Who's Responsible for the Lies?(Welcome, fellow
Politburo Dictat readers!)
This
New Orleans Times-Picayune article makes it clear that the stories of rape and murder at the Superdome and the New Orleans Convention Center were largely a fiction. But who is responsible?
"I had the impression that at least 40 or 50 murders had occurred at the two sites," he said. "It's unfortunate we saw these kinds of stories saying crime had taken place on a massive scale when that wasn't the case. And they (national media outlets) have done nothing to follow up on any of these cases, they just accepted what people (on the street) told them. ... It's not consistent with the highest standards of journalism."Ah, so it's the media? But they were reporting what people supposedly in the know told them:
Police, according to their chief, Eddie Compass, found themselves in multiple shootouts inside both shelters, and were forced to race toward muzzle flashes through the dark to disarm the criminals; snipers supposedly fired at doctors and soldiers from downtown high-rises.
In interviews with Oprah Winfrey, Compass reported rapes of "babies," and Mayor Ray Nagin spoke of "hundreds of armed gang members" killing and raping people inside the Dome. Unidentified evacuees told of children stepping over so many bodies, "we couldn't count."Now, I'm not a big defender of the media, but it seems to me that if you are relying on the folks who supposedly are in the know--the mayor and the chief of police--it's a bit hard to blame it on the newspapers and TV stations for passing that information along. Remember, the
Times-Picayune itself reported some of the most outrageous stories. That said, the media passed along the stories uncritically because they suited their agenda at the time, which was to claim that people were being killed because of the supposedly sluggish response of the Bush Administration.
Note as well that this fits nicely
with the Aaron Broussard story. Now we've got three local New Orleans officials who quite obviously lied to make it seem like people were dying because the feds didn't step in fast enough.
The Commissar
ties it into a Frank Rich column. I vaguely remember the name Frank Rich; wasn't he the backup QB for the Buffalo Bills?
See also
Michelle Malkin
