Pittsburg Post-Gazette:
The first casualty of Hurricane Katrina appears to have been the truth. Many of the other casualties were products not of armed gangs but of overheated imaginations.
The reality of the devastation and misery in New Orleans was bad enough, or should have been. But when the rumors started to fly, we were all taken in. Now that the deluge of water and journalists have both receded, reporters at the New Orleans Times-Picayune have been separating the tall tales from the true stories. Their findings are startling and instructive.
At the Superdome, for example, there were not hundreds of corpses but six. One person had overdosed, four had died of natural causes, and the one suspicious death, a fall, may have been an accident or suicide. One shooting has been confirmed: A Louisiana Guardsman was attacked by someone with a metal rod, and he accidentally shot himself in the leg with his own gun during the struggle.
The hundreds of bodies stacked inside the Ernest N. Morial Convention Center never materialized either; just four were recovered, one of which appeared to be a murder victim. In fact, the parish's district attorney said only four murders have been confirmed in the hurricane's aftermath, which makes that week no more deadly than the norm in New Orleans. There was plenty of looting and some guns, but a Convention Center official said he saw no violent crimes.
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Aside from being irresponsible, the gossip-mongering hurt response to real problems, as help was sent where it wasn't needed. A thousand soldiers and police in battle gear went to the Convention Center to quell the storied mayhem, but they met no resistance, found no evidence of assaults or murders and were in control in 20 minutes, according to their commander.
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