Rapes, Violence, and estimates of the dead were wrong (About Hurricane Katrina)

[Javier]

Katrina Takes a Toll on Truth, News Accuracy
# Rumors supplanted accurate information and media magnified the problem. Rapes, violence and estimates of the dead were wrong.

By Susannah Rosenblatt and James Rainey, Times Staff Writers

BATON ROUGE, La. — 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."

Journalists and officials who have reviewed the Katrina disaster blamed the inaccurate reporting in large measure on the breakdown of telephone service, which prevented dissemination of accurate reports to those most in need of the information. Race may have also played a factor.

The wild rumors filled the vacuum and seemed to gain credence with each retelling — that an infant's body had been found in a trash can, that sharks from Lake Pontchartrain were swimming through the business district, that hundreds of bodies had been stacked in the Superdome basement.

"It doesn't take anything to start a rumor around here," Louisiana National Guard 2nd Lt. Lance Cagnolatti said at the height of the Superdome relief effort. "There's 20,000 people in here. Think when you were in high school. You whisper something in someone's ear. By the end of the day, everyone in school knows the rumor — and the rumor isn't the same thing it was when you started it."

Follow-up reporting has discredited reports of a 7-year-old being raped and murdered at the Superdome, roving bands of armed gang members attacking the helpless, and dozens of bodies being shoved into a freezer at the Convention Center.

Hyperbolic reporting spread through much of the media.

Fox News, a day before the major evacuation of the Superdome began, issued an "alert" as talk show host Alan Colmes reiterated reports of "robberies, rapes, carjackings, riots and murder. Violent gangs are roaming the streets at night, hidden by the cover of darkness."

The Los Angeles Times adopted a breathless tone the next day in its lead news story, reporting that National Guard troops "took positions on rooftops, scanning for snipers and armed mobs as seething crowds of refugees milled below, desperate to flee. Gunfire crackled in the distance."

The New York Times repeated some of the reports of violence and unrest, but the newspaper usually was more careful to note that the information could not be verified.

The tabloid Ottawa Sun reported unverified accounts of "a man seeking help gunned down by a National Guard soldier" and "a young man run down and then shot by a New Orleans police officer."

London's Evening Standard invoked the future-world fantasy film "Mad Max" to describe the scene and threw in a "Lord of the Flies" allusion for good measure.

Televised images and photographs affirmed the widespread devastation in one of America's most celebrated cities.

"I don't think you can overstate how big of a disaster New Orleans is," said Kelly McBride, ethics group leader at the Poynter Institute, a Florida school for professional journalists. "But you can imprecisely state the nature of the disaster. … Then you draw attention away from the real story, the magnitude of the destruction, and you kind of undermine the media's credibility."

Times-Picayune Editor Jim Amoss cited telephone breakdowns as a primary cause of reporting errors, but said the fact that most evacuees were poor African Americans also played a part.

"If the dome and Convention Center had harbored large numbers of middle class white people," Amoss said, "it would not have been a fertile ground for this kind of rumor-mongering."

Some of the hesitation that journalists might have had about using the more sordid reports from the evacuation centers probably fell away when New Orleans' top officials seemed to confirm the accounts.

Nagin and Police Chief Eddie Compass appeared on "Oprah" a few days after trouble at the Superdome had peaked.

Compass told of "the little babies getting raped" at the Superdome. And Nagin made his claim about hooligans raping and killing.

State officials this week said their counts of the dead at the city's two largest evacuation points fell far short of early rumors and news reports. Ten bodies were recovered from the Superdome and four from the Convention Center, said Bob Johannessen, spokesman for the Louisiana Department of Health and Hospitals.

(National Guard officials put the body count at the Superdome at six, saying the other four bodies came from the area around the stadium.)

Of the 841 recorded hurricane-related deaths in Louisiana, four are identified as gunshot victims, Johannessen said. One victim was found in the Superdome but was believed to have been brought there, and one was found at the Convention Center, he added.

Relief workers said that while the media hyped criminal activity, plenty of real suffering did occur at the Katrina relief centers.

"The hurricane had just passed, you had massive trauma to the city," said Lt. Col. Pete Schneider of the Louisiana National Guard.

"No air conditioning, no sewage … it was not a nice place to be. All those people just in there, they were frustrated, they were hot. Out of all that chaos, all of these rumors start flying."

Louisiana National Guard Col. Thomas Beron, who headed security at the Superdome, said that for every complaint, "49 other people said, 'Thank you, God bless you.' "

The media inaccuracies had consequences in the disaster zone.

Bush, of the National Guard, said that reports of corpses at the Superdome filtered back to the facility via AM radio, undermining his struggle to keep morale up and maintain order.

"We had to convince people this was still the best place to be," Bush said. "What I saw in the Superdome was just tremendous amounts of people helping people."

But, Bush said, those stories received scant attention in newspapers or on television.

Times staff writer Scott Gold contributed to this report.

[TeeRaySix9Teen]

not a surprised. i posted before how the head of the Sexual Assault division in New Orleans reported that there was actually only 2 "attempted rapes" and both suspects were arrested.

[Trauma-san]

The media exagerated a bad situation, and made up negativity?  Nooooooooooooooo.  Say it aint' so!  If Bill Clinton would have been in office, the only thing we would have seen on television was children dancing around holding hands, throwing daisies out of a little wicker handbasket.  In their rush to crucify the president, and anyone else he has anything to do with (ahem, Fema), they even had to make shit up to get the point across.  The media is one of the largest forces of evil in the world today, you wanna talk about wars, look at the war the media is waging against anything positive. 

[J Bananas]

I heard there wasnt even a huge flood and it's all fabricated to cover up the war in Iraq, buts that just what I heard...

