[Rhodes22-list] Katrina News

Wed May 24 07:44:54 EDT 2006

Here's a couple of articles on Katrina that you won't
get in the MSM.  A bit lengthy but worthwhile if
you're interested in truth.  I'm leaving the coast
today.  This work will be here for awhile.

Brad

----------------------

May 23, 2006 
Katrina: What the Media Missed
By Lou Dolinar

Remember the dozens, maybe hundreds, of rapes,
murders, stabbings and deaths resulting from official
neglect at the Superdome after Hurricane Katrina? The
ones that never happened, as even the national media
later admitted?

Sure, we all remember the original reporting, if not
the back-pedaling.

Here's another one: Do you remember the dramatic TV
footage of National Guard helicopters landing at the
Superdome as soon as Katrina passed, dropping off tens
of thousands saved from certain death? The corpsmen
running with stretchers, in an echo of M*A*S*H,
carrying the survivors to ambulances and the medical
center? About how the operation, which also included
the Coast Guard, regular military units, and local
first responders, continued for more than a week?

Me neither. Except that it did happen, and got at best
an occasional, parenthetical mention in the national
media. The National Guard had its headquarters for
Katrina, not just a few peacekeeping troops, in what
the media portrayed as the pit of Hell. Hell was one
of the safest places to be in New Orleans, smelly as
it was. The situation was always under control, not
surprisingly because the people in control were always
there.

>From the Dome, the Louisiana Guard's main command ran
at least 2,500 troops who rode out the storm inside
the city, a dozen emergency shelters, 200-plus boats,
dozens of high-water vehicles, 150 helicopters, and a
triage and medical center that handled up to 5,000
patients (and delivered 7 babies). The Guard command
headquarters also coordinated efforts of the police,
firefighters and scores of volunteers after the storm
knocked out local radio, as well as other regular
military and other state Guard units.

Jack Harrison, a spokesman for the National Guard
Bureau in Arlington, Virginia, cited "10,244 sorties
flown, 88,181 passengers moved, 18,834 cargo tons
hauled, 17,411 saves" by air. Unlike the politicians,
they had a working chain of command that commandeered
more relief aid from other Guard units outside the
state. From day one.

There were problems, true: FEMA melted down. Political
leaders, from the Mayor to Governor to the White
House, showed "A Failure of Initiative", as a recent
House report put it. That report, along with sharply
critical studies by the White House and the Senate,
delve into the myriad of breakdowns, shortages and
miscommunications that hampered relief efforts. 

Still, by focusing on the part of the glass that was
half-empty, the national media imposed a near total
blackout on the nerve center of what may have been the
largest, most successful aerial search and rescue
operation in history.

"The Coast Guard, the National Guard, the military in
general performed heroically," said Sen. Robert
Barham, R-Oak Ridge, who monitored the Superdome
operation from Baton Rouge as head of the Louisiana
State Senate's Homeland Security Committee. His
opposite number in the Louisiana House, Rep. Francis
Thompson, D-Delhi, said, "They (the Guard) did a
yeoman's job." Both said they were getting very
different pictures from TV than they got from the
Guardsmen at the Dome, and the state fish and wildlife
department, another key player in the rescue
operation. 

"TV of the Superdome was perplexing to most folks,"
Thompson said. "You had them playing the tapes of the
same incidents over and over, it tends to bias your
thinking some, you tend to think it's worse than it
really is." Official estimates at this point suggest
the Guard, working from the Dome, saved 17,000 by air
and uncounted thousands more by boat.

Let's try that again: The cavalry wasn't late. It
didn't arrive on Thursday smoking a cigar and cussing.
It was there all along. 

The National Guard's response to Katrina was even more
robust than I suspected in my reporting for
RealClearPolitics in September, and in more detail for
National Review, where I revealed for the first time
that rescue operations saved up to 50,000 lives, with
perhaps an equal number making their way to shelters
on their own.

Fifty thousand New Orleans residents were in danger of
death from drowning, heatstroke, dehydration and
disease. That was a tough one to get through the media
reality-distortion field, but the numbers have since
been confirmed by Congress, the White House, Louisiana
state officials and the relevant agencies themselves.
If anything, I understated the size of the rescue
effort. What I didn't understand was the critical role
the Superdome headquarters played.

