|
Katrina: Blaming the Messenger
Jefferson Flanders
(Published in AM/NY on October 5, 2005)
Did journalists create an unwarranted atmosphere of hysteria and panic during the days after Hurricane Katrina caused flooding
in New Orleans?
It turns out that many of the reports—of major loss of life, of rapes, beatings and murders at the Superdome and the
Convention Center, of rescue helicopters being fired on, of wide-spread lawlessness and disorder—were unfounded. New
Orleans apparently had very few homicides, accounts of rampant hooliganism were exaggerated, few rapes were reported, and
the death toll from Katrina is much lower than originally thought.
Certainly Katrina exposed worrisome aspects of today’s cable and Internet news coverage: a relentless, fast-paced live
journalism with little, if any, gatekeeping by editors—a hyper-fast first draft of history. This inevitably leads to
some rumors and false information being broadcast. (Newspapers, for the most part, did a better job of verification.)
Catastrophes are inherently hard to cover—the “fog of war” factor, spotty communications, and the inherent
unreliability of eyewitness accounts make it difficult to get at the truth. Remember that CNN, MSNBC, and Fox did not fabricate
those false and exaggerated reports: most came straight from official sources.
New Orleans Police chief Eddie Compass told of “little babies getting raped” at the Superdome and claimed his
officers were facing hundred of armed gang members (both claims now debunked). Mayor Ray Nagin, lamented that those trapped
in the “frickin’” Superdome were facing “dead bodies, watching hooligans killing people, raping people”—again,
an account that has not held up to scrutiny. Nagin estimated that the Katrina death toll would reach 10,000; the actual count
is somewhere around 1,000. Meanwhile, the hapless, out-of-touch head of FEMA, Michael Brown, had little accurate information
to contribute—by his own admission he was bouncing from one broadcast appearance to another with no time to assess the
situation on the ground.
The media can be blamed for spreading disinformation, but, in fairness, reporters naturally turned to the local and federal
authorities in charge of disaster response for information. If the media had been aggressively skeptical about these claims
of suffering and anarchy we would have later heard –from the same Monday morning quarterbacks—about the heartlessness,
cynicism and indifference of journalists.
It was a chaotic situation. The televised images of dead bodies in the street, of thousands of residents, many poor, sickly
and old, waiting for evacuation without food and water were real. Some of the best broadcast coverage – that of CNN’s
Anderson Cooper and Fox’s Shepard Smith—exposed both the incompetence and fecklessness of the authorities.
The media coverage of Katrina was far from perfect. But New Yorkers who remember 9/11 and the conflicting reports and secondhand
rumors of that sad day can understand the difficulty in separating fact from fearful fiction in the midst of a major urban
catastrophe. But this recent press-bashing, led by conservative media critics, isn’t aimed at getting at the truth.
Sadly, it reflects nothing more than “shooting the messenger,” a cynical and transparent attempt to shift blame
away from those who truly failed the people of New Orleans.
Jefferson Flanders teaches in NYU’s journalism department.
|
