MEDIA LIED, PEOPLE DIED

Michael Fumento is a really great science writer and debunker of numerous media myths. His Tech Central Station article is well worth reading.

Here is an excerpt.:


In the wake of Hurricane Katrina two sports were all the rage in New Orleans. One was the blame game, attributing all local and state incompetence to the feds. The other was inventing and spreading stories of murder and mayhem -- killings, rapes, firing at rescuers, bodies stacked like cordwood.
But the accounts turned out to be grim fairy tales. They were also hardly harmless sensationalism -- if there be such a thing; because of them people suffered and apparently died.

Among the horrors that never happened:

* Editor & Publisher headlined an article, "Mortuary Director Tells Local Paper 40,000 Could Be Lost in Hurricane," while the French paper Liberation ran a detailed report on 1,200 people drowning in a single school.

* CNN claimed snipers were taking potshots at helicopters trying to evacuate patients from hospitals, while separately CNN host Paula Zahn breathlessly spoke of "reports" of "bands of rapists, going block to block."

* To be fair and balanced, we note that Fox News's Geraldo Rivera claimed from the scene that "Yesterday the sun set on a scene of terror, chaos, confusion, anarchy, violence, rapes, murders, dead babies, dead people."

* Oprah Winfrey's special report from New Orleans was wall-to-wall hysteria. Mayor Ray Nagin told her "They have people standing out there, have been in that frickin' Superdome for five days watching dead bodies, watching hooligans killing people, raping people." Police Chief Eddie Compass (since resigned) added that "little babies [are] getting raped."

Winfrey herself, knowing how trusting (or gullible) her audience is, told them that in the Superdome "gangs banded together and had more ammunition, at times, than the police."

If all of this sounds like something from a post-apocalyptic zombie movie, that's pretty much what it was said professional rabble-rouser Randall Robinson. Four days after the storm "thousands of blacks in New Orleans are dying like dogs," he wrote, and "have begun eating corpses to survive." Just four days and already feasting on your friends? ...

Read the rest.