I initially heard about the Dome headquarters from
Maj. John T. Dressler, who serves with the National
Guard Bureau in Washington D.C, an organization that
coordinates efforts of State Guard units which serve
under their respective governors. Dressler was present
in the command tent there and pulled together
after-action reports for the Guard as a whole from its
fifty-plus individual state commands. His account was
so far at variance with the picture the media
portrayed that I suspected a hoax, as did my RCP
editor. As it turns out, various Guard documents,
personal memories, and sworn testimony support his
story, which in Louisiana is no great secret. It's
just the rest of the country that's been kept in the
dark.

This is how it happened:

As has been reported, when the Superdome was
established as a shelter of last resort on the weekend
before Katrina hit, the Louisiana National Guard sent
several hundred soldiers there who were trained in
policing and crowd control. They also, as rarely
noted, stocked huge quantities of combat rations, also
known as Meals Ready to Eat (MREs), and water, both of
which were never in short supply, according to Maj. Ed
Bush, who was inside the Dome the whole time.

Dressler said that about 2,000 other troops, MREs and
water were stationed at armories and schools around
the city, mini-versions of what the Guard had set up
in the Dome. They had about 50 high-water vehicles
available, and two dozen boats. Some satellite sites
and equipment would later be put out of business by
flooding. Elsewhere in the state and around the
country, another 6,000 troops were standing by. 

As these preparations were underway, National Guard
helicopters dispersed out of state away from the
storm, which was standard operating procedure. Like
the Coast Guard (also running by a detailed playbook),
they later circled south behind Katrina and followed
the storm into the city. Thus there were up to 64
National Guard helicopters that began rescue
operations, as well as critical reconnaissance that
revealed more details of the breached levees, arriving
Monday afternoon and into the evening. Because of high
winds, it literally was impossible for help to arrive
any sooner.

The main operations headquarters for the National
Guard was at the Jackson Barracks in the hard-hit
Ninth Ward, which began flooding after nearby levees
breached early Monday, a critical fact that wasn't
clear at many levels of government until the next day.
In one of those ironies of military operations, this
crisis may have ended up saving lives. Most of the
staff was local, with three liaison officers from the
National Guard Bureau in Washington. Long before they
had aerial recon, Guard commanders knew by 9:00am that
their city was in deep trouble, with water about 20
feet deep around the barracks. (This was about the
time that TV anchors were reporting the city had
"dodged a bullet".)

They contacted the National Guard Bureau in Washington
via satellite phone for more help. That led officials
at the national level to call a noon teleconference
among all 52 state guard commanders, who got a laundry
list of what the locals needed. The result was that
more helicopter search and rescue teams began arriving
late Monday from as far away as Wisconsin, close
behind the original batch, mostly local, that tracked
the storm in. 

The procedure ran under a system known as EMACs
(Emergency Management Assistance Compacts), a mutual
aid pact among states. The conference call became a
daily routine that was New Orleans' primary lifeline
to outside aid. It bypassed local officials and the
fouled-up federal chain of command that led to much
publicized infighting among the Governor, FEMA and the
White House. According to the Senate Select Committee
on Katrina, "This process quickly resulted in the
largest National Guard deployment in U.S. history,
with 50,000 troops and supporting equipment arriving
from 49 states and four territories within two weeks.
These forces participated in every aspect of emergency
response, from medical care to law enforcement and
debris removal..." the report said. All from the
Superdome.

Meanwhile, late Monday, Louisiana National Guard HQ
moved its high tech "unified command suite" and tents
to the upper parking deck of the Superdome. This
degraded communications for about four hours but
ultimately gave them satellite dishes for phone and
Internet connections to the outside world, Wi-fi, plus
radios that were the only talk of the town.
Helicopters and boats, as we noted, were already
bringing in survivors there. About fifty men and
women, black and white, worked per shift, equipped
with maps, laptops, phone and radios to coordinate the
rescue operation. The rescuers called it the "eagles'
nest". 

