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DAVID CARR
More Horrible Than Truth: News Reports
Published: September 19, 2005
DISASTER has a way of bringing out the best and the worst
instincts in the news media. It is a grand thing that during the most
terrible days of Hurricane Katrina, many reporters found their gag
reflex and stopped swallowing pat excuses from public officials. But
the media's willingness to report thinly attributed rumors may also have contributed to a
kind of cultural wreckage that will not clean up easily.
First, anyone with any knowledge of the events in New Orleans knows that terrible
things with non-natural causes occurred: there were assaults, shots fired at a rescue
helicopter and, given the state of the city's police department, many other crimes that
probably went unreported.
But many instances in the lurid libretto of widespread murder, carjacking, rape, and
assaults that filled the airwaves and newspapers have yet to be established or proved,
as far as anyone can determine. And many of the urban legends that sprang up - the
systematic rape of children, the slitting of a 7-year-old's throat - so far seem to be just
that. The fact that some of these rumors were repeated by overwhelmed local officials
does not completely get the news media off the hook. A survey of news reports in the
LexisNexis database shows that on Sept. 1, the news media's narrative of the hurricane
shifted.
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7/18/2014 More Horrible Than Truth: News Reports - New YorkTimes
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The Fox News anchor, John Gibson, helped set the scene: "All kinds of reports of
looting, fires and violence. Thugs shooting at rescue crews. Thousands of police and
National Guard troops are on the scene trying to get the situation under control.
Thousands more on the way. So heads up, looters." A reporter, David Lee Miller,
responded: "Hi, John. As you so rightly point out, there are so many murders taking
place. There are rapes, other violent crimes taking place in New Orleans." After the
interview, Mr. Gibson did acknowledge that "we have yet to confirm a lot of that."
Later that night on MSNBC, Tucker Carlson grabbed the flaming baton and ran with it.
"People are being raped," he said in a conversation with the Rev. Al Sharpton. "People
are being murdered. People are being shot. Police officers being shot."
Some journalists did find sources. About 10 p.m. that same evening, Greta Van
Susteren of Fox interviewed Dr. Charles Burnell, an emergency room physician who
was providing medical care in the Superdome.
"Well, we had several murders. We had three murders last night. We had a total of six
rapes last night. We had the day before I think there were three or four murders. There
were half a dozen rapes that night," he told Ms. Van Susteren. (Dr. Burnell did not
return several calls asking for comment.) On the same day, The New York Times
referred to two rapes at the Superdome, quoting a woman by name who said she was a
witness.
It is a fact that many died at the convention center and Superdome (7 and 10
respectively, according to the most recent reports from the coroner), but according to a
Sept. 15 report in The Chicago Tribune, it was mostly from neglect rather than overt
violence. According to the Tribune article, which quoted Capt. Jeffery Winn, the head
of the city's SWAT team, one person at the convention center died from multiple stab
wounds and one National Guardsman was shot in the leg.
On Sept. 8, Lt. Dave Banelli, head of the sex crimes unit, told a CNN correspondent,
Drew Griffin, that his division had reports of two attempted rapes at the Superdome.
The caveat here is that rape is a notoriously underreported crime, perhaps more so
under the chaotic circumstances.
7/18/2014 More Horrible Than Truth: News Reports - New YorkTimes
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The journalists who dwelled on some of the more improbable stories out of New
Orleans might be held to account, except that they eventually received confirmation
from both the mayor and the police chief.
Appearing on "Oprah" on Sept. 6, Chief Eddie Compass said of the Superdome: "We
had little babies in there, some of the little babies getting raped." Mayor C. Ray Nagin
concurred: "They have people standing out there, have been in that frickin' Superdome
for five days watching dead bodies, watching hooligans killing people, raping people."
But the night before, Chief Compass had told The Guardian, "We don't have any
substantiated rapes. We will investigate if they come forward." Many of the more toxic
rumors seem to have come from evacuees, half-crazed with fear sitting through night
after night in the dark. Victims, officials and reporters all took one of the most horrific
events in American history and made it worse than it actually was.
Although I was not in New Orleans, I was at the World Trade Center towers site the
afternoon of Sept. 11, 2001. People had seen unimaginable things, but a small
percentage, many still covered in ash, told me tales that were worse than what actually
happened. Mothers throwing babies out of the towers, men getting in fights on the
ledges, human heads getting blown out of the buildings, all of which took place so high
up in the air that it was hard to distinguish the falling humans from the falling wreckage.
"There is a timeless primordial appeal of the story of a city in chaos and people running
loose," said Carl Smith, a professor of English and American studies at Northwestern
University and the author of "Urban Disorder and the Shape of Belief." He says that
urban chaos narratives offered "the fulfillment of some timely ideas and prejudices about
the current social order."
In New Orleans, the misinformation extracted a terrible toll in another way. An
international press eager to jump on American pathology played the unfounded reports
for all they were worth, with hundreds of news outlets regurgitating tales of lawlessness.
"They're Going to Kill or Rape Us, Get Us Out" read the headline in The Daily Star, a
British tabloid. "Tourist Tells of Murder and Rape," was one headline in The Australian.
"Snipers Shoot at Hospitals. Evacuees Raped, Beaten," The Ottawa Citizen reported.
7/18/2014 More Horrible Than Truth: News Reports - New YorkTimes
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"I think that citizens of New Orleans have been stigmatized in a way that is going to
make it difficult to be accepted wherever they go," said Jonathan Simon, who teaches
criminal law at the University of California, Berkeley.
Howard Witt, the Southwest bureau chief of The Chicago Tribune, wrote early on that
much of what he had been told, even by public officials, did not check out. And he
found himself inundated by rumors.
"The Web and talk radio fueled these rumors in the days following the storm, and the
evacuees themselves contributed to the misinformation because they were so scared,"
he said by telephone from Baton Rouge, La. With the grid down and accurate
information at a premium, a game of toxic telephone supplanted logic.
"I talked to a friend and, after the flood, they heard on the radio that a gang of 400
armed black looters were coming over the bridge to Hanrahan, where he lived," said
Ken Bode, a professor of journalism at DePauw University and a former correspondent
for NBC. "He and his neighbors were sitting in the street with guns and they decided to
load up all they could and caravan out. He said the looters never got there because the
National Guard turned them back."
There was no band of looters coming their way, but other things that sound too horrible
to be true did happen. The widely reported and seemingly fantastical story about a man
shooting at a rescue helicopter was confirmed. And the police in Gretna, La., did in fact
turn back hundreds of fleeing refugees on the Crescent City Connector.
On Sept. 15, The Chicago Tribune had an extensive report detailing how thugs took
some measure of control over people and supplies at the convention center. The
Washington Post published a vivid article on the same day detailing how grave the
situation in the convention center became, but again, the issue of whether people were
murdered was left open.
And yes, true story, a Louisiana congressman under investigation by the Federal Bureau
of Investigation hitched a ride on a National Guard truck to his flood-damaged home to
pick up, among other things, a box of documents. A rescue helicopter was diverted
7/18/2014 More Horrible Than Truth: News Reports - New YorkTimes
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from picking up survivors after the truck became stuck.
Even now, the real, actual events in New Orleans in the past three weeks surpass the
imagination. Who needs urban myths when the reality was so brutal?
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