The more I see things like this, the angrier I get about the irresponsible and sensationalistic press coverage of Katrina, for no other reason than to discredit the Bush administration.
[Update later morning]
(Tenesseean) Michael Silence is running an Internet poll. Of course, the problem is, it’s been so undercovered that many people taking the poll won’t even know what it was about. As I note in comments over there, there should have been a third choice: “What TN flooding?”
And what is that Barack Obama hates so much about southern people?
but… but… but he walks on water.
I won’t minimize the deaths, property damage, hardship, and misfortune, but if you’re criticizing the media and making political commentary, don’t maximize them either — just count them. So, compare the death tolls. Compare the number of evacuees. Compare the number of people stranded for days in need of immediate help. The media wasn’t being sensationalistic — count the numbers.
Lets start with the death tolls. Every life is precious. Every life is a story. But we can agree that mass casualties get more coverage from the media regardless of political bias, right? Between 1,836 and 4,081 people died due to Katrina. See Wikipedia for the lower death toll. See this source for an explanation of the higher number: http://robertlindsay.wordpress.com/2009/05/30/final-katrina-death-toll-at-4081/ Last I heard, 21 people died due to the Nashville floods, which seems high for an urban flood, but if 21 is high, than 1,836 to 4,081 is a very significant news story.
I could go on in the same vein, but I’ll stop and await your reaction.
One might ask why the death toll was so different, Bob.
Your reply makes me think I didn’t understand the point you were making here. By posting that video and saying you were angry about “the irresponsible and sensationalistic press coverage of Katrina, for no other reason than to discredit the Bush administration”, I thought you were talking about the degree of coverage, and not about why the death tolls were different.
The post was about all the differences. And the media coverage of Katrina was awful, regardless of the death tolls. And it largely ignored the fact that much of the problems were caused by the New Orleanians themselves, because that story didn’t fit the “incompetent, and racist Bush administration” narrative.
Actually, please ignore that last comment. It didnt’ make sense. I should have just asked this: “In what way was the Katrina coverage irresponsible? And inn what way was the Katrina coverage sensationalistic?” I’m obviously not following your thought process.
I understand that the problems were caused by the locals in Katrina. Maybe everyone should have owned boats as a last resort (I know this isn’t the best answer, but it frustrated me that more people didn’t own small boats.) There are lots of interesting engineering questions about how to make a city truly hurricane-proof. And for Kiatrina, there can be a lot of finger pointing. But by inviting a comparison to Nashville, you seem to be making a different point, and I can’t figure out what it is.
If you don’t recall the reports of cannibalism and baby raping in the Superdome, and all of the reports blaming the federal government for not doing things for which it had no responsibility while ignoring the incompetence of the governor and mayor, I don’t know how to help you, Bob.
Well, for starters, asserting that people were turning to cannibalism after a few days seems a tad sensationalist (as well as an obvious lie). Then there were the troops that entered the Superdome fully expecting to find bodies stacked like cordwood. Remind me again how many corpses were removed from the Superdome. Other than that the coverage was excellent.
There is one parallel between the two, though. We can safely conclude that Barack Obama hates white people.
It’s also worth pointing out that New Orleans should expect hurricanes and should be prepared. Nashville should not expect 15″ of rain over two days. Having previously lived in one of the stricken areas (Bellevue), I can say that it is unbelievable to see just how much flooding the Harpeth River caused. The effects of Katrina were totally believable (the actual effects, not the reported ones).
In addition to the sensational lies the press told about what was happening in the Superdome, don’t forget the stories about widespread shootings. Did those stories contribute to any of the delays in getting aid to New Orleans? I remember seeing footage of US troops going into New Orleans with loaded weapons being carried as if they were back in Iraq. Troops tend to be more cautious when they suspect they’ll soon be under fire. The lies told by the press quite likely led to more deaths in New Orleans. For that, they give each other prizes.
Who are we to question the mayor and the gov for mishandling the mess and waiting three days to ask for the feds to step in? Don’t they know that Bu$hitler blew up the levies because he hates black people? That’s the key issue — let’s not lose sight of those facts.
Ok! Now, what is the connection to Nashville?
The connection to Nashville is that there was no way for the press to make the Bush administration look bad, or the Obama administration look good, by reporting on it, even though it was (as the video indicates) perhaps the biggest non-hurricane disaster in the United States (I wonder if that includes earthquakes as well?), in terms of property damage.
I think what TS Allison did to Houston got more coverage, and as bad as I knew that flooding to be (I got stuck on the otherside of town for 24 hours); it doesn’t seem as bad as what that video is showing of Nashville.
you seem to be making a different point, and I can’t figure out what it is.
You hit the nail, Bob. It’s obvious to others, but not to you. The press is politically biased and will use any chance at all to bash their enemies and avoid any responsibility of their friends. It’s not the magnitude of the disaster. It’s how the press use it.