The operation was impossible to hide or ignore and
some news outlets may have mentioned it in passing.
Still, I haven't seen anything reported that sounded
like what the two Majors described Tuesday morning:
helicopters landing every minute; big ones, like the
National Guard Chinooks, literally shaking the decking
of the rooftop parking lot; little ones like the
ubiquitous Coast Guard Dolphins; Black Hawks
everywhere, many with their regular seats torn out so
they could accommodate more passengers, standing.
Private air ambulance services evacuating patients
from flood-threatened hospitals. Owners of private
helicopters who showed up to volunteer, and were sent
on their way with impromptu briefings on basic rescue
needs. Overhead, helicopters stacked in a holding
pattern. 

By the end of the week 150 National Guard aircraft
were operating, plus regular military and Coast Guard
units who also dropped off survivors. The biggest
problem rescuers faced, according to crew members I've
interviewed, was the danger of aerial collisions.

This is at the Superdome, remember, supposedly Ground
Zero for bad behavior and the scene of massive
governmental incompetence. 

Also hard to ignore at the Dome was another big
operation: support for local first responders. This
effort included many of the black local heroes among
the police and firefighting squads, despite misleading
media reports leaving the impression they had either
fled the city or walked off the job. The majority of
local police and firefighters were available, though
their communications system had been wiped out. They
quickly hooked up with pre-positioned Guard units, as
well as an army of volunteers in everything from
flatboats to airboats. "We were just handing out
radios to anyone who wanted one," Dressler said.

The distribution of extra National Guard radios also
helps explain why deaths were much lower than the
10,000 anticipated, even though the city's emergency
services comm network had been knocked out. National
Guard communications, limited by range, were far from
perfect, but better than nothing. In some cases,
Dressler said, helicopter crews called for firemen
equipped with axes and power saws, picking them up and
dropping them on the roofs of submerged buildings to
pry survivors from attics. Conversely, when boat crews
picked up survivors who were near death from
dehydration, they could call in helicopters for quick
evacuation. 

In military jargon, the radios were a "force
multiplier," as was aerial recon. The latter enabled
police and fire rescues to be prioritized for the most
desperate. Dressler said the Guard was controlling
more than 200 boats, most of which were run by mixed
crews of Guardsmen, police, firefighters, volunteers
and officers of the Louisiana Department of Wildlife
and Fisheries. Later in the week, when reports of
rioting and looting broke out, the Guard set up a
special transportation unit of high water vehicles to
whisk police and sheriffs' teams to trouble spots.
Thousands of survivors came to the Dome by boat,
thanks to police and firefighters and the rest of the
rescue flotilla. Between the radios and first-hand
reports from pilots and boat crews coming in, the comm
center at the Dome had a good feel for what was going
on in their city - something the media utterly lacked.

Besides rescuers and local first responders, another
big story at the Dome was the medical center. Like a
Chinook helicopter landing on your roof, that sure was
hard to miss. Fifteen doctors and a total of 65
medical personnel set up at the New Orleans Arena,
within spitting distance of the Dome. It was primarily
for survivors brought in by air and boat, but also for
people in the Superdome with medical problems. There
was never any shortage of medical care, Dressler and
Bush both said. 

The Arena medical center cycled through triage and
treatment of up to 5,000 injured or sick victims,
Dressler said. Those in the worst shape were evacuated
to the New Orleans airport and out of the region,
those in good shape hydrated and sent to the
Superdome. The success of the makeshift medical center
was such that there were just six deaths at the entire
Superdome complex: four of natural causes, one drug
overdose, and one suicide during the week of
supposedly rampant anarchy and death. 

Triage (there was another medical facility at the
airport) may have been the most critical element in
limiting deaths once the levees broke and the city
flooded. Rescue operations were brisk, but survivors
of that kind of trauma aren't always coherent or aware
of their own life-threatening injuries, particularly
dehydration. Absent care, hundreds if not thousands
could have died even after they were rescued and
brought to the Dome. 

Most of the national media also neglected to mention
the seven babies that National Guard physicians
delivered, something Maj. Ed Bush said he pointed out
repeatedly. Overall, the false claims of up to 200
dead at the Dome, including murder victims, had
clueless FEMA officials showing up at the end of the
week with a refrigerated 18-wheeler to claim the
stacks of bodies. 

