NAGIN: "FAKE but ACCURATE! April Fools!"
Posted on 09/27/2005 11:36:58 AM PDT by andyk
NEW ORLEANS
On Sept. 1, with desperate Hurricane Katrina evacuees crammed into the convention center, Police Chief Eddie Compass reported: "We have individuals who are getting raped; we have individuals who are getting beaten."
Five days later, he told Oprah Winfrey that babies were being raped. On the same show, Mayor Ray Nagin warned: "They have people standing out there, have been in that frickin' Superdome for five days watching dead bodies, watching hooligans killing people, raping people."
The ugliest reports _ children with slit throats, women dragged off and raped, corpses piling up in the basement _ soon became a searing image of post-Katrina New Orleans.
The stories were told by residents trapped inside the Superdome and convention center and were repeated by public officials. Many news organizations, including The Associated Press, carried the witness accounts and official pronouncements, and in some cases later repeated the claims as fact, without attribution.
But now, a month after the chaos subsided, police are re-examining the reports and finding that many of them have little or no basis in fact.
They have no official reports of rape and no eyewitnesses to sexual assault. The state Department of Health and Hospitals counted 10 dead at the Superdome and four at the convention center. Only two of those are believed to have been murdered.
One of those victims _ found at the Superdome _ appears to have been killed elsewhere before being brought to the stadium, said Bob Johannessen, the agency spokesman.
"It was a chaotic time for the city. Now that we've had a chance to reflect back on that situation, we're able to say right now that things were not the way they appeared," said police Capt. Marlon Defillo.
Sally Forman, a spokeswoman for Nagin, said the mayor was relying on others for his information about conditions at the evacuation sites. "He was listening to officials, trusting that information they were providing was accurate," she said.
To be sure, conditions at both sites were chaotic. Water was rising around the Superdome, home to 20,000 evacuees. Toilets were backing up, garbage was rotting, fights were breaking out. Food was in short supply at the convention center, where about 19,000 people took shelter from the rising waters. The temperature was climbing. The elderly and very young were desperate for food, water and medicine.
Police said they saw muzzle flashes at the convention center, and a National Guard member was shot in the leg when an evacuee tried to take his gun.
A week after the floodwaters poured into the city, an Arkansas National Guardsman told The Times-Picayune of New Orleans that soldiers had discovered 30 to 40 bodies inside a freezer in the convention center's food area. Guardsman Mikel Brooks told the newspaper that some of the dead appeared to have met violent ends, including "a 7-year-old with her throat cut."
When the convention center was swept, however, no such pile of bodies was found.
Lt. Col. Jacques Thibodeaux of the Louisiana National Guard said reports of violence at the Superdome and the convention center were overblown. He was head of security at the Superdome and led the 1,000 military police and infantrymen who went in to secure the center on Sept. 2.
"The incidents were highly exaggerated" _ the result of fear and hopelessness, he said. "For the amount of the people in the situation, it was a very stable environment."
Thibodeaux said his guard unit received no reports of rape.
Bill Waldron, a homicide detective from Florida in New Orleans for a murder trial, was stuck in the convention center until Sept. 1. He said he saw a couple of fights between young men, but "no murders, no rapes." He said that he did see people dying, but that those deaths were most likely a result of the heat and lack of water.
"People were wanting just some type of authority to come in and say, `Hey, this is what's going to happen,'" Waldron said. "People were scared."
New Orleans District Attorney Eddie Jordan said officials at the morgue in St. Gabriel have identified four apparent homicide victims from the city. All were shot and all were adults. Police arrested one person on suspicion of attempted sexual assault but received no official reports of rape.
Judy Benitez, executive director of the Louisiana Foundation Against Sexual Assault, cautioned that it might be too soon to say whether there really were rapes at the evacuation sites. Because the evacuees and any perpetrators have been scattered across the country by Katrina, and now Hurricane Rita, victims may come forward later, she said.
"It is extremely difficult to get good statistics about rape under normal circumstances, and these are certainly not normal circumstances," she said.
Bill Ellis, a folklorist at Pennsylvania State University, said rumors in an environment like that at the evacuation centers are to be expected, given the frightening circumstances and paucity of authoritative information.
"Rumors become improvised news. You become your own anchorman," he said.
The chaos also seemed to affect some reporters and editors, said Kelly McBride, who teaches ethics to journalists at the Poynter Institute, a journalism research and education center in St. Petersburg, Fla.
"You get so hung up as a reporter on what the big picture is that you use generalizations that become untrue," McBride said.
