Monday, September 26, 2005
Body Count Surprise in New Orleans
The Times-Picayune follows up on widely reported attacks and deaths at the Superdome and Convention center. Most of the widely reported artocities are either demonstably false or unsupported by evidence.
Those 30 bodies in the freezer? Chow line gossip passed to guardsmen who had never seen any bodies. There were 6 bodies found at Dome (four more outside); 4 at the convention center. An exhaustive search and repeated sweeps found no others.
How about the Guardsman who was shot in a superdome locker-room? He shot himself by accident. Sniper fire? a lie. Shootouts and mayhem with roving bands of thugs? More like wild goose chases on false reports.
The truth was bad enough - stifling heat, not enough food, water, no place to go to the bathroom ... most of the deaths were from natural causes.
Vulnerable poor descending into sub-human seething raging predatory cannibalizing wildebeasts? Not so much.
FOAF (Friend of a Friend, or more likely Fool of a Fool) legends spread like wildfire, and no reporter apparently had the sense to pin down an original sources about where they got their story.
Update:
Jeff Goldstein lays a few of them out here: Hurricane Coverage and the Legacy Media's Mainstream Failures.
Those 30 bodies in the freezer? Chow line gossip passed to guardsmen who had never seen any bodies. There were 6 bodies found at Dome (four more outside); 4 at the convention center. An exhaustive search and repeated sweeps found no others.
How about the Guardsman who was shot in a superdome locker-room? He shot himself by accident. Sniper fire? a lie. Shootouts and mayhem with roving bands of thugs? More like wild goose chases on false reports.
The truth was bad enough - stifling heat, not enough food, water, no place to go to the bathroom ... most of the deaths were from natural causes.
Vulnerable poor descending into sub-human seething raging predatory cannibalizing wildebeasts? Not so much.
FOAF (Friend of a Friend, or more likely Fool of a Fool) legends spread like wildfire, and no reporter apparently had the sense to pin down an original sources about where they got their story.
Update:
Jeff Goldstein lays a few of them out here: Hurricane Coverage and the Legacy Media's Mainstream Failures.
