Rough Justice
Topic: Hurricane Katrina

The city today looks like an unkempt, moldy trailer park. Those who remain are reduced to living in trailers planted on their front lawns; labor and material shortages have prevented many from vacating the campers for the relative comforts of central cooling and carpeting. A year after the catastrophe, some New Orleanians are still battling insurance companies over claims that should have been settled months ago. There is a citywide rat infestation; mosquitoes carrying the West Nile virus are as common as drunken collegiates on Bourbon Street; and electricity and water service remain spotty.

That's the way Raymond Arroyo describes the Crescent City today, one year after it was destroyed by Hurricane Katrina, in this article for National Review Online. It's the sad story of a city that will probably never arise from the rubble, thanks largely to corrupt, incompetent political leadership. While progressives and their mainstream media allies have been concentrating their Katrina criticisms on the Bush Administration, the hapless Mayor Ray Nagin dithers and postures as his city disintegrates around him. Thanks to him and his fellow local pols, New Orleans will probably never recover from the Katrina disaster. But, after all, the people voted Nagin back into office. In that sense, perhaps, they chose the fate that Arroyo describes.

Katrina: The Real Story
Topic: Hurricane Katrina
The current (October 24, 2005) National Review (fondly known as NRODT or National Review on Dead Tree), includes a story by Lou Dolinar that exposes the falsity of the charge that the poor of New Orleans were abandoned by an uncaring government. Mr. Dolinar exposes this charge, so loudly trumpeted by Bush haters and eagerly amplified by the mainstream media, as a bare-faced lie.

Critics screamed that after the levees broke, help was unpardonably slow to arrive. Not true. For example, the US Coast Guard (part of the much-criticized Homeland Security Department) swung into action immediately. It put 16 rescue helicopters into the air in 60mph winds on Monday, August 29, just after the passage of the storm and the failure of the levees. Ultimately, the Coast Guard deployed some 50 helicopters to the disaster area, plus hundreds of small boats and barges. The Coast Guard was credited with 24,000 rescues; it also evacuated 9,000 people from hospitals and nursing homes.

The Coast Guard was joined by 16 helicopters from two Louisiana Army National Guard units: the 1st Battalion, 244th Aviation and the 812th Medical Company (Air Ambulance). Despite being neither trained nor equipped for rescue operations, these two units saved thousands of lives.

The Air Force and Navy also contributed in the rescue effort. Five helicopters from the USS Bataan began flying rescue missions on Tuesday, August 30, and saved several hundred people on their first day of operation alone. (New York Times columnist Paul Krugman seems to have overlooked this when he condemned the Bataan for inaction.) National Guard units from other states, police, firefighters and private citizens also saved many lives.

Mr. Dolinar observes that the Hurricane Katrina story requires major revision--an understatement if ever there was one.

Fact-Free Zone
Topic: Hurricane Katrina
It's considered a great scandal that FEMA wasn't able to banish the chaos and suffering of Hurricane Katrina with a wave of its magical bureaucratic wand. The mainstream media are simply livid about this. The MSM have less to say, however, about their resounding failure to report the story fairly accurately. Fortunately, we have Hugh Hewitt to remind us that much of what we heard from the likes of Anderson Cooper and Shepard Smith was pure bunk.

Reality began to set in when the Los Angeles Times, to its credit, published an analysis of the media's Katrina coverage. Its conclusion: many of the most sensational stories we heard during the crisis were simply false. Instead of reporting real news, many journalists were simply collecting and broadcasting rumors. Fact checking? Everyone was way too outraged to bother with that

This colossal snafu was all the more despicable because accompanied by hosannas of praise for the press from--the press itself. A typical example came from New York Times media columnist David Carr:

[Anderson] Cooper’s well-shaded outrage—he stopped just this short of editorializing—elicited the kind of anger that has been mostly missing from a toothless press. After a couple of years on the run from the government, public skepticism and self-inflicted wounds, the press corps felt its toes touch bottom in the Gulf Coast and came up big.

There speaks the authentic voice of MSM narcissism. A huge swath of America gets trashed by a monster storm, but the real story is how journalists "grew a spine." Gag.

Drawing a Blank on Blanco
Topic: Hurricane Katrina
After subjecting former FEMA Director Michael Brown to a series of intemperate tirades and personal insults, Congress took a very different tone with the Governor of Louisiana, as the Washington Times reports:

Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Babineaux Blanco. . .was given no questions about her response to Hurricane Katrina when she appeared before a Senate committee to plead for more federal money.

She asked not to be questioned about it and the senators agreed.

That figures. It's becoming more and more clear that the nation's political class has nominated Brown and FEMA to be official Katrina scapegoats. Blaming this second-tier agency for all the nation's bad-weather woes is ever so much more comforting than questioning the actions of one's fellow elected officials. It's disgraceful that members of Congress, Republicans and Democrats alike, have adopted this CYA strategy.

Hostile Witness
Topic: Hurricane Katrina
Former FEMA chief Michael Brown was on the Hill yesterday, being hectored by a House panel. He didn't take the criticism that was aimed at him lying down, either. While admitting that he could have done a better job, Brown pointed the finger--justly, in my opinion--at the Mayor of New Orleans and the Governor of Louisiana.

His response to criticism that FEMA should have moved in force to succor the people of New Orleans:

Guess what, FEMA doesn't own fire trucks; we don't own ambulances; we don't own search-and-rescue equipment. In fact, the only search-and-rescue or emergency equipment that we own is a very small cadre to protect some property that we own around the country. FEMA is a coordinating agency. We are not a law enforcement agency.

