MEDIA FRENZY: Everyone is dead in New Orleans The DC Guy September 26, 2005

The Times-Picayune from New Orleans has released an article stating that the massive number of casualties that were predicted by the mainstream media at the Superdome and at the New Orleans Convention center were off.

Extremely off.

They are so far off that I can't believe there hasn't been a major story on how wrong they were.

New Orleans Media Frenzy
Being the news junkie that I am, I had Fox and CNN on almost constantly during the whole Katrina crisis. I recall Fox News and CNN anchors talking about bodies being stacked up like cordwood and the scene at the Convention center being even worse.

CNN's Chris Lawrence wrote:

"We spent the last few hours at the New Orleans Convention Center...We saw dead bodies. People are dying at the center and there is no one to get them. We saw a grandmother in a wheelchair pushed up to the wall and covered with a sheet. Right next to her was another dead body wrapped in a white sheet."

CNN's Jim Spellman wrote:

"Probably the most disturbing thing is that people at the convention center are starting to pass away and there is simply nothing to do with their bodies. There is nowhere to put them. There is no one who can do anything with them. This is making everybody very, very upset."

Sounds pretty bad, right? I thought so. Most people did.

The true numbers at New Orleans
Now, with all that horrific news, I was expecting something between the Black Death and Armageddon. The media was already throwing around terms like "Biblical disaster" and "apocalyptic proportions". So what was the official death toll now that the Superdome and Convention Center have been cleaned?

Ten.

Six dead at the Superdome and four at the Convention Center. Of the Superdome deaths, four were from natural causes, one was an overdose, and one a suicide. Of those at the Convention Center, one appeared to be a homicide, the rest were natural causes.

I would love to hear from anyone who thinks, based on what they saw in news coverage, if that was what they expected. I certainly didn't.

I expected a death toll in the hundreds from those two locations alone based on the kind of rhetoric I was hearing and reading. Apparently, that's all it was: Rhetoric. And since then there has not been a peep from the major news outlets discussing how they got this wrong.

While some of the actual fact-based news coming out of New Orleans and the Gulf Region during the hurricane was good, after a few days it all went downhill. It was as if the entire media world had decided to throw the calm, cool impartiality of old-school Walter Cronkite out the window, and started acting like Johnny from Airplane.

Rita Media Frenzy
The coverage of Hurricane Rita was similar, particularly on Friday when Rita hit Category 5 and the news outlets went bonkers. "Colossal" Rita sends Texans "scurrying" like ants out of Houston.

It seemed obvious to me, as I was up at 3 AM waiting for Rita to make landfall, that the media was doing its best to gear everyone up for Katrina-like devastation down in the Gulf. But is that what the media is supposed to be doing? Is that what they should be doing? No.

Much of what the media said and did during the Katrina crisis, especially the reporting on the Superdome and Convention Center, has worked its way into the political scene in DC. Both Democrats and Republicans are using it in whatever way will advance their individual agendas. The problem with that is when the media gets it completely wrong, it starts a chain reaction that results in the making of bad policies based on bad facts.

Or, worse, it forces lawmakers to spend all their time correcting the media's poor impressions, which makes it impossible for them to focus on what really matters.

There's plenty more I've got to say about the media. You'll get it in my next column later this week.