In all this time, Dressler said, "We didn't see a
single camera crew or reporter on the scene. Maybe
someone was there with a cell phone or a digital
camera but I didn't see anyone." This was in the
headquarters area. Maj. Ed Bush, meanwhile, did start
seeing reporters on Tuesday and Wednesday, but inside
the Dome, most were interested in confirming the
stacks of bodies in the freezers, interviews with rape
victims, he said, and other mayhem that never
happened. He pitched the rescue angle and no one was
interested. A few reporters and film crews did hitch
rides on helicopters, came back, and produced stories
of people stuck on rooftops, not stories about
rescues, he said. 

Neither Maj. Bush nor Dressler saw TV until the end of
the week. They were aghast. Apart from sporadic
mentions, the most significant note taken of this
gigantic operation was widespread reporting of the
rumor that a sniper had fired on a helicopter. What
were termed evacuations in some cases, rescue
operations in others, were said to have been halted as
a result. "I never knew how badly we were being killed
in the media," Maj. Ed Bush says. In reality, the only
shots fired at the Guard were purely metaphorical and
originated with the media. Rescues continued 24/7 at a
furious pace. 

In the end, the media timeline was exactly backwards.
The bulk of all rescues took place on Monday, Tuesday
and Wednesday, and began tapering off on Thursday,
officials say. Their account is buttressed by a
Washington Post poll of survivors, which indicates
that 75 percent of the survivors who had been trapped
and rescued were picked by Thursday, and virtually all
were picked up by the end of the week. 

In other words, by the time the clichÃ©d "long-awaited
help" arrived, in the form of a visually-stimulating
cigar being chomped by a cussing Lt. General Russel L.
Honore, the worst was over. The majority of trapped
survivors were out of the direst straits and awaiting
evacuation.

They weren't happy campers. Besides the smelly but
safe Superdome, which was not a pleasant place, many
had been dropped off on the nearest high ground,
primarily Interstate overpasses, in the rush to clear
rooftops and attics. There were genuine shortages of
food and water at these locations, especially at the
Convention Center, another drop-off point. They were
stuck, as search and rescue and lifesaving continued. 

The biggest story everyone missed was that the guys in
charge - and you're entitled to your own political
persuasion here - weren't out-of-touch FEMA
bureaucrats, or a president somewhere fund-raising, or
a paralyzed governor in Baton Rouge, or a mayor
hanging out with his crew at a posh hotel a block
away. 

Except for the Coast Guard's brilliant performance,
which saved up to 30,000 lives, most of the rescue
operation was run by local National Guard middle
management, combat tested in Iraq, accustomed to
hardship, and intimately familiar with the city. (In
fact, as I previously reported, Guard members rescued
other Guard members, who then reported for flight
duty.) The junior officers munched the same
unappetizing but adequate rations as everyone else at
the Dome. They were struggling to catch a few winks
when they could in the garage level under the LZ, with
concrete chips raining down on them when the Chinooks
landed and rattled the decking. 

Like everyone except the TV anchors, they squatted to
do their business in the nearest stairwell. "You just
walked down the steps, and when you hit water, there
you were," Major Dressler recalls fondly. "We had a
little boy's stairwell, and a little girl's
stairwell."

They were, in other words, on the scene, and they knew
exactly the grotesqueries in the Dome and in the rest
of the city. The priorities were search, rescue and
lifesaving, not the comfort level of survivors they
rescued who they knew would survive somehow if they
sorted out the sick from the healthy. It looked brutal
on TV, but it was effective, giving a whole new
meaning to that venerable military clichÃ© "quick and
dirty."

Someone should have told them that's not how real
Americans are supposed to act when they could be on
national television. But they weren't watching TV, so
they didn't even have a political or PR motive to
appear to be doing something. They were too busy. 

The true story of the Dome accounts for a lot of what
looked liked official incompetence. Some specific
examples:

--Why didn't the Guard fly in porta-potties as the
crowd at the Dome stewed in its own rich and savory
juices? Well, toilets worked through Tuesday
afternoon, and by stinky Wednesday, search and rescue
missions continued to ramp up and still had the
highest conceivable priority. Had helicopters been
diverted, people trapped in attics, on rooftops, and
in broken-down hospitals would have died. Other
apparently brutal behavior, such as ignoring visible
corpses scattered around the city, were also seen as a
distraction from the main task. 