NAGIN: "FAKE but ACCURATE! April Fools!"
And many many people bought it.
But, but, but Chrissy Matthews said that the media has done a fabulous job of reporting with Katrina...-sarc
From: http://www.radioblogger.com/#001017 - Hardball transcript
Matthews (Speaking to Congressman King): No, no, no. Let me ask you. Weren't you dismayed as a Republican Congressman, that the President of the United States didn't watch television for all those 48 hours? That he had to be shown a picture of what we'd all been watching? One of the reasons these people are volunteering is because of what they saw on television. I'm very proud of the media this last couple of weeks. We're not always perfect, but I've got to tell you something. The latest polling shows almost 80% of the American people say the media has done a fabulous job in handling this hurricane, because it's the pictures that people have seen on television, in their homes, that have alerted them to this tragedy. And maybe to a large extent, push the politicians to move a little faster.
related FR thread - http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1492089/posts
"You get so hung up as a reporter on what the big picture is that you use generalizations that become untrue," McBride said.
Pure crap. The MSM doesn't give a rat's a$$ about big pictures or they'd be showing us the Big Picture in Iraq.
Or Afghanistan. Or NOLA (because the Big Picture there would show that the dems, the Great Society and LBJ are far more culpable for what happened in Katrina than the GOP, an Ownership Society and GWB.
The MSM delights in finding offbeat, oddball, quisling aspects of a story (true or not) and then presenting them as the Big Picture That Only People Like Us Can See. And when it turns out that picture is a forgery or a fraud, they blame their circumstances...never their bad judgement.
The MSM believes anything worth doing is worth overdoing, and for Katrina they all jumped overboard. Now they're embarrassed to find people saying they're all wet. Duh.
Big Picture? Don't trust the MSM. Ever.
The entire Superdome thing was severely exaggerated, yet that is what led to the MSM rioting. In the first place, there is no way 25,000 people can overcrowd it, it is friggin' HUGE. It holds 72,000 for football and hundreds more in the luxury suites. There are huge kitchens, locker rooms, storage areas, etc. in the place. But the news reports made it look like people were sitting and lying on top of each other and gigantic piles of filth were everywhere. And there was food and water there, enough for at least a couple of days, as well as 300 National Guardsmen. It wasn't pleasant being in there for 3 days without air conditioning or lights, for sure, but it was far from the death trap the MSM portrayed, and probaly hundreds of people are alive today because they went to the Superdome instead of staying home.
The MSM lied, and many people died needlessly.
Is this a subtle reference to JFnK?
Oh, thank goodness there were ONLY two murders. Well then it was an experiment in human kindness and generosity at the super dome.
Sure did! At FR and elsewhere, bought it hook, line, and sinker.
If you want a Google GMail account, FReepmail me.
They're going fast!
Is this a subtle reference to JFnK?
No one benefits from distortion. No one.
That is why Hillary wanted "her commission" so they could twist the already exgaggerated stories. You could see all the reporter tripping over themselves looking for death and destruction that could be used to blame the Bush Admin.
I recall when Rita hit Texas and no reports of looting, Diane Sawyer kept asking "are you sure". Good thing we have Free Republic to put them in their place get the real news :)
I conversed with Navy Patriot about this very thing last night on another thread. And believe it or not, I'm not pointing this out to use as a bludgeon to hit anyone over the head.
My point is that since we all are normally circumspect on what comes out of the MSM, we should be this way consistently. But it appears that if the MSM report confirms one's worldview here, it's automatically legitimate. No questions asked.
Remember a month or so ago when those thugs in Seattle attacked two servicemembers? The automatic assumption was that the thugs were black, and the victims, who were servicemen, were white. The threads were humming at full speed, until... it was found out that the servicemen were black. Then it virtually died.
See how that works?
If you want a Google GMail account, FReepmail me.
They're going fast!
WestTexasWend:
Very well said. The great majority of the MSM are defacto representives of the DNC. Many show up for work and with their coffee tear off DNC talking points from their fax machines. That's where they get the "news". ABC, NBC, CBS, CNN, NPR, PBS, and many, many newspapers are dedicated not to the truth, but to their socialist agenda.
EXELLENT POINT! I have to wonder...why were the media so eager to believe these terrible things about the poor, Black inhabitants of the Superdome?
Who ARE the racists here???? hmmmmmmmmmmmm?
So these PROFESSIONAL journalists simply reported the gossip and rumors instead of getting the story straight OR at least waiting to report these statements until they could be proven true or false.
They don't call 'em media whores for nothing
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