Digby wrote a terrific piece of reporting for Salon that was
published earlier today and quite frankly I can do no better. The
article is here but I will quote a large swath of it below:
When the levees broke in those early days after Hurricane Katrina, Americans found themselves watching a disaster unfold before their eyes for the second time in four short years. Indeed, sometimes it felt as if the entire decade had been nothing but one disaster after another. As the flood waters rose and overhead shots showed people walking waist deep through toxic floodwater and desperately waving for help from their rooftops, the scope of the crisis became clear.
Unfortunately, almost from the beginning a narrative took shape that would seriously affect the response: The police had abandoned their duties and the city was under attack from roaming gangs of African American thugs, threatening people in their homes and businesses.
There were two famous photographs of Katrina victims published in the media on Tuesday August 30, 2005. In the first, a black New Orleans resident is described as walking through water after having “looted a grocery store,” while in the other, the white subjects were said to have “found” bread and water from a local grocery story. It was the beginning of a couple of days of rising hysteria, particularly on the right, about “looting” and violence.
The most famous example of this from the
national punditry was perhaps a column by the Wall Street Journal’s
Peggy Noonan, who wrote:
As for the tragic piggism that is taking place
on the streets of New Orleans, it is not unbelievable but it is
unforgivable, and I hope the looters are shot. A hurricane cannot
rob a great city of its spirit, but a vicious citizenry can. A bad time with
Mother Nature can leave you digging out for a long time, but a bad turn in
human behavior frays and tears all the ties that truly bind human being–trust,
confidence, mutual regard, belief in the essential goodness of one’s fellow
citizens.
There were many more long disquisitions
and much
hand-wringing among right wingers about the
necessity of shooting looters. Some, like Ted Frank of the
American Enterprise Institute, finding summary execution to be
the “compassionate” approach:
I think shooting looters is a compassionate
way to protect the safety and well-being of law-abiding citizens. Time after
time it has been shown that the way to prevent deadly anarchic riots is to take
firm decisive action to prevent matters from getting to a tipping point.
Mostly what anyone had actually seen at that
point were shots of people inside Big Box stores taking goods in the
presence of police, who had made a deliberate decision to stand
down since they were in the middle of one of the most devastating natural
disasters in recent memory and protecting Walmart’s junk didn’t seem like
something worth worrying about when bodies were floating down the street.
But beyond the footage of looting, there were
rampant, over-the-top rumors of violence, but no pictures
of it despite the fact that photographers and film crews were all over the
city. Still, the idea took hold and reports of running street battles and armed
gangs were everywhere. Most of the world watched in horror in those early days
at the devastation and carnage being wreaked by mother nature and crumbling
infrastructure. But the mainstream press breathlessly reported on a city that
no one could see — a city in a “war zone” in which average citizens were being
randomly killed everywhere.
Here’s a
fairly typical example of the hysterical reporting from the AFP:
New Orleans was primed for all-out combat Friday,
as Iraq-tested troops with shoot-to-kill orders moved into the
hurricane-devasted city to quell rioters and looters.
The deployment of 300 members of the Arkansas
National Guard came ahead of a tour of the affected region by President George
W. Bush, who vowed “zero tolerance” for the armed gangs terrorising the flooded
city.
Louisiana Governor Kathleen Blanco said the
guardsmen had been authorized to open fire on “hoodlums” profiteering from the
destruction wrought by Hurricane Katrina, which is believed to have left
thousands dead.
“These troops are fresh back from Iraq, well
trained, experienced, battle tested and under my orders to restore order in the
streets,” Blanco said.
“They have M-16s and they are locked and
loaded.
“These troops know how to shoot and kill and
they are more than willing to do so if necessary and I expect they will,” she
said.
Four days after the killer storm slammed into
the US Gulf Coast, New Orleans was still plagued by gunbattles and rapes, with
gangs of looters and carjackers roving the streets and bodies just left lying
by the roadside.
Residents reported survivors dropping dead in
shelters or gunned down outside the New Orleans convention center. Hospitals
were evacuated after power ran out and helicopters ferrying patients and babies
drew gunfire.
“This is a war zone,” said Melissa Murray, 32,
a Louisiana state corrections officer helping in the relief effort.As you can see, the officials themselves were stoking the sense of panic.
…
And then the world saw something that no one
ever expected to see in the most powerful and wealthy nation on earth
–tens of thousands of Americans abandoned at the New Orleans convention center
with no water, no food, pleading with a local celebrity, Harry Connick Jr, to
do something, anything to help them. Somehow, Connick, along (along with
camera crews) had been able to fight through the wild street gangs to find out
for himself what was going on. Hour after hour we watched the shocking scenes
of mostly elderly men and women and mothers with young children — the most
vulnerable residents of the city who hadn’t been able to evacuate — left
abandoned to fend for themselves. The sun was shining, there was no flooding
near the center. Camera crews were in and they were everywhere. There were
scenes of military vehicles driving by old ladies in wheelchairs as people
screamed for help.
All over the country, all over the world,
people couldn’t believe what they were seeing. And they asked themselves,
“Where is the government, where is the Red Cross?”
We found out a few days later that the Red
Cross was told not to go into the city by the authorities (which authorities is still
a point of dispute) because it was unsafe, what with the roaming thugs
killing and raping and all. The government needed to stop all the violence
before food and water and medical help could be deployed.
The next year, the LA Times took a look back at the reporting and what
they found wasn’t pretty:
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.
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.”
“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.”
…
And there can be little doubt about what made all this so believable to the Peggy Noonans of
the world:
“If the dome and Convention Center had
harbored large numbers of middle class white people,” [Times-Picayune Editor
Jim] Amoss said, “it would not have been a fertile ground for this kind of
rumor-mongering.”BATON ROUGE, La. — They locked down the entrance doors Thursday at the Baton Rouge hotel where I’m staying alongside hundreds of New Orleans residents driven from their homes by Hurricane Katrina.
“Because of the riots,” the hotel managers
explained. Armed Gunmen from New Orleans were headed this way, they had heard.
“It’s the blacks,” whispered one white woman
in the elevator. “We always worried this would happen.”
……..
There is much more at the article itself. It is worth your
time.
Cheap Shots:
Shorter Pete Sessions: “You
non-whites suck!”
Your
morbidly funny death – from the man who killed Pluto.
I’m curious because I’ve never been there, but
doesn’t Ohio itself have something they can name after the man? Thanks
Obama.
How
much money is each candidate worth?
I’m curious – how many of you will focus on the issue of the
largest refugee crisis since the Vietnam Boat Lift of the 1970s, and how many
of you will focus on the fact that the top photo was taken at the Greek
Island of Lesbos?
The fallout from the whole Ashley Madison thing continues
and a South Dakota legislator tries
to find a new source for his hookups.
A moment of Zen:
