Sorry Ed please don’t take this personally but for a while now these sorts of articles have been getting under my skin. Not because the MSM does not deserve to be attacked when they are wrong but simply because we seem to be so anxious to prove the media wrong that we jump to the wrong conclusions ourselves.
For instance one of the big sites that was often linked to by nearly everyone on the rightside of the blogsphere was Gateway Pundit. A site that I believe does excellent work. But let me use one of their posts about Katrina to illustrate a point.
One of Gateway Pundit’s posts about Katrina that was linked to often was the “More Hurricane Katrina: Folklore vs. Fact” The first entry was:
Folklore: Hurricane Katrina was the worst natural disaster in the country’s history
Fact: Hurricane Katrina is the seventh worst natural disaster in US history.
Wow we were “only” the 7th worst natural disaster! That was wrong on so many different levels that its hard to know where to start. But lets simply start with the fact that at the time Gateway Pundit wrote that bit of fluff, we were still pulling bodies out of the water. In fact when Gateway Pundit posted that bit we had already assumed the dubious title of 5th worst natural disaster, so while attacking the MSM for getting the story wrong, he got the story wrong. It was also in my opinion fairly unseemly to be crowing about the fact that we were “only” the 7th worst when indeed at that point over 9,000 people were still listed as missing. Indeed at this very moment there are still over 5,000 adults missing and 1,500 children missing. No doubt that not all of them are dead but still perhaps a bit of decorum is called for especially since we are STILL finding bodies, 30 last month.
A lot was made of the fact that the Media regurgitated Mayor Nagins claim that we might have 10,000 dead as if that were a figure that Nagin pulled out of his ass. Many different sites crowed that the MSM was perpetuating myths without any basis in fact and that it was absurd to have claimed that upwards of 10,000 might have died. Again the blogsphere got the story twisted and wrong…blatantly wrong.
Matter of fact Nagin didn’t pull those figures out of his ass. He pulled them from the Federal Agencies responsible for disaster planning. NOAA had predicted up wards of 50,000 dead in a hurricane hit similar to Katrina, Red Cross had predicted between 25,000 to 100,000 dead in simulations that both had run. It was entirely plausible for Nagin to make that claim especially considering how quickly the waters rose in such populated areas like St. Bernard and Plaqumines.
The media has a lot to answer for, indeed they did get major parts of the story wrong in Katrina. It was shameful that they used our tragedy to attack President Bush. It would be ashamed if we in the Blogsphere also used the tragedy to attack our enemy the MSM.
At this point a Major US city is no more. Less that 100,000 people sleep in the city overnight. Enormous portions of the city will never recover. Let that sink in for a moment…a US City has been effectively destroyed. Not sure how much the MSM overhyped it, but it would be ashamed if we made less of it, to attack the MSM. More than 5,000 Adults and 1,500 children from La. are still missing. Chill a bit on the minimizing eh?
Pierre Legrand
Baton Rouge
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