All over the newspapers and the internet, the headlines tell us that much of what we saw in the early aftermath of Katrina and flood in New Orleans was exaggerated. No argument there. There's always some exaggeration and some incorrect information is invariably disseminated. Sometimes the errors are corrected after the storm has passed, so to speak. Sometimes not. What makes this time different is that, for some reason(s), there is a huge need to "get the truth out." But is it really the truth? Sure, the tales piles of hundreds of dead bodies in the convention center and the reports of at least 40,000 dead, and the corpse-eating nonsense have now been debunked, but I'm not sure anybody really believed any of that to begin with. The source of many of the more grim stories was hysterical people shoved in front of a camera and encouraged to say something. I'd hope that reasonable people watching this had the wisdom to take these reports with a grain of salt. But I also recognize that reasonable people don't have a very strong presence in the media.
What's bothersome to me is that the idea behind all these reports of exaggeration seems to be that bad things didn't happen and that all the reports of disgusting criminal behavior were made up. Like so much of what's been said since Katrina, this idea is perfectly acceptable to people who have never been to New Orleans. And I'd venture to say that the majority of people in the United States as a whole have in fact never set foot in that city. Thus the majority consensus is based entirely on what people get from their various media outlets. So right now there are people sitting in Boston thinking that no looting took place and that rescue operations were in no way repelled by violent thugs. Those people are wrong.
You can take away all the speculation and questionable eyewitness reports, and just look at what is absolutely known to have happened. I seriously doubt CNN, ABC, NBC, FOX, etc. had time to PhotoShop or otherwise edit the images of looters and bands of hooligans. It happened. While it turns out that the murders that took place in the aftermath of the hurricane number no more than the murders of a typical week in New Orleans, there's no denying that there were murders. And though we now know that small children weren't being raped left and right in the Convention Center, there were rapes. As to reports of arson, the piles of charred rubble speak for themselves.
The fact that things were exaggerated doesn't mean that nothing happened.
5:55 AM
