Bias in the Media

Another Karl at Patterico's Pontifications looks at "manufacturing dissent".

Why was the establishment media so slow to recognize the turnaround in the Iraq war? Why did they largely rush to judgment when the Duke lacrosse team members were accused of rape? Why did they get the Jena 6 case wrong? Why was the establishment media narrative about Hurricane Katrina built on myths, including grisly fables about violence and death in the Superdome? And why is the establishment media celebrating it?

These examples are but the tip of the establishment media's "faux news" iceberg. Folks on the far left probably have an entirely different list, but that is the point — the establishment media's center-left epistemic closure produces the same problems critics identify in the conservative media. That the critics are only concerned about closure in conservative media — and dismiss the theory that conservative media closure is partially caused by the establishment's marginalization of conservatives — suggests they are less interested in solutions than they are in further marginalizing the right.

As with the epistemic closure obsessives, don't hold your breath waiting for the center-left to consider that that their shrill stereotyping only adds to the problem. And as with the epistemic closure obsessives, the offense they give to everyone else is fueled in part by the double or triple standards at work. If you think the Ground Zero mosque is a bad idea (as I do), you are deemed a religious bigot, or are empowering religious bigots. In contrast, if you think Fred Phelps and the Westboro Baptists protesting at military funerals (or Bill Keller setting up shop near Ground Zero) is a bad idea (as I do, for many of the same reasons), the center-left does not unleash the same gushing firehose of vitriol. When the passage of California's Proposition 8 caused people to engage in anti-Mormon protests and boycotts, and to practice the politics of personal destruction against Miss California, the center-left was not denouncing it as religious bigotry. And to bring it full circle, if the folks behind the Ground Zero mosque are not entirely gay-friendly, the center-left media ignores it.

Compare and contrast

The Anchoress seems to see a difference between coverage of the ice storms in Kentucky and

hurricane Katrina.

Katrina Rumors

They Shoot Helicopters, Don't They?

Matt Welch at Reason Magazine looks at how unfounded rumors spread through the news media.

 

Also No, This Is the Story of the Hurricane – Katrina as a story of the culture war.

Life after Katrina

From NRO: A piece on how New Orleans has fared in the two years following Katrina.

...what would keep the good times rolling?

First, crime control is a must. The bad guys have returned with a vengeance. The local homicide rate has climbed a staggering 100 percent this year, according to a recent NBC News story. New Orleans needs a strong dose of Giuliani-style "broken windows" policing. Fighting small crimes usually nabs the perpetrators of bigger violations. An NYPD-type CompStat system also would help police commanders pinpoint crimes on precinct maps and employ those indicators to deploy cops exactly where crimes tend to unfold.

Second, FEMA still cannot connect trailers with everyone who needs them. While some still seek them, others who have finished rebuilding their houses no longer need trailers, but cannot get FEMA to collect them.

FEMA could help by deregulating its failed trailer operation. It should allow inhabitants to sell their trailers to those who need them. This will wheel unneeded trailers to those who want them.

Third, close Mr. Go.

The Mississippi River Gulf Outlet (nicknamed "Mr. Go" and the Hurricane Highway) facilitated Katrina's devastation of New Orleans. In 1956, Congress authorized this mini-Mississippi River as a shortcut to the Gulf of Mexico. But on August 29, 2005, Mr. Go became a varnished wooden lane that sped the bowling ball of Katrina's storm surge right into the pins of New Orleans' skyline. The resulting strike still smarts.

Displaced residents prefer to stay that way

People who were displaced from New Orleans by hurricane Katrina don't seem all that eager to return.

Despite oft-heard protests about the dearth of public housing in New Orleans, the Housing Authority of New Orleans said Monday that it has at least 283 apartments repaired, cleaned and ready for former public housing tenants.

Problem is, it can't seem to entice former residents to return.

"I'm just being honest: A lot of residents are saying, 'Not at this time. We're happy where we are,' " said HANO's government affairs liaison Darren Martin at a special meeting of the New Orleans City Council's housing committee in Baton Rouge.

There are people who would blame FEMA for this ongoing displacement, but it seems related to problems that predate Katrina.

The reasons for residents' delayed returns are complex, from the city's struggling public school system and lack of health care to the long-standing turf wars that make the idea of transplanting families from one end of New Orleans to the other a realistic risk of running into violence.

The Incredible Shrinking Disaster

Remember the dozens, maybe hundreds, of rapes, murders, stabbings and deaths resulting from official neglect at the Superdome after Hurricane Katrina? The ones that never happened, as even the national media later admitted?

Sure, we all remember the original reporting, if not the back-pedaling.