--Many survivors in the Dome complained of food and
water shortages, a charge that reverberated through
the media echo chamber. According to Maj. Bush, the
Guard stuck to strict rationing - one MRE and one
liter of water per day, exactly what troops got in
combat in Iraq. Because so many victims were being
brought in so quickly in an open-ended rescue
operation, the Guard wasn't taking any chances of
running out of supplies by opening an all-you-can eat
buffet. It started out with a 3-day supply for ten
thousand people, and ultimately brought in 300,000
MREs and 397,000 liter bottles of water, a 30-day
supply for 10,000 people. And as Maj. Bush points out,
there wasn't a single death from dehydration - a
constant threat to those waiting to be rescued from
rooftops and attics in the 100-degree heat and in the
steamy atmosphere of the Dome as well.

--Why wasn't the Superdome evacuated sooner? National
Guard officials on the scene saw no need for it until
Thursday, and they were right. First, all resources at
their disposal were, quite correctly, focused on
search and rescue and lifesaving, rather than on
re-supply and the comfort level of those saved. Had
they deployed helicopters for marginal tasks, people
still stuck on rooftops or languishing in powerless
hospitals would have died. When rescues began to taper
off on Thursday, they began to shift resources to
evacuation. In other words, they had a plan: rescue,
triage, hydrate, evacuate. Not exactly rocket science,
but if you leave out the rescue and triage part, as
the national media did, the rest makes no sense. The
Guard spent the week after Katrina in an exquisite
balancing act between the needs of healthy survivors
in the Dome, the care of the sick and injured in the
Arena, and hauling in the tens of thousands who faced
death on rooftops and in attics. Then they could worry
about getting the hell out of town.

--Why did the evacuation take so long? The full
evacuation proceeded rapidly once it began on
Thursday, Maj. Dressler said. Once again, however, the
use of the Superdome as a staging area distorted
perceptions: Even as the previously rescued were being
bused away, more were arriving by helicopter, boat,
and under their own power as rescue operations reached
a crescendo. The new arrivals delayed the completion
of evacuation until well into the weekend.

To be fair to the national media, there were good
reasons the rescue angle was grossly underreported.
For the first few days, no one was keeping close track
of numbers. Nor was there a "center" for the media to
cover since most of the reporters were stuck
elsewhere, away from the action. The rescuers
themselves, which also included the Coast Guard and
local first responders, knew they saved a lot of
lives, but feared how many thousands, or even ten of
thousands, may have been left behind to fill the
25,000 body bags on hand. With Mayor Nagin predicting
up to 10,000 dead, no one was in any mood to crow. 

It was a week and a half before anyone saw a glimmer
of hope. That was when boat crews began a formal,
gridded house-by-house search, leading to cautious
reports on Sept. 8 that "Katrina death toll could be
lower than feared," but no one was ready to say how
much lower. By then, however, the view of Katrina as a
massive governmental screw-up had been set in
concrete, and it wasn't until Oct. 5 that the intense
official search for bodies ended, with a toll of 972
in Louisiana, a number that has since crept slowly
upward to about 1,300. 

And there were screw-ups. The lead-up to Katrina took
decades and cut across party lines. More resources
could have been put in place in the few days before
the hurricane struck. More could have been done to
evacuate, particularly for the sick and elderly. But
once the levees burst on Monday, it is hard to make a
case that many more lives could have been saved - and
that's the bottom line in any disaster. 

"We had a major city destroyed," said Dr. James Jay
Carafano, a Homeland Security expert at the Heritage
Foundation. "If it had happened in any other country
on the planet, tens of thousands of people would have
died."

