“Rapes, killings hit Katrina refugees in New Orleans” - Reuters headline, September 3d

“Reports of rapes and killings at the Superdome now appear to be unfounded.” - Los Angeles Times Los Angeles Times

Oops. Which story will people remember months from now — the now-discredited “bodies are stacked in the Superdome freezer,” or the month-late retraction?

And it’s not just a little “print the correction on page A-30″ mistake. From an AP story today that the Houston Chronicle headlined “Reports of New Orleans mayhem probably exaggerated, police say”:

… 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.

By the AP’s count, there may have been a single murder at the Superdome.

The LAT said Tuesday

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.”

… 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.

(the Times-Picayune archive seems to be pay only, else we’d link to their original story)

To be fair, some of these stories were peddled by ‘responsible’ people: both departing New Orleans police superintendent Eddie Compass and Mayor Ray Nagin (Nagin, on Oprah: “They have people standing out there, have been in that frickin’ Superdome for five days watching dead bodies, watching hooligans killing people, raping people.”).

Good news for the media, though — it’s not their actually their fault, it’s racism! From the LAT story:

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.”

So … major media organizations lobbed these incendiary rumors onto front pages and national newscasts without actually checking them out, and the excuse is “we’re biased?”

That’s not a good day on the credibility front.

Technorati Tags: Katrina, Superdome, chaos

This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 28th, 2005 at 10:44 am by A Senior Administration Official and is filed under Media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.