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http://www.NewsAndOpinion.com | What do you "know" about the recent hurricanes that struck the Gulf Coast and how did you come by the information?
If your knowledge was acquired from watching the broadcast and cable networks, as it was for most people, you "know" only what their reporters and anchors told you.
What they told you initially was that as many as 10,000 people probably died in New Orleans after the city was hit by Hurricane Katrina. They also reported on roving gangs who looted and terrorized survivors. And they claimed people were being raped in a darkened Superdome due to lack of security.
You also "know" that emergency relief efforts were either nonexistent or ineffective and that it was the federal government that was largely responsible because it is incompetent and its white leaders don't like poor black people.
President Bush's approval ratings are at a record low due, in part, to the public's disapproval of how the media characterized his performance in the aftermath of Katrina and the largely unrebutted assault by some Democrats who engaged in political opportunism.
Cable TV reporters and anchors made their own kind of news by screaming for help and accusing the government of not sending any. Some newspapers lauded them for becoming involved in their stories and for demonstrating a moral conscience.
Weeks after these "facts" have been deeply implanted in the public consciousness, we are now learning that much of what we "know" is incorrect.
On Monday, the New Orleans Times-Picayune reported the body count numbers had been inflated. The paper also described the reported sniper attacks on civilians and fire and rescue personnel as some of the "scores of examples of myths about the (Super)dome and the Convention Center treated as fact by evacuees, the media and even some of New Orleans' top officials."
Ten bodies were recovered from the Superdome and four from the Convention Center, according to the Louisiana Department of Health and Hospitals, and among the 841 recorded deaths related to the storm, just four were identified as gunshot victims. National Guard spokesman Major Ed Bush was inside the Superdome and told the Los Angeles Times, "What I saw in the Superdome was just tremendous amounts of people helping people." He noted that most of those stories never made it into the newspapers or on TV.
It is dangerous in chaotic situations for journalists to accept as truth accounts of distressed "witnesses" who repeat rumors as if they have actually seen what they describe.
The Mayor of New Orleans, Ray Nagin, didn't help when he told Oprah Winfrey's vast TV audience about people "in that frickin' Superdome for five days watching dead bodies, watching hooligans killing people, raping people." Police Chief Eddie Compass told Oprah about "little babies getting raped" at the Superdome. Not true, but it made a riveting story and the public rewarded cable networks with high ratings.
A Los Angeles Times story Tuesday on the media's failure to report truthfully and accurately noted that journalists blame the breakdown of telephone service for the inaccuracies and says that race may also have been a factor.
Bad telephone service is not a sufficient excuse for putting anything and everything on the air without fact-checking. Waiting until you can get it right is always preferable to whatever ratings advantage one gets from allowing the journalistic equivalent of polluted water to pour into the public mind. The media should have acted as a levee in keeping out the bad stuff, but in too many cases it failed to do so.
Journalists like stories about the black poor because it allows them to beat up on a supposedly "uncaring" Republican administration, though they mostly seem to ignore such people when a Democrat is in the White House.
Few white reporters want to question or imply anything negative when it comes from a poor black person for fear they might be tarred with the "racist" label. It didn't help that some of New Orleans' top officials confirmed many of the accounts of lawlessness. But did they "know" these things, or were they repeating rumors? Did journalists bother to ask them, or was the story too good to be hurt by facts?
The Los Angeles Times story noted, "The media inaccuracies had consequences in the disaster zone." It also had unwarranted consequences on the president's approval ratings and may have caused Congress to throw too much money at the recovery effort without sufficient accountability.
What a shame the lies told by our media are protected by "Freedom of the Press." They should be free to tell the truth - not free to lie. That's taking license, not being free. And it does not leave us free when we don't know we can trust the reporters.
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Life's a banquet and most poor suckers are starving to death!
We can hope that the lies and distortion of fact will be well documented and be a part of the information process for the upcoming elections.
Because it's over for now the hoop-la associated with the huricanes could be forgtotten by then. The attention span has been reduced so it's possible we might even get some truths surfacing as what's next. Nahhhhh that would be boring and the media doesn't sell on boredom.
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"The only thing that makes life possible is permanent, intolerable uncertainty, not knowing what comes next."
Ursula K. Leguin
Point/Counterpoint
10-01-2005, 18:39
Media blindside in hindsight 
Non sibi sed patriae 
