Michael Fumento, writing for Tech Central Station, has the best summary to date of the myriad ways in which the Mainstream Media, reveling in self-righteousness as it blamed the Bush administration for Hurricane Katrina, never got around to actually getting the New Prleans story.


Fumento lists (with ample links) each item in the MSM’s misreporting on the Katrina aftermath:


“Among the horrors that never happened:


“* Editor & Publisher headlined an article, ‘Mortuary Director Tells Local Paper 40,000 Could Be Lost in Hurricane,’ while the French paper Liberation ran a detailed report on 1,200 people drowning in a single school.


“* CNN claimed snipers were taking potshots at helicopters trying to evacuate patients from hospitals, while separately CNN host Paula Zahn breathlessly spoke of ‘reports’ of ‘bands of rapists, going block to block.’


“* To be fair and balanced, we note that Fox News’s Geraldo Rivera claimed from the scene that ‘Yesterday the sun set on a scene of terror, chaos, confusion, anarchy, violence, rapes, murders, dead babies, dead people.’


“* Oprah Winfrey’s special report from New Orleans was wall-to-wall hysteria. Mayor Ray Nagin told her ‘They have people standing out there, have been in that frickin’ Superdome for five days watching dead bodies, watching hooligans killing people, raping people.’ Police Chief Eddie Compass (since resigned) added that ‘little babies [are] getting raped.'”


Fumento adds:


“If all of this sounds like something from a post-apocalyptic zombie movie, that’s pretty much what it was said professional rabble-rouser Randall Robinson. Four days after the storm ‘thousands of blacks in New Orleans are dying like dogs,’ he wrote, and ‘have begun eating corpses to survive.’ Just four days and already feasting on your friends?”


As we now know, conditions at the Superdome, with its non-functioning restrooms, were loathsome and primitive but far from barbaric. Looting was fairly minimal, much it of by New Orleans cops themselves. If the MSM had put a lid on the moral indignation and done some real reporting, it would have saved itself a lot of embarrassment.


Hat tip: Arts and Letters Daily. Be sure to skip the companion piece by Marxist blowhard and postmodernist academic darling Slavoj Zizek.