Katrina reporting: MSM's "best" was very wrong

Slowly the American people are being told the truth: MSM got the post-Katrina rescue and recovery story very, very wrong.

Jonah Goldberg makes a contribution to the emerging truth in his LA Times column, “The Media’s Imperfect Storm.” Excerpts:

[It] is difficult to think of a bigger media scandal in my lifetime than the fraudulently inaccurate coverage of Hurricane Katrina.

Where to begin?

As I've written before, virtually all of the gripping stories from Katrina were untrue. All of those stories about, in Paula Zahn's words, "bands of rapists, going block to block"? Not true.

The tales of snipers firing on medevac helicopters? Bogus.

The yarns, peddled on "Oprah" by New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin and the New Orleans police chief, that "little babies" were getting raped in the Superdome and that the bodies of the murdered were piling up? Completely false.

The stories about poor blacks dying in comparatively huge numbers because American society "left them behind"? Nah-ah.

While most outlets took Nagin's estimate of 10,000 dead at face value, Editor and Publisher - the watchdog of the media - ran the headline, "Mortuary Director Tells Local Paper 40,000 Could Be Lost in Hurricane."

In all of Louisiana, not just New Orleans, the total dead from Katrina was roughly 1,500. Blacks did not die disproportionately, nor did the poor.

The only group truly singled out in terms of mortality was the elderly. According to a Knight-Ridder study, while only 15 percent of the population of New Orleans was over the age of 60, some 74 percent of the dead were 60 or older, and almost half were older than 75. Blacks were, if anything, slightly underrepresented among the dead given their share of the population.

This barely captures how badly the press bungled Katrina coverage.

And yet, a ubiquitous media chorus claims simultaneously that Katrina was Bush's worst hour and the press's best.

That faultless paragon of media scrupulousness Dan Rather proclaimed it one of the "quintessential great moments in television news." Christiane Amanpour explained, "I think what's interesting is that it took a Katrina, you know, to bring us back to where we belong. In other words, real journalists, real journalism, and I think that's a good thing."

So the media believes their Katrina reporting showed them at their best?

Well, who are we to argue that? Let’s concede their point.

That leads to the question: who’ll provide reliable information to citizens who need it if democracy is to function properly?

Enter the blogs.

I’ll say more on Katrina coverage soon.

Meanwhile, Goldberg’s column is here. I hope you read it. He says plenty about the role of the military in the rescue operations, a part of the story MSM "missed."