Here's another one: Do you remember the dramatic TV footage of National Guard helicopters landing at the Superdome as soon as Katrina passed, dropping off tens of thousands saved from certain death? The corpsmen running with stretchers, in an echo of M*A*S*H, carrying the survivors to ambulances and the medical center? About how the operation, which also included the Coast Guard, regular military units, and local first responders, continued for more than a week?

Me neither. Except that it did happen, and got at best an occasional, parenthetical mention in the national media. The National Guard had its headquarters for Katrina, not just a few peacekeeping troops, in what the media portrayed as the pit of Hell. Hell was one of the safest places to be in New Orleans, smelly as it was. The situation was always under control, not surprisingly because the people in control were always there.

From the Dome, the Louisiana Guard's main command ran at least 2,500 troops who rode out the storm inside the city, a dozen emergency shelters, 200-plus boats, dozens of high-water vehicles, 150 helicopters, and a triage and medical center that handled up to 5,000 patients (and delivered 7 babies). The Guard command headquarters also coordinated efforts of the police, firefighters and scores of volunteers after the storm knocked out local radio, as well as other regular military and other state Guard units.

And of course, some news outlets merely changed their archives to reflect what they wish they had reported at the time.

Let's try that again: The cavalry wasn't late. It didn't arrive on Thursday smoking a cigar and cussing. It was there all along.

The National Guard's response to Katrina was even more robust than I suspected in my reporting for RealClearPolitics in September, and in more detail for National Review, where I revealed for the first time that rescue operations saved up to 50,000 lives, with perhaps an equal number making their way to shelters on their own.

Fifty thousand New Orleans residents were in danger of death from drowning, heatstroke, dehydration and disease. That was a tough one to get through the media reality-distortion field, but the numbers have since been confirmed by Congress, the White House, Louisiana state officials and the relevant agencies themselves. If anything, I understated the size of the rescue effort. What I didn't understand was the critical role the Superdome headquarters played.

FEMA failed miserably. Yet the Coast Guard, a branch of the much-maligned Department of Homeland Security, operated precisely according to plan and saved up to 30,000 lives amid near total destruction. The National Guard Bureau helped run the show. The State Guard and regular military, which owes its extraordinary professionalism to the administration's insistence on training and equipage for service in Iraq, saved tens of thousands more.

That's the real story of Katrina. But the national media isn't about to acknowledge it unless the administration makes its own case, something that, so far at least, it hasn't begun to do.

Myths about Bush

The Anchoress looks at a list of "reasons to impeach Bush".

I’ve seen similar lists throughout the web - the collective is circulating it in order to really drill home to everyone who may not yet be fully convinced that George W. Bush is the worst, most evil man ever born from woman (if that is what Barbara Bush may be called) and also the stupidest evil super genius imaginable.

I read a transcript of the execrable morning program The View in which Joy Behar, a Gore-adoree of the first water, reads from one of these lists:

...Let me get through the list. He withdrew us from the Kyoto Treaty, John Ashcroft. Sat in the classroom after learning about 9/11…He lied to us to get us into the war. He awarded a no-bid contract to Halliburton, Abu Ghraib. He promoted his friend Michael Brown to take care of Katrina. Heck of a job, Brownie. Remember that? He doesn’t listen to the Iraq Study Group. He choked on a pretzel…He waited a week to visit New Orleans and then only to watch some jazz. He stood by Alberto Gonzales…and he stood by Rumsfeld, who some people think is a war criminal. He can’t pronounce the word “nuclear.” These are just some of the reasons…this guy needs to be thrown out of office.

The list she looks at includes:

1) Bush Stole the Election!

2) Bush Lied Us Into War!

3) Bush Wanted to Privatize Social Security!

4) Bush Killed the Surplus with Tax Cuts!

5) Bush Killed the Kyoto Treaty!

6) Bush sat in the classroom after learning about 9/11!

7) Bush awarded a no-bid contract to Halliburton!

8) Bush promoted his friend Michael Brown to take care of Katrina! Heck of a job, Brownie. Remember that?

9) Bush ignored the Iraq Study Group!

10) Bush choked on a pretzel! He can’t say nuclear the way we want him to! He talks like a Texan! We hate him!

Follow the link to see what she does with them.

Katrina relief efforts -- a response

In the wake of charges that blacks were being shorted during relief operations following Katrina, Project 21 issued this press release:

Members of the Congressional Black Caucus held a press conference today in which it was that asserted God "cannot be pleased" with the Bush Administration's response to Hurricane Katrina and suggested race is a factor affecting the likelihood of a person's survival in the aftermath of the hurricane.

