston, Cleveland, Chicago, Miami, Los Angeles, how many choppers would have–’” Then Williams was drowned out by applause.
Williams the serial exaggerator also claimed he could see bodies floating outside his hotel room in the French Quarter, but the New Orleans Advocate reported that the area had been largely spared in the catastrophe and experienced little flooding.
Read the whole thing.
Last October, during the run-up to the election: Scott Jennings Torches CNN Colleagues Calling for ‘Political Restraint’ Over Hurricane Response.
JENNINGS: I lived through Hurricane Katrina in the Bush White House, as I know you lived through it Anderson, covering it, and I don’t recall any restraint by Democrats or the national media coming after George W. Bush and FEMA and every other thing. It was immediately politicized, and, you know, I mean, I well remember it. It’s seared into my brain.
And so now, all these people are out here saying, “We can’t politicize this, we can’t criticize this,” you know, nothing can be said about Biden and Harris here or FEMA or anything else, and I just think, if a Republican were in the White House, and a Republican president were at the beach, and the vice president were raising money with celebrities, I guarantee you somebody would be mad about it.
As Bonchie of Red State adds, “There will be no ‘political restraint’ regarding hurricane responses after what Democrats did to George W. Bush. The Biden administration has made several mistakes that deserve to be called out before voters head to the polls in November. Perhaps one day, Democrats will learn not to set precedents that come back to bite them. Until then it’s game on.”
From Reason in December of 2005: They Shoot Helicopters, Don’t They?
On September 1, 72 hours after Hurricane Katrina ripped through New Orleans, the Associated Press news wire flashed a nightmare of a story: “Katrina Evacuation Halted Amid Gunfire…Shots Are Fired at Military Helicopter.”
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Like many early horror stories about ultra-violent New Orleans natives, whether in their home city or in far-flung temporary shelters, the A.P. article turned out to be false. Evacuation from the city of New Orleans was never “halted,” according to officials from the Coast Guard, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), and the Louisiana National Guard. The only helicopter airlifts stopped were those by a single private company, Acadian Ambulance, from a single location: the Superdome. And Acadian officials, who had one of the only functional communications systems in all of New Orleans during those first days, were taking every opportunity to lobby for a massive military response.
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But the basic premise of the article that introduced the New Orleans helicopter sniper to a global audience was dead wrong, just like so many other widely disseminated Katrina nightmares. No 7-year-old rape victim with a slit throat was ever found, even though the atrocity was reported in scores of newspapers. The Convention Center freezer was not stacked with 30 or 40 dead bodies, nor was the Superdome a live-in morgue. (An estimated 10 people died inside the two buildings combined, and only one was slain, according to the best data from National Guard officials at press time.)
Tales of rapes, carjackings, and gang violence by Katrina refugees quickly circulated in such evacuee centers as Baton Rouge, Houston, and Leesville, Louisiana–and were almost as quickly debunked.
From a journalistic point of view, the root causes of the bogus reports were largely the same: The communication breakdown without and especially within New Orleans created an information vacuum in which wild oral rumor thrived. Reporters failed to exercise enough skepticism in passing along secondhand testimony from victims (who often just parroted what they picked up from the rumor mill), and they were far too eager to broadcast as fact apocalyptic statements from government officials–such as Mayor Ray Nagin’s prediction of 10,000 Katrina-related deaths (there were less than 900 in New Orleans at press time) and Police Superintendent Edwin Compass’ reference on The Oprah Winfrey Show to “little babies getting raped”–without factoring in discounts for incompetence and ulterior motives.
In September of 2005, Mickey Kaus wrote, “Previously, [the media] couldn’t grouse about the Iraq War without seeming defeatist (and anti-liberationist and maybe even selfishly isolationist). Even the Clintons never figured a way out of that trap…Katrina gives [the MSM] a way to talk about Iraq without talking about Iraq. No wonder Gwen Ifill smiles the ‘inner smile.’”
Such demagoguery produced results, Bryan Preston wrote in November of 2006 at Hot Air. “What cost the GOP its majorities in Congress and statehouses?… The GOP’s fortunes fatally cratered in the Fall of 2005, and were recovering ever since minus a couple of blips this year. What happened in the Fall of ‘05? Katrina. That storm turned out to be the hurricane that changed history:”
There’s a lesson in all of this, that’s an old one but an important one to remember: Demagoguery wins, and more so when it comes in the middle of a horrific disaster. Also, lies do indeed travel halfway around the world before the truth gets its boots on. By the time the story of New Orleans buses surfaced (only to be buried by the AP and ignored by the national media), the disaster had been framed as a Bush failure and the damage was already done. The media’s later mea culpa did nothing to change the basic narrative that already had a life of its own.
Years later, then-DNC Chairwoman Donna Brazile would later confess at CNN, “Bush came through on Katrina,” but as a wise future mayor would advise his fellow Democrats in the fall of 2008, “Never let a crisis go to waste.”
