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The shameful reporting from New Orleans

Independent:

The stories out of New Orleans in the immediate aftermath of Hurricane Katrina were little short of sickening: armed gangs terrorising evacuees in the Superdome and convention centre, bodies piling up by the dozen amid the stench and human waste, bodies stuffed into a freezer, children raped, murdered and thrown into waste bins.

One month after the storm, however, it appears that few, if any, of the most lurid reports breathlessly repeated on American television, echoed in official statements and duly reported in many of the world's newspapers, had any basis in fact.

Several reporters and officials who have revisited the emblematic sites of the peculiarly chaotic hell that was New Orleans in the wake of Katrina now say the death toll at the Superdome was just six - and four of those were the result of natural causes. The fifth victim overdosed on drugs and the sixth committed suicide. If there were shootings or stabbings, none were fatal.

At the convention centre, where The New York Times recently reported a death toll of 24 amid scenes of gun violence and rank fear, health and law enforcement officials have now told the New Orleans Times-Picayune newspaper that they recovered four bodies, of which only one showed signs of having been murdered.

Police have confirmed just four homicides in the city in the week after the hurricane - about average for one of America's most crime-ridden metropolitan areas.

...

Some of the distortions were due to the collapse of communications and the sense of horror at what was unfolding. Some were the hallmark of an over-eager, under-informed news media - who, six years ago, managed to get wronng almost all the basic details of the shootings at Columbine High School in Colorado. And some of it appears to have been fuelled by fear of - occasionally bordering on bigotry towards - a poor, desperate, largely black population.

He was doing pretty good until he got to this last paragraph. Who does he think was the source for this nonsense? The black mayor and the black police chief repeated stories told them by blacks who were supposedly on the scene. These people very well may have been desperate and perhaps they wrongly thought that by exagerating the situation that might get more prompt action. If that was their plan, it backfired big time, since FEMA could not send its people into such a chaiotic situation. It us just like the UK liberals to blame bigotry for the acts of people who they perceived to be its victims. They are 180 degrees out of phase on this. The US media repeated this nonsense because they were willing to believe it when repeated by an incompetant mayor and police chief.