Media Lies About Katrina Need Investigating
By Richard Davis (10/03/05)
Remember all of those stories about post-Katrina crime and chaos? Forget about them. The media is now “correcting” its coverage, cleaning up most of the thuggery and mayhem. Down the memory hole they go. Turns out it was all a simple reporting error, an upshot of rumors and careless news gathering. But is the media now telling us the truth or, being at their liberal best, just a bigger lie?
Bet on the lie, though inexplicably everyone seems to be taking the media at their word on this. The fact is we’ll probably never know, not because the truth is unknowable, but because there’s no one whose word we can trust. Everyone has an agenda or is constrained by political correctness -- journalists, bureaucrats, politicians, academics, race hustlers. None has any credibility.
Even as the media were confessing to one of the most egregious and irresponsible acts of malfeasance in journalistic history, they were lying. Their newfound honesty is based entirely on reports from the Superdome and convention center, where conditions appear to have been grossly exaggerated (though who can really say at this point?). Because they fictionalized coverage there, they’ve concluded that they must have done the same thing everywhere. “Reports of post-Katrina violence, anarchy mostly myth,” says a typical headline (Austin American-Statesmen).
That’s known as politically correct wishful thinking, and the media does a lot of it these days. It’s not based on facts about events in the hurricane zone, since political correctness doesn’t permit them to gather that information, let alone report on it publicly.
Since the initial stories about looting and widespread criminality appeared right after Katrina there has been a virtual blackout on the subject. Like criminality in general in America, the subject is too racially sensitive to be reported. Thus, though reporters are swarming all over New Orleans, and have been for some time, no one has bothered to assess any looting damage. It’s right there in front of their eyes. Not a word or a picture. If it had been a myth, we’d have been deluged with words and pictures. PC would have demanded it.
Believe it or not -- and after Katrina how can you not? -- political correctness and a rabid hatred of Bush (and conservatives) dictate the direction of mainstream media coverage these days. Every major story has their imprint. Both operated here and continue to do so.
There’s no question whatsoever that the media and their Democratic colleagues used Katrina and the poor of New Orleans to escalate Bush-bashing to hysterical levels and to engage in one of their favorite pastimes, race baiting. The worse they portrayed the situation, the worse it became for Bush. The more racial animosity they generated among blacks the better for the party, which is desperately trying to isolate African-Americans and keep them on their plantation.
The frantic coverage of the god-awful (and mostly fantasized?) conditions at the Superdome was designed solely to smear Bush (and, as an added bonus, whites). Bush’s procrastination and racist insensitivity had driven those people into savagery and bestiality. This was victimhood and Bush-bashing nonpareil, and the media were orgasmic .
Since their Superdome misinformation couldn’t account for the looters and hooligans elsewhere, who began appearing even during the eye of the hurricane, and because blacks began immediately to take offense at pictures of black looters, they were quickly edited out of the coverage. However, because of the embarrassment they had caused African-Americans, efforts were ramped up to portray them as victims of Bush’s heartless attitude toward the poor.
We live in an Orwellian world. The old truth served its purposes -- Bush and whites took a beating, blacks were further alienated -- but now a new truth is needed (to rehabilitate blacks’ self-image if nothing else). And the new truth, like all politically correct truth, is self-regulating. Who’s going to contradict reports that the poor of New Orleans acted better than the evidence overwhelmingly indicated? Only a racist would try.
But the media have two major problems -- themselves and their Democratic brethren. Much of the incorrect reporting came from their own news people, many of whom were eyewitnesses on the scene. Certainly these comrades can be re-educated in the new truth, but how do you disavow what’s already in print? And how do you ignore such obvious political bias? Simple, you blame gross incompetence. Given the media today, who’s going to argue?
But who can forget NBC’s Tony Zumbado’s eyewitness account: “You would never ever imagine what you saw in the Convention Center in New Orleans… The sanitation was unbelievable. The stench in there … was unbelievable. Dead people around the walls of the convention center, laying in the middle of the street in their dying chairs … They were just covered up … Babies, two babies dehydrated and died. I’m telling you, I couldn’t take it.” All a lie.
And how do you forget the reports from the mayor, police chief and assorted other black officials and personalities? On Oprah, Chief Eddie Compass reported babies being raped and their throats slit, while Mayor Nagin talked of hundreds of armed gang members “killing and raping” people inside the Dome. The people, he said, had descended to an “almost animalistic state.” They were on the scene.
Why Nagin, Compass and other blacks were so quick to attribute the worse possible behavior imaginable to other African-Americans is something I’ll leave for the social psychologists. Freudians would be useful.
There’s been little public comment, let alone outrage, over revelations that the news coverage that stunned Americans and smeared the nation worldwide was all a fake, a product of liberal bias, conscious or not, that is now being pawned off as bad reporting. Just business as usual in America’s newsrooms.
But they shouldn’t get off so easily. They transformed a natural disaster into a national disgrace. There’s almost no way to underestimate the societal damage. At the very least they displayed a reckless disregard for the truth then or are doing so now, and that merits greater public exposure and investigation. Some accountability is demanded.
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