Everything You Read About Katrina Was Bull

Gang rapes in the Superdome. Stacks of bodies. Looters firing up rescue copters. No effort made to evacuate people. A complete breakdown. 

That was the story, and it has the elements that today's editors strive for: impact. Punch. Vividness. Blood. Depravity. It was adaptable (and quickly adapted) to a cohesive political narrative. 

It didn't have what today's editors don't care about: accuracy. 

Well, by May of 2006. Retired Newsday reporter and tech-columnist Lou Dolinar had completed a careful study of what really happened there -- a remarkable tale of a rescue story untold. He initially hit some of the same themes here -- as early as October, 2005. As in so many things, the initial headlines were completely false. No gang rapes. No murders. No reefer truck full of bodies. No abandonment. Go to the link and read what really went down in the Crescent City.

You're waiting for the media to correct their story? As prominently as the original headlines? Better lay in a lifetime supply of MREs and bottled water, because they're not going to change their story -- the link includes a later exclamation by the New York Times's Adam Nagourney, that the emergency response was "incompetent and heartless." Nagourney is still wedded to the narrative, even as the Times and other papers have issued a few, grudging, carefully hidden corrections. 

We know, perhaps, why they don't care to get it right now. The narrative always trumps the truth for the modern journalist like Nagourney. But why didn't the press get it right at the time?

There are three principal reasons the press got it all wrong. It's worth looking at the causes of their Katrina failure, because these are the same reasons they get war reporting wrong. 

Lack of Presence

You can't report on Iraq from a hotel bar, and you can't report on a natural disaster from outside the city. "[M]ost of the reporters were stuck elsewhere, away from the action," Dolinar reports. Other sober analyses agree. "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," Joe Hill wrote in Louisana life. If you're in a place where you can't report on the action, and you're filing reports anyway, what you're doing may be something but it isn't reporting. Unfortunately, these days it still is "journalism." 

Sole and Anonymous Sourcing

One great way to report complete bull puckey is to take one person's word without checking. Another is to report stuff without saying who it was that said it (which gives you several options, including the perennial favorite of just making it up), and a third is to report hearsay as fact. The Katrina reporters did all three, almost to the exclusion of reporting solidly-sourced facts. 

With a little effort, the reporters could have left their comfortable surroundings, but they didn't. So instead they settled in comfortably and began working telephones. As a result rumors and fabrications began to dominate their stories: rapes in the superdome, gangs of looters shooting at helicopters, rescue efforts abandoned. It was all hogwash. When they contacted the command center at the Superdome, they got a different story... the reporters concluded that the National Guard command was lying to them (after all, it disagreed with everybody else's reporting!) and went with the rumors instead. 

Mayor Nagin's entourage was the source for many of these stories, which ultimately proved nothing much except that Nagin and his people also were not talking to the command center. But even when they had a named source, they normally had just one (Nagin or one of his flunkies) and made no effort to confirm the story. 

Sole and anonymous sourcing should be anathema to journalists, as it's a shortcut to writing a false report. But in an age that venerates Woodward and Bernstein, pre-1970s journalistic standards are seen as quaint and restrictive. (Of course they're restrictive. They're a quality control!)

Closely akin to sole and anonymous sourcing is second-hand sourcing, or hearsay. Unfortunately many journalists are perfectly comfortable with putting a serious spin on a fast-moving urban legend. The key phrase to detect this common device in Katrina stories is "refugees told us..." and then a lapse into passive voice. Babies were killed. Babies were raped. Babies were eaten.

The journalists ate the babies. 

It's probably a good idea for readers to consider any report predicated on a sole, anonymous or second-hand sources to be the personal opinion of the journalist. 

Pack Journalism/Groupthink/Bias

Many leap to the conclusion that journalists are all biased. Of course, all humans are biased but journalism is an institution in which nearly all its inmates are biased the same way. They tend to run in a pack, and this produces the phenomenon of groupthink. 

So the Times reporter is more concerned about having a report like the one the Post reporter has, and vice versa, than either one cares about accuracy. Accuracy is not what their editors want (or even, as their circulations contract down to a hard core of elderly True Believers, what their readers want).

They are also interested in putting the most sensationalistic spin on a story as possible -- it's a war out there, if you're trying to get page-one-above-the-fold placement for your story. 

This is what resulted in this strange phenomenon: late in the event, according to Dolinar's essay, some reporters did get to the command center and rode on rescue helicopters. Maj. Ed Bush of the Louisana National Guard "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." What were the reporters interested in? According to Bush, paraphrased by Dolinar: "stacks of bodies in the freezers, interviews with rape victims... and other mayhem that never happened." 

It's almost as if they regret the rescues and were hoping for more deaths. 

Listen, and you can hear the baying of the pack.