[Trauma-san]

Well, what I heard, was that George Bush and Dick Cheney personally blew up the levees, and that the storm was actually just some tricky shit they had wired up to the Goodyear Blimp. 

[TeeRaySix9Teen]

Well, what I heard, was that George Bush and Dick Cheney personally blew up the levees, and that the storm was actually just some tricky shit they had wired up to the Goodyear Blimp. 

lol@ Bush having the brainpower to carry out a plan that sophisticated...

[coola]

The media exagerated a bad situation, and made up negativity?  Nooooooooooooooo.  Say it aint' so!  If Bill Clinton would have been in office, the only thing we would have seen on television was children dancing around holding hands, throwing daisies out of a little wicker handbasket.  In their rush to crucify the president, and anyone else he has anything to do with (ahem, Fema), they even had to make shit up to get the point across.  The media is one of the largest forces of evil in the world today, you wanna talk about wars, look at the war the media is waging against anything positive. 

the govt and media work in uni-sen. have you ever realised that if someone asks you a favor, then you tell them you didnt do it, they get all pissed off at you, then they find out you did do it, so they feel twice as good about you after then they did before ? well thats whats happen, IF you know what i mean..

[ToOoOoN!!!]

Well, what I heard, was that George Bush and Dick Cheney personally blew up the levees, and that the storm was actually just some tricky shit they had wired up to the Goodyear Blimp. 

lol@ Bush having the brainpower to carry out a plan that sophisticated...

LMAO

[Trauma-san]

Well, what I heard, was that George Bush and Dick Cheney personally blew up the levees, and that the storm was actually just some tricky shit they had wired up to the Goodyear Blimp. 

lol@ Bush having the brainpower to carry out a plan that sophisticated...

Yeah, I can't ever figure out which one it is.  I wish the democratic party would clarify that for me.  Is he a bumbling idiot, or is he a criminal mastermind that concoted wars around the world to pad his pockets.  I'm so glad I have them in congress to figure it all out for me, because when I look at it (with my inferior mind) he appears to just be an honest guy doing the best job he can.  They're all Rhodes scholars and doctors, though, I'm sure they know more about it than me. 

[Javier]

Well, what I heard, was that George Bush and Dick Cheney personally blew up the levees, and that the storm was actually just some tricky shit they had wired up to the Goodyear Blimp. 

lol@ Bush having the brainpower to carry out a plan that sophisticated...

Yeah, I can't ever figure out which one it is.  I wish the democratic party would clarify that for me.  Is he a bumbling idiot, or is he a criminal mastermind that concoted wars around the world to pad his pockets.  I'm so glad I have them in congress to figure it all out for me, because when I look at it (with my inferior mind) he appears to just be an honest guy doing the best job he can.  They're all Rhodes scholars and doctors, though, I'm sure they know more about it than me. 

When has any important member of the democratic party has said anything about Bush being a mumbling idiot or statin that Bush has this master evil plan?

[TeeRaySix9Teen]

Well, what I heard, was that George Bush and Dick Cheney personally blew up the levees, and that the storm was actually just some tricky shit they had wired up to the Goodyear Blimp. 

lol@ Bush having the brainpower to carry out a plan that sophisticated...

Yeah, I can't ever figure out which one it is.  I wish the democratic party would clarify that for me.  Is he a bumbling idiot, or is he a criminal mastermind that concoted wars around the world to pad his pockets.  I'm so glad I have them in congress to figure it all out for me, because when I look at it (with my inferior mind) he appears to just be an honest guy doing the best job he can.  They're all Rhodes scholars and doctors, though, I'm sure they know more about it than me. 

yup, if it makes u feel any better...i dont think he blew up the levees...im way more on the side that says "bumbling fuckin idiot"

[Javier]

Oh by the way, all the media was doing was asking important people what they have seen or heard.  And these people just listened to the people spreading rumors and those rumors were reported.  Blame the media for just believing them but not for making shit up

[TeeRaySix9Teen]

Oh by the way, all the media was doing was asking important people what they have seen or heard.  And these people just listened to the people spreading rumors and those rumors were reported.  Blame the media for just believing them but not for making shit up

i blame the media though too man. You know the media is all about ratings and sensationalism. there are no ratings in saying "everything is calm and people are ok" lol. Shit, i watched so much coverage of that shit...and it was makin me sick. I dont know how many times they interviewed someone who was stranded by the hurricane, and the person being interviewed was keeping positive and saying they were ok. This is how the interview would go...

Interviewer-"Tell us how bad things are in New Orleans"
Person being interviewed-"Its bad, but we're doin ok...just trying to stay positive"
Interviewer-"Yeah, but tell us how this tragedy has destroyed your life"
Person being interviewed-"We lost everything, but we have faith in God and we'll make it through this"
Interviewer-"We've heard news of rapes and angry mobs with weapons terrorizing innocent people in the Superdown.."
Person being interviewed-"I havent witnessed anything like..."
Interviewer-"Sorry...we've ran out of time....good luck..."

lol

[Javier]

Yeah thats true.  it was just a combination of thigns ya know

[TeeRaySix9Teen]

Yeah thats true.  it was just a combination of thigns ya know

yeah. thing is, the media WAS probably gettin inflated accounts of what was really goin on. im sure people were blowin it up....because thats what everyone does. My beef with tha media is only this...they KNOW whats the truth and whats not. they handpicked the right people...that would tell them the right thing for the camera, that would get them ratings. the media imo has a responsibility to report the truth (yeah....even Fox news, dont count on it happenin anytime soon tho lol). so when they dont, even if its because they got false information...their responsible for it. they should investigate further before just throwin anything on the news.