Readers On Media’s Miss

Readers had a lot to say about the media’s rumor-mongering response to Katrina. Lila M. writes that it will be very difficult to set the record straight:

Tying in both the comments from your reader Barton J. and what Soledad O’Brien recently said comparing the beheadings to what went on inside the Superdome made me wonder if the reporters who covered Katrina understand even now how much of their emotional (although I believe mostly sincere) reporting was rumor-based and agenda-driven by people looking for 15 minutes of fame. (They have probably not been reading blogs in the last three weeks). I wish every newsroom in America made it a mandatory assignment for their reporters — even the marquis ones — to read today’s wonderful Times-Picayune article about the hype, misinformation, and the false numerics that have wended their way into the public consciousness and that will be very difficult, if not impossible to eradicate.

Geoff W. writes that journalists fell victim to the “tyranny of the six-meter circle”:

Enjoying your blog as always. However, if we are going to pillory media personalities we might start with Fox News. I’ve never seen a worse performance by a journalist than Geraldo Rivera, followed closely by Shepard Smith.

Both (like the others you cite) are guilty of being influenced by the “tyranny of the six-meter circle”. That is, believing that what you see in front of you is accurately a smaller version of what is happening in general. That transportation or other assets might have been working in areas other than “Exit 293″ or “The Superdome” seems to not have occurred to either of them. Nor did it seem to occur that setting up a long-term and large rescue operation might take more preparation and assets than driving a van across a bridge.

Greg in NYC writes that local officials helped spread misinformation:

You’ll probably never read this from an MB reader, but… while I was watching Oprah, my wife DVR’d the Oprah post-Katrina coverage and I watched with her. Oprah, somehow, was able to arrange a personal tour with Nagin and the “NO” PD Chief. (The fact that at the height of the crisis Nagin could give Oprah a personal tour is crazy). There was one emotional scene where the Chief was crying to Oprah about the babies getting raped in the Convention Center. Of course, Oprah just sat there aghast. I guess asking the Chief of Police why he didn’t send every officer in his force to the Convention Center to stop babies getting raped never occurred to Oprah. When they took Oprah to the Superdome, they (Nagin and the Guard commander on the scene) refused to let her in. Nagin made Oprah say on air that she was absolving Nagin and the city of NO if anything happened to her in the Superdome. When she finally went in, she went in with a bunch of the armed Guard guys. The only thing I can think of was that the Guard had yet to do a full search of the Superdome and they (the Mayor, the Police and the Guard) were operating under the assumption that the area was not secure. The cameras showed a trashed and — from the reaction of the people — quite smelly Superdome, but no evidence of the crimes or danger in question. In my opinion, all of the misinformation starts and ends with Nagin and the “NO” PD chief.

This incident with Oprah is also singled out in the LA Times story that Drudge is linking to today.

Finally, Mike H. writes:

Another media hype (and a favorite sore point with me) is the story on the NOPD cops who failed to report for duty. The first number I recall seeing in the national news was 1,000 of the 1,700-member force. This story puts the final number (after cops were able to overcome communications and transit problems) at 249. I would love to see the national media do a little mea culpa on this, too. Yes, the number was 15 percent of the force and that’s a big number. But the only historical disaster of comparable magnitude was the Great Fire in San Francisco (the earthquake), during which about half of the police and fire forces quit.

He’s right. All the major news organizations must investigate and set the record straight. So far, these investigations are small fry compared to the major back-slapping about how the media had rediscovered its spine that were in print before we even knew why the city flooded.

Readers On Media’s Miss

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