America's Jenin, continued

In Jenin, the media's anti-Israel prejudices led to reports of a "massacre" where none existed. In New Orleans three years later - perhaps from a combination of sensationalism, latent anti-Black racism and not-so-latent Bush-hatred - the media got it completely wrong again:

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."

Unfortunately, just as many people continue to insist that thousands of Palestinians were butchered at Jenin, the most outrageous reports from Hurricane Katrina - that the levees were deliberately blown up, that babies were raped and bodies stacked in freezers at the Superdome, that victims resorted to cannibalism - may never really die. Believing the worst, especially when it fits your political belief system, seems to be human nature.

(That goes for bloggers from all over the political spectrum, including myself, as well. With a few brave exceptions, we didn't approach the Katrina reports with the skepticism we dedicated to, say, the Bush/National Guard story.)

Update: speaking of the Bush/National Guard story, Mary Mapes is still deep, deep in denial.

Posted by damian at September 27, 2005 12:22 PM | TrackBack