I fear that my blogging’s going to be light today because I’m having a bout (hopefully temporary) of severe abdominal pain.
Too bad really, because I was getting all worked up about the New Orleans “bad reporting” scandal, which I see has now made Drudge:
(Sorry to leave Shepard Smith out of the picture, but he’s supposed to be off to the right somewhere and got cut off because my nausea affected my, um, crop.*)
This “bad reporting” reporting also made today’s LA Times:
The National Guard spokesman’s accounts about rescue efforts, water supplies and first aid all but disappeared amid the roar of a 24-hour rumor mill at New Orleans’ main evacuation shelter. Then a frenzied media recycled and amplified many of the unverified reports.
“It just morphed into this mythical place where the most unthinkable deeds were being done,” Bush said Monday of the Superdome.
His assessment is one of several in recent days to conclude that newspapers and television exaggerated criminal behavior in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, particularly at the overcrowded Superdome and Convention Center.
The New Orleans Times-Picayune on Monday described inflated body counts, unverified “rapes,” and unconfirmed sniper attacks as among examples of “scores of myths about the dome and Convention Center treated as fact by evacuees, the media and even some of New Orleans’ top officials.”
Indeed, Mayor C. Ray Nagin told a national television audience on “Oprah” three weeks ago of people “in that frickin’ Superdome for five days watching dead bodies, watching hooligans killing people, raping people.”
Not a word about the role the Times-Picayune (via Brian Thevenot) played in “reporting” these unsubstantiated stories! Instead the Times-Picayune’s abrupt turnaround and condemnation of the bad reporting is now reported as news. Without passing go, without any retraction, correction, or any mention of the lead reporter’s own role in the bad reporting, the coverup of bad reporting by bad reporters is passed along as “news.”
What’s next? A Blue Ribbon Commission comprised of bad reporters to investigate bad reporting?
(If thine reporting offends thee . . .)
Forgive me if I spend the day being sick to my stomach.
*No, I am not making up excuses, and I am not about to say the alligators ate my homework!
UPDATE: Not everyone shares my dismal view of Brian Thevenot’s reporting. He’s been highly praised for the comparisons he made between New Orleans and Iraq:
Just inside the door lay a man under a blanket, his decomposing arm sticking up in the air. Next to him, a child. A few yards away, an old woman in a wheelchair Brooks had carted in himself. Next to her lay an old man with his head bashed in.
They wouldn’t take me to the freezer in the next room, which they said contained 30 or 40 bodies, a figure still unconfirmed amid a swirl of urban myths churned up by the storm. “I ain’t got the stomach for it, even after what I saw in Iraq,” Brooks told me.
I didn’t particularly need or want to see more bodies, either. I’d seen quite enough.
I could tell Brooks had, too. I’d seen his type of agitated mannerisms before in Iraq, the soldier’s mind just clicking, clicking, clicking, the mouth spewing out details of death and anarchy. The scenes of bodies would live in his head for some time. I know they’ll live in mine.
I told them I’d been to Iraq, too, as a reporter in January, in some of the same areas of Western Baghdad they had patrolled for a year, where many of their comrades perished in roadside bomb attacks. Back outside in the sunshine, away from the stench of bodies, we chatted awhile with a group of four or five other guardsmen. All of us agreed: The horrors of Katrina trumped anything we’d seen overseas. Death in war makes sense. Death on Convention Center Boulevard makes none.
I roared off Uptown in the Jeep, and called my editor, Jed Horne, in Baton Rouge, to tell him I’d have a vivid if gruesome story coming.
Thevenot is an Iraq veteran, for which he deserves the highest praise. But does that make his reporting necessarily accurate?
MORE: I think it’s worth informing readers who don’t like to click the links that Brian Thevenot’s AJR piece is titled “Apocalypse in New Orleans.” (Whether that might be called suggestive depends on whether there was an apocalypse. And even that depends on which definition is used.)
MORE: I called Thevenot an Iraq veteran, because he was clearly in Iraq with the U.S. military, as his military weblog shows. But I am not 100% sure whether “on assignment in Iraq with the Louisiana National Guard’s 256th Brigade Combat Team” means that he actually served in the military or was merely embedded as a reporter. (I see only evidence of the latter.)
AND MORE: There’s been serious discussion about whether Brian Thevenot’s reporting deserves the Pulitzer Prize. For what? For not letting facts get in the way of the heart of the story?
MORE: Via Glenn Reynolds, John Podhoretz says MSM praise will go to “the the early reporters for their ‘commitment’ and the later correctives for their honesty.” Even when they’re the same reporters whose “correctives” don’t mention their own errors? Podhoretz also opines that “everyone was very credulous.”
Being credulous is one thing. (I was credulous.) But are there no limits?
UPDATE: Dean Esmay’s reaction to this was about as visceral as mine.