Hugh Hewitt on Media Out of Control Exaggerating New Orleans Disorder

Read his great article Reporting Katrina in the Weekly Standard 09/29/2005.

Media reports included:
 “Arkansas National Guardsman Mikel Brooks stepped through the food service entrance of the Ernest N. Morial Convention Center Monday, flipped on the light at the end of his machine gun, and started pointing out bodies.
- ‘That one with his arm sticking up in the air, he's an old man.’ Then he shined the light on
the smaller human figure under the white sheet next to the elderly man.
- ‘That's a kid,’ he said. ‘There's another one in the freezer, a 7-year-old with her throat
cut’.”
- ‘There's an old woman, …and that old man got bludgeoned to death," he said of the body
lying on the floor next to the wheelchair.’
- Brooks and several other Guardsmen said they had seen between 30 and 40 more bodies
in the Convention Center's freezer.”

 “NBC photojournalist Tony Zumbado on air” saying “according to them, and what they saw, they left and they're there on their own. There's no police there's no authority. . . . You would never ever imagine what you saw in the convention center in New Orleans. …Dead people around the walls of the convention center, laying in the middle of the street in their dying chairs. . . . They were just covered up . . . Babies, two babies dehydrated and died.”

 “New Orleans Police Superintendent Eddie Compass acknowledged that murders and rapes had occurred at both the convention center and the Superdome”

 “"The Dome turned into a den of depravity at some point,"

 “noting reports of rapes and people beaten to death."

 “NBC's Campbell Brown ‘lot of people died, I believe unnecessarily’.”

Hugh writes “now even the mainstream media is figuring out that its performance in New Orleans was a disgrace, an emotion-binging joyride fueled by urban myth, rumor, and a deep desire to injure the Bush administration.”

Hugh Hewitt HughHewitt.com is the host of a nationally syndicated radio show, and author most recently of Blog: Understanding the Information Reformation That is Changing Your World.

See Prior Posts:
Ghost New Orleans Police
Media Inaccurate New Orleans Reporting
Lawsuit That Sank New Orleans
New Orleans Levees Failed Not Built to Specification
Environmentalist Lawsuit Blocked Storm Gates to Protect New Orleans
U.S. Hurricanes Getting Worse Due to Global Warming? No
U.S. Hurricane Strikes by Decade
Help Victims of Hurricane Katrina