Here's the Fox News report on Brown's testimony.

Both Democrats and Republicans on the House panel charged with an inquiry into the Katrina response labored mightily to pin the blame on Brown. All in all, it was a pathetic spectacle. The Governor of Louisiana is slated to testify today, and I confidently predict that she will he handled with kid gloves.

Postmodern Journalistic Ethics
Topic: Hurricane Katrina
As criticism of the media's distorted and false reporting on Hurricane Katrina gathers momentum, one journalist offers a lame defense:

I don’t think the media overplays. I don’t think the media exaggerates. Maybe the people on the ground were exaggerating because, hey, they wanted help, they needed help and they were’t getting it. Perhaps they would say anything they could say. Maybe they would say the first thing that came to mind to try and get help. But if the photojournalist, if that photographer is there to capture it, who’s doing the overplaying? You’re certainly gonna take that person and you’re gonna tell that story because that’s the story of the need, of the person that camera is on. And I don’t think that’s over-exaggerating in the least. . .

It’s the responsibility of the photojournalist to capture that and put it on television because those people at that point needed help no matter what was true, what was false, what was exaggerated.

This from Heath Allen, a reporter for NBC’s Baton Rouge affiliate. (Hat tip: NRO's "Media Blog." He is saying, in effect, that journalistic ethics cover lying in cases where the cause is just. For after all (as jesting Pilate inquired of Jesus), what is truth?

Mr. Allen would no doubt be indignant if anyone were to tell him that he can't be trusted as a journalist. But hasn't he testified to his untrustworthiness?

I suspect that Heath Allen's attitude is widespread among journalists, many of whom labor under the adolescent notion that they exist to "make the world a better place." And this explains why more and more people view the mainstream media with distrust and skepticism.

Topic: Hurricane Katrina
As criticism of the media's distorted and false reporting on Hurricane Katrina gathers momentum, one journalist offers a lame defense:

I don’t think the media overplays. I don’t think the media exaggerates. Maybe the people on the ground were exaggerating because, hey, they wanted help, they needed help and they weren’t getting it. Perhaps they would say anything they could say. Maybe they would say the first thing that came to mind to try and get help. But if the photojournalist, if that photographer is there to capture it, who’s doing the overplaying? You’re certainly gonna take that person and you’re gonna tell that story because that’s the story of the need, of the person that camera is on. And I don’t think that’s over-exaggerating in the least…

It’s the responsibility of the photojournalist to capture that and put it on television because those people at that point needed help no matter what was true, what was false, what was exaggerated.

This from Heath Allen, a reporter for NBC’s Baton Rouge affiliate. (Hat tip: NRO's "Media Blog."

Topic: Hurricane Katrina
As criticism of the media's distorted and false reporting on Hurricane Katrina gathers momentum, one journalist offers a lame defense:

I don’t think the media overplays. I don’t think the media exaggerates. Maybe the people on the ground were exaggerating because, hey, they wanted help, they needed help and they weren’t getting it. Perhaps they would say anything they could say. Maybe they would say the first thing that came to mind to try and get help. But if the photojournalist, if that photographer is there to capture it, who’s doing the overplaying? You’re certainly gonna take that person and you’re gonna tell that story because that’s the story of the need, of the person that camera is on. And I don’t think that’s over-exaggerating in the least…

It’s the responsibility of the photojournalist to capture that and put it on television because those people at that point needed help no matter what was true, what was false, what was exaggerated.

This from Heath Allen, a reporter for NBC’s Baton Rouge affiliate. (Hat tip: NRO's "Media Blog."

Another Media Fairy Tale
Topic: Hurricane Katrina
We were transfixed the media's reporting on New Orleans' Superdome and Ernest N. Morial Convention Center, those charnel houses in which the dead, victims of the uncaring George W. Bush and his sinister neocon cabal, were stacked up like cord wood. Well, it now appears that those reports were, ahem, slightly exaggerated:

After five days managing near-riots, medical horrors and unspeakable living conditions inside the Superdome, Louisiana National Guard Col. Thomas Beron prepared to hand over the dead to representatives of the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

Following days of internationally reported killings, rapes and gang violence inside the Dome, the doctor from FEMA - Beron doesn't remember his name - came prepared for a grisly scene: He brought a refrigerated 18-wheeler and three doctors to process bodies.

"I've got a report of 200 bodies in the Dome," Beron recalls the doctor saying.

The real total was six, Beron said.

Of those, four died of natural causes, one overdosed and another jumped to his death in an apparent suicide, said Beron, who personally oversaw the turning over of bodies from a Dome freezer, where they lay atop melting bags of ice. State health department officials in charge of body recovery put the official death count at the Dome at 10, but Beron said the other four bodies were found in the street near the Dome, not inside it. Both sources said no one had been killed inside.

At the Ernest N. Morial Convention Center, just four bodies were recovered, despite reports of corpses piled inside the building. Only one of the dead appeared to have been slain, said health and law enforcement officials.

So says the New Orleans Times-Picayune--which, it should be noted, published a couple of earlier, hysterical stories about mass killings in the Convention Center and the Dome.

There's only one word for this: disgraceful. I wonder how many of the networks, newspapers & etc. that carried all those phony stories will issue retractions and apologies? Not many, would be my guess.

Streisand's Science Project
Topic: Hurricane Katrina
That numerous Tinseltown celebs suffer from a sense of overweening self-regard is well known, but this one most certainly deserves to win the hotly contested Hollywood Hubris Award:

STREISAND DECLARES 'GLOBAL WARMING EMERGENCY'

Thanks for the warning, Babs.