Speaking at the press conference, Rep. Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-MD), said "To the President of the United States, I simply say that God cannot be pleased with our response." Cummings also said: ""We cannot allow it to be said that the difference between those who lived and those who died in this great storm and flood of 2005 was nothing more than poverty, age or skin color."

Members of the black leadership network Project 21 have blasted the Congressional Black Caucus - whose elected members are charged to serve the best interest of all Americans - for racially politicizing a natural catastrophe.

"The comments and actions of the Congressional Black Caucus were morally opprobrious and divisive," said Project 21 member Mychal Massie. "It is beneath the level of sane discourse for the Congressional Black Caucus to suggest that blacks are suffering more than the hundreds of thousands of Americans who have been displaced."

....

To date, the federal government has responded to the devastation brought by Hurricane Katrina by sending more than 15,000 National Guardsmen, 7,800 U.S. military personnel and 61 Federal Emergency Management response teams to assist in the recovery efforts. The U.S. Department of Homeland Security announced that federal, state and local government efforts have saved more than 4,500 lives, assisted more than 30,000 people and evacuated more than 22,000 displaced persons of the hurricane.

Still looking back at Katrina coverage

(Hat tip: NRO Media Blog.)

Are CNN and Fox covering the same disaster?

Generally, I’ve been pretty impressed with the network news coverage of Katrina provided by both CNN and Fox. Today, the media coverage of this tragedy devolved into the worst of the worst on one network, and the best of the best on the other.

The contrast of the coverage from CNN and Fox watched simultaneously was stark, and disturbing.

CNN: Anchor Kyra Phillips in near meltdown, drilling every person on air demanding that the Department of Homeland Security “call out the military” declaring that the leaders of the community should just admit that their plans were a failure. Breathlessly harping on video that showed two bodies and crowds outside the convention center where help was nowhere to be found. Repeatedly, Phillips drones on about why the military hasn’t been put on the ground, and why hasn’t homeland security simply admitted that the plan has failed, and call out on the “military for help?”

Fox News: Pictures of wave after wave of helicopters bringing injured into a staging area, where others are gathering for busses. Showing three lines in a triage where injured were being seen, treated, receiving assistance, while others were receiving food and being loaded onto busses.

....

First rule for anchors: you don’t know all the facts, your reporter on the scene doesn’t know all the facts, and YOU are not the supreme all knowing voice of reality.

I once had a news reporter, in my news operation, declaring that our local community was flooding and needed to be evacuated, based on a phone call from someone whose basement had suddenly flooded. Both the person calling, and reporter were convinced that a levee in the city had failed and that the downtown was in a torrent flood. The caller lived in a basement apartment. What actually happened was a broken water main right outside the apartment building. The roar of rushing water, with the rapid flow into the basement sure looked like a flood. But neither had appropriate perspective, to make announcements live on air without a little more consideration.

What one reporter sees at one location within 90-THOUSAND SQUARE MILES is not an appropriate reason to declare the Katrina disaster recovery plan a failure and call for a whole new plan. Which is what Ms. Phillips did on air, on more than one occasion.

There will be many people still waiting several days from now, and there will be bodies – many bodies – tragically in New Orleans. But as they relief effort continues, and reporters actually look for the assistance rather than the victims, it will be clear that progress is being made every day.

Changeable News Network

In the days following hurricane Katrina, there were hysterical reports of total disaster and complete social breakdown in New Orleans.

Clayton Cramer quoted a number of reports, including this text from CNN:

Overnight, police snipers were stationed on the roof of their precinct, trying to protect it from gunmen roaming through the city, CNN's Chris Lawrence reported.

One New Orleans police sergeant compared the situation to Somalia and said officers were outnumbered and outgunned by gangs in trucks.

"It's a war zone, and they're not treating it like one," he said, referring to the federal government.

...

The officer hitched a ride to Baton Rouge Friday morning, after working 60 hours straight in the flooded city. He has not decided whether he will return.

He broke down in tears when he described the deaths of his fellow officers, saying many had drowned doing their jobs. Other officers have turned in their badges as the situation continues to deteriorate.

In one incident, the sergeant said gunmen fired rifles and AK-47s at the helicopters flying overhead.

He said he saw bodies riddled with bullet holes, and the top of one man's head completely shot off.

Here is the link. Try to find any of these reports at the linked file.

Go ahead, I'll wait.

Neither could I.

I have a friend whose response to blogs is a sneer. According to him, blogs are completely biased and unreliable, and you might as well consult a Ouija board for news.