Carafano also points out that the media's stereotype
of victims as poor and black is wrong. The
demographics of the dead mostly mirror those of the
city, but for one exception: Most who died were
elderly. Stats at the Louisiana Department of Public
Health show that people 60 and older make up about 15
percent of the city's residents but 74 percent of the
known victims. Blacks, according to a lengthy report
from Knight-Ridder in December, were slightly
under-represented among the dead. The mortalities of
Katrina, in other words, were less about race and
class and more akin to the official neglect of the
most vulnerable during heat waves that killed more
than 1,000 elderly in the Midwest in 1995 and nearly
15,000 in France in 2003. Hospitals and nursing homes
were particularly hard hit.

The truth about the National Guard's role in Hurricane
Katrina is gradually emerging. John Hill, senior
Louisiana government reporter for Gannett, put
together a huge take on the Louisiana Guard operation
in the current issue of Louisiana Life. "While those
stories of violence whipped across the nation from a
press corps isolated on high ground on Canal Street
near the river, the National Guard and state
responders set about doing their work," Hill wrote.

Still, the existence of a functioning command center
at the Superdome raises almost as many questions as it
answers. Mayor Ray Nagin, source of many of the
unfounded rumors of widespread civil disorder, was
staying at a hotel near the Dome. Why didn't he or his
police chief, Eddie Compass, move their command center
there, where they could tap into the Guard's awareness
of the situation in the city? Why didn't they run aid
requests through EMACs? Like Compass' three-day
disappearance, this is a genuine mystery. 

Governor Kathleen Blanco, meanwhile, had a direct
pipeline to the command center and clearly knew what
was going on, which might explain why she maintained
her authority over the Guard and resisted calls from
the President to federalize it. It also explains her
apparent callousness to those stuck in the Dome - she
knew the real situation was not as bad as the media
was reporting. At the very least, she deserves credit
for standing up to the national media and following
the advice of the junior officers on the scene.

Hill's story also indicates how the politics of
Katrina rescues are playing out in Louisiana: Gov.
Blanco, facing the voters in 2008, is eagerly, and
with justification, claiming some of the credit for
the rescue operation. "When all the stories are told,"
Gov. Blanco is quoted as saying, "the story is going
to be that Louisianans were saved by Louisianans."
Understandable, but a little bit of a stretch, as it
conveniently leaves out the federal contribution,
namely the Coast Guard, the regular armed forces and
Guard units from other states, as well as the key
coordinating role the National Guard Bureau played.

What's more puzzling is why the White House hasn't
joined Blanco in trying to rehabilitate its
reputation. The handling of Katrina by FEMA is one of
the most-cited reasons for the President's low poll
numbers. The national Democratic Party, meanwhile,
continues to try to hang Katrina around the
President's neck. As Adam Nagourney recently wrote in
the New York Times, "Democrats are looking to this
city as the symbol of an administration that is at
once incompetent and heartless."

The president's side isn't a complicated story. He
sits atop a huge bureaucratic machine. He's
responsible for how the pieces of the pyramid work,
not every last detail. "The rescues happened way below
the radar screen and that's not bad," Carafano said.
"You want this kind of decentralized execution. If we
have to sit around for someone in Washington to make a
decision, we're all going to die." 

FEMA failed miserably. Yet the Coast Guard, a branch
of the much-maligned Department of Homeland Security,
operated precisely according to plan and saved up to
30,000 lives amid near total destruction. The National
Guard Bureau helped run the show. The State Guard and
regular military, which owes its extraordinary
professionalism to the administration's insistence on
training and equipage for service in Iraq, saved tens
of thousands more.

That's the real story of Katrina. But the national
media isn't about to acknowledge it unless the
administration makes its own case, something that, so
far at least, it hasn't begun to do.

For additional coverage and photos of Katrina, see
dolinar.com. Email Lou Dolinar at dolinar at verizon.net.

Â© 2000-2006 RealClearPolitics.com All Rights Reserved

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at May 24, 2006 - 08:40:36 AM CDT 

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May 24, 2006 
The Media's Imperfect Storm
By Jonah Goldberg

On a recent edition of "Larry King Live," liberal
Republican Congressman Christopher Shays, eager to put
some distance between himself and the president,
explained what he thinks is George Bush's real
albatross.

"Let me just say that I think the thing that has hurt
the president most is not Iraq. It's Katrina," Shays
said. "People saw an arrogant but confident
administration, but when they saw Katrina, they saw
arrogance and frankly incompetence, and that was very
unsettling."

This sentiment is pervasive among Democrats and the
press. Time magazine writes matter-of-factly that "the
government's inept response to Hurricane Katrina" is a
major liability for Republicans in '06. Howard Dean
and other Democrats mention Katrina as a staple
talking point.

That's certainly fair, given that the bar is set
pretty low for what constitutes fair in American
politics these days. But it is worth reminding people
that the Katrina they think they remember wasn't the
Katrina that actually took place. In fact, it is
difficult to think of a bigger media scandal in my
lifetime than the fraudulently inaccurate coverage of
Hurricane Katrina.

Where to begin? As I've written before, virtually all
of the gripping stories from Katrina were untrue. All
of those stories about, in Paula Zahn's words, "bands
of rapists, going block to block"? Not true. The tales
of snipers firing on medevac helicopters? Bogus. The
yarns, peddled on "Oprah" by New Orleans Mayor Ray
Nagin and the New Orleans police chief, that "little
babies" were getting raped in the Superdome and that
the bodies of the murdered were piling up? Completely
false. The stories about poor blacks dying in
comparatively huge numbers because American society
"left them behind"? Nah-ah. While most outlets took
Nagin's estimate of 10,000 dead at face value, Editor
and Publisher - the watchdog of the media - ran the
headline, "Mortuary Director Tells Local Paper 40,000
Could Be Lost in Hurricane."

In all of Louisiana, not just New Orleans, the total
dead from Katrina was roughly 1,500. Blacks did not
die disproportionately, nor did the poor. The only
group truly singled out in terms of mortality was the
elderly. According to a Knight-Ridder study, while
only 15 percent of the population of New Orleans was
over the age of 60, some 74 percent of the dead were
60 or older, and almost half were older than 75.
Blacks were, if anything, slightly underrepresented
among the dead given their share of the population.

This barely captures how badly the press bungled
Katrina coverage. Keep in mind that the most
horrifying tales of woe that captivated the press and
prompted news anchors to - quite literally - scream at
federal officials occurred within the safe zone around
the Superdome where the press was operating. Shame on
local officials for fomenting fear and passing along
newly minted urban legends, but double shame on the
press for recycling this stuff uncritically. Members
of the press had access to the Superdome. Why not just
run in and look for the bodies? Interview the rape
victims? Couldn't be bothered? The major networks had
hundreds of people in New Orleans. Was there not a
single intern available to fact-check? The coverage
actually cost lives. Helicopters were grounded for 24
hours in response to media reports of sniper attacks.
At least two patients died waiting to be evacuated.

And yet, a ubiquitous media chorus claims
simultaneously that Katrina was Bush's worst hour and
the press's best. That faultless paragon of media
scrupulousness Dan Rather proclaimed it one of the
"quintessential great moments in television news."
Christiane Amanpour explained, "I think what's
interesting is that it took a Katrina, you know, to
bring us back to where we belong. In other words, real
journalists, real journalism, and I think that's a
good thing."

But in the race to prove the federal response
incompetent, the "real journalists" missed some
important details. As Lou Dolinar of
RealClearPolitics.com exhaustively documents, the
National Guard did amazing work in New Orleans. From
the Superdome, the Guard managed some 2,500 troops, a
dozen emergency shelters, more than 200 boats, 150
helicopters (which flew more than 10,000 sorties
moving 88,181 passengers, 18,834 tons of cargo, and
saved 17,411 survivors), and an enormous M*A*S*H
operation that, among other things, delivered seven
babies.

Also left out of the conventional tale of Katrina is
the fact that the hurricane hardly singled out New
Orleans. Obviously, the flooding was worse because of
the levee breaks. But, as Mississippi Gov. Haley
Barbour noted, the people of his state and Alabama and
Florida have the same federal government. And despite
awesome destruction, they managed to do OK.

None of this is to say that the federal government and
the Bush administration didn't make mistakes. But, if
we're looking for poster children for arrogant
incompetence in response to Katrina, there are better
candidates than George W. Bush.

Page Printed from:
http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2006/05/the_medias_imperfect_storm.html
at May 24, 2006 - 08:42:06 AM CDT 

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