In contrast, I've maintained that blogs link to the stories they comment upon, and anyone with any doubts about the facts being referenced is free to follow the link and check them out for himself. (And I'll mention here, the protocol that's grown up in blogs – at least the ones I follow – of posting corrections promptly and prominently. If the correction is soon enough after the original post, the post is edited, the word "UPDATE" appears, and the fact of the correction is inserted.

Now, on to CNN.

The page linked by Clayton Cramer has no trace of the horrific stories of societal breakdown that characterized the news in the days followign the hurricane. Instead, we see a page describing the recovery process, and tellign of a much more normal level of devastation, the kind you expect when high winds and water lash a city. Two things are conspicuously absent: any trace of the horrific events quoted in Cramer's post, and any sign that the report has been edited.

Now, I see two possibilities.

First, maybe Clayton made it all up. In that case, we'd have to assume he not only typed up a fake story, but he also included a link to a story that he'd have to know said something other than what he was claiming.

I don't think he's that stupid.

Frankly, I don't think my compost pile is that stupid.

Furthermore, at Clayton's post today, he links to other people who cited the same story, and quoted the same text. Even if they were all that stupidly wrong, they'd have to have been that stupidly wrong exactly the same way.

That seems to leave one other possibility: CNN pulled the story, and carefully erased all traces of their having it gotten it hysterically wrong from their website, with not so much as a sentence saying, "We retract this".

If I have to compare blogs with major news organizations in terms of integrity, I'm afraid the major news organizations have some catching up to do.

Anchoress Katrina archive

Here is the page of Katrina links from The Anchoress

Wizbang's Katrina archive pages

Eight pages worth of posts.

Even more Katrina retrospective

Wizbang has a post about "The Katrina Video Congress Didn't Want You to See". After looking at a video, and at other photographic evidence, he concludes the levees failed because they were flawed.

The bottom line is, Katrina's storm surge did not wash the wall away. As you may remember, water had been seeping under the floodwall at the break location for about a year before Katrina. The ground under the levee was soaked and ready to give at any moment... New Orleans was doomed with or without Katrina, we just didn't know it. A good high tide puts more water in the canal than this. As the video shows, the water was barely higher than normal levels. The walls could have failed on a decent high tide.

And indeed, we may owe the hurricane a vote of thanks.

What I will say next will probably completely throw you. Katrina saved probably over 50,000 lives. That levee was doomed. If it had failed without notice, the death toll would have been measured in tens of thousands. There would be no evacuation, no preparation, no Feds at all. (such that they were anyway) no Coast Guard in choppers etc. Tens of thousands of people would have been dead in hours and tens of thousands more would have died on 120 degree rooftops waiting for rescue. It would have been unimaginable. - More unimaginable.

Katrina, race, and class

Jason DeParle gives his assessment of the true story of the destruction of the Gulf coast -- the race card. His editorial in the New York Times doesn't wait for any scholarly analysis or dispassionate research for his conclusions to meet the Paper of Record's standards for publication, either:

THE white people got out. Most of them, anyway. If television and newspaper images can be deemed a statistical sample, it was mostly black people who were left behind. Poor black people, growing more hungry, sick and frightened by the hour as faraway officials counseled patience and warned that rescues take time. What a shocked world saw exposed in New Orleans last week wasn't just a broken levee. It was a cleavage of race and class, at once familiar and startlingly new, laid bare in a setting where they suddenly amounted to matters of life and death. Hydrology joined sociology throughout the story line, from the settling of the flood-prone city, where well-to-do white people lived on the high ground, to its frantic abandonment. The pictures of the suffering vied with reports of marauding, of gunshots fired at rescue vehicles and armed bands taking over the streets. The city of quaint eccentricity - of King Cakes, Mardi Gras beads and nice neighbors named Tookie - had taken a Conradian turn. In the middle of the delayed rescue, the New Orleans mayor, C.Ray Nagin, a local boy made good from a poor, black ward, burst into tears of frustration as he denounced slow moving federal officials and called for martial law.

If the opening paragraph of this screed didn't cause the editors at the New York Times to spike this column, they have apparently given up any pretense of editorial standards at the Gray Lady. "If television and newspaper images can be deemed a statistical sample"? Since when does that ever apply? Perhaps the Times can abandon its polling contracts in the next election and simply scan for TV coverage of political events to determine racial demographics in politics, too. What utter rubbish, and unfortunately for the Times and its readers, this intellectually famished assumption forms the basis of the entire editorial.

Katrina memes

Michelle Malkin has more memes that now look to be fading out. The children who had their throats slit, the rapes, and the corpses in the Superdome now appear to be nothing but urban legends. The same is true for the black people having to eat human corpses to stay alive in New Orleans, a lie spread by civil-rights activist Randall Robinson but now retracted. Ditto, apparently, for the story about the police shooting a teenager after running him down with their car. Don't expect these retractions and factual rebuttals to make much difference, but it does show how much of the initial Exempt Media coverage relied on hysterical and poorly sourced rumors. Take that into consideration when relying on them to tell you that George Bush was derelict in his duty because he failed to violate the Constitution and the sovereignty of Louisiana while its governor dithered on the state's emergency response.

Salvation Army kept out of New Orleans

Hugh Hewitt and Duane "Generalissimo" Patterson follow up with Fox's Major Garrett this evening on Garrett's blockbuster report last night that the Louisiana DHS ordered the Red Cross not to enter New Orleans. Tonight the story expands, as Garrett now reports that the Salvation Army confirmed that the state officials kept them away from the victims as well:

Also here.

Federalism and Katrina

The Washington Post has started to ask the same questions as Fox News and ABC did earlier this week in an analysis of the response to Hurricane Katrina. Robert Pierre reports in a piece titled in part, "Assessing Leadership", that Mayor Ray Nagin now faces many questions about his role in the fumbled disaster response -- and that his own underlings say that the answers will expose him as an incompetent:

...those in charge of the first responders -- the city and state governments -- failed to follow their own published plans for the emergency, and then failed to cooperate with the federal government when they did arrive. They essentially froze like deer in the headlights when they should have opened up the plans they drew up themselves and started running them like a playbook. The federal relief, which coordinates with state and local officials based on the emergency planning done earlier, planned their response on the expectation that those tasks would have been handled prior to the storm hitting the city. Instead, what they saw was a city mayor who had done nothing but order an evacuation too late to be effective, fail to expedite it with resources specifically named in the plan, and then run around getting hysterical for the press. Pierre also neglects to mention that the feds cannot simply take over a city or a state without the governor's permission under current law unless they are in a state of rebellion.

Inept planning and Katrina

The New York Times has a feature story in its Sunday edition that supposedly looks at the frustration of coordinating the local, state, and federal responses to Hurricane Katrina. However, the article by a crew of Times writers instead inadvertently encapsulates the incompetence of Louisiana's governor Kathleen Blanco and New Orleans mayor Ray Nagin, in a single anecdote that also calls into question the ability of the four reporters to properly investigate their subject matter. The scene: three days after Katrina's landfall, and a day after the levees broke. The place: Baton Rouge. The setting: the state's command center for emergency response.

The governor of Louisiana was "blistering mad." It was the third night after Hurricane Katrina drowned New Orleans, and Gov. Kathleen Babineaux Blanco needed buses to rescue thousands of people from the fetid Superdome and convention center. But only a fraction of the 500 vehicles promised by federal authorities had arrived. Ms. Blanco burst into the state's emergency center in Baton Rouge. "Does anybody in this building know anything about buses?" she recalled crying out. They were an obvious linchpin for evacuating a city where nearly 100,000 people had no cars. Yet the federal, state and local officials who had failed to round up buses in advance were now in a frantic hunt. It would be two more days before they found enough to empty the shelters.

Why didn't Blanco know about these buses?

This anecdote and this report tells us all we need to know. It amply demonstrates the incompetence of the state and local authorities, who had no clue about their own emergency response plans in the days and hours before landfall. And it also demonstrates the incompetence of the Exempt Media in reporting the story that continues to this day.

Katrina and the emergency plan

Today's Palm Beach Post takes a look at the Katrina response from a Floridian point of view, one that has plenty of experience with hurricane devastation and response. The verdict of Florida's emergency response officials is that not only did Louisiana fail to properly plan and train for an eminently forseeable disaster, but it also failed to follow the flawed plan it had (h/t: CQ reader Barnestormer):

More here, and here.

Response to Katrina was not as bad as portrayed.

It is settled wisdom among journalists that the federal response to the devastation wrought by Hurricane Katrina was unconscionably slow. "Mr. Bush's performance last week will rank as one of the worst ever during a dire national emergency," wrote New York Times columnist Bob Herbert in a somewhat more strident expression of the conventional wisdom. But the conventional wisdom is the opposite of the truth. Jason van Steenwyk is a Florida Army National Guardsman who has been mobilized six times for hurricane relief. He notes that: "The federal government pretty much met its standard time lines, but the volume of support provided during the 72-96 hour was unprecedented. The federal response here was faster than Hugo, faster than Andrew, faster than Iniki, faster than Francine and Jeanne."