Was this a bad story? http://edition.cnn.com/2010/US/weather/05/05/tennessee.flooding/
I think the overly sensational nature of the Katrina reporting came out of the actually sensational things that really did happen. People got trapped for days without food. That didn’t happen with Nashville, so the reporting was more understated. But as the above story illustrated, the press is still looking for the most tragic heart-rending aspects of the story to report on.
And it largely ignored the fact that much of the problems were caused by the New Orleanians themselves, because that story didn’t fit the “incompetent, and racist Bush administration” narrative.
Whereas it would have been good journalism if it had followed your preferred narrative.
It would have been good journalism if it had borne some relationship to reality. It’s not about “my preferred narrative.”
The images from Nashville bear striking resemblence to what happened along the Cedar River and Iowa River back in 2008, although most of those affected in those disasters had a little more warning of the water coming down the river.
There’s nothing quite as surreal as being in a traffic jam on a highway with blackhawk helicopters flying overhead. At least, for me there isn’t.
Fortunately, here in the MidWest, we take care of our own, and I can only hope that many of my fellow Iowans will be on their way to help out the Tennesseeans in the very near future.
President Obama has declared six Tennessee counties major disaster areas, which makes federal funding available to affected residents.
Oh, yer right Bob. They did take this opportunity to bash the president.
And why did they get trapped for days without food? Everyone in a hurricane-prone area like, well, the entire Gulf Coast knows, or should know, to keep a stock of hurricane supplies on hand, including food. I grew up in Florida and it was second nature to keep some canned goods, sterno, candles, batteries, and so on stashed in the pantry just in case. New Orleans is in an even more precarious position than Miami, because a lot of it is under sea level, and only guarded from being completely flooded by a series of levees that everyone knew were elderly and neglected. (The old, ratty buildings of New Orleans that everyone loves so much should have been a clue.) Anyway, all the crying over the poor, abandoned, foodless and waterless people of Nola that the media did was pure bullshit. It’s not like they didn’t have days to prepare — a hurricane doesn’t suddenly form, thanks to modern tech you can watch it come at you on tv. But the people of New Orleans were preparing all right — preparing to have their hurricane parties and then let Uncle Sam come lift them out of the mire when the bad rain got their diapers wet. I am through feeling sorry for the people of New Orleans.
Oh, and as for those deaths, how many were in Nola? Katrina devastated the coasts of Mississippi and Alabama much worse than New Orleans, and then went inland to wreak havoc.
My thoughts exactly Andrea. Watching a hurricane coming for days, knowing it is a CAT 3 or stronger, and not taking action to save yourself or at least prepare yourself is your problem. A storm front that looked like nothing until it passed the Rockies and then hit your town about 24-36 hours later dropping 3+ inches of rain is another story. TS Allison was like that for Houston, because it passed Houston once, and then circled back. No one expected it to come back, and that’s why it was deadly. However, no one starved for days without food, because we still had the food when it first came ashore.
Rand Simberg Says:
May 6th, 2010 at 11:04 am
It would have been good journalism if it had borne some relationship to reality. It’s not about “my preferred narrative.”
Rand, you have to understand how the Left loves their narratives. Remember the Duke Lacrosse Team scandal from a couple years ago when the Press admitted that “The narrative was right but the facts were wrong.”? They’d already written their story and then went looking for “facts” to confirm it. Concepts like reality and truth have no meaning.
From this source
‘The Narrative Was Right, but the Facts Were Wrong’
Rachel Smolkin of the American Journalism Review, in a post-mortem on the Duke rape hoax and journalists’ credulity in reporting it, relays a damning quote:
Perhaps the most complex lessons about the media coverage of the Duke case involve issues of narrative. Unquestionably, the media too readily ran with a simplistic storyline, sacrificing a search for truth. Not only were the accused innocent of rape, the allegations of racial taunts that received so much media attention appear to have been exaggerated.
“We fell into a stereotype of the Duke lacrosse players,” says Newsweek’s Evan Thomas. “It’s complicated because there is a strong stereotype [that] lacrosse players can be loutish, and there’s evidence to back that up. There’s even some evidence that that the Duke lacrosse players were loutish, and we were too quick to connect those dots.”
But he adds: “It was about race. Nifong’s motivations clearly were rooted in his need to win black votes. There were tensions between town and gown, that part was true. The narrative was properly about race, sex and class. . . . We went a beat too fast in assuming that a rape took place. . . . We just got the facts wrong. The narrative was right, but the facts were wrong.”
If the facts are wrong, though, why explore the narrative at all? Is it fair to use the Duke lacrosse players to tell a larger story of athletes run wild–a theme that appeared not only on sports pages but also was splashed, repeatedly, on the front pages of major newspapers and amplified on cable shoutfests? Says [KC] Johnson [an early skeptic of the case]: Once the facts are “proven not to be true, you certainly have to consider whether the narrative is relevant.”
“The narrative was right, but the facts were wrong.” This is reminiscent of the “fake but accurate” defense of CBS’s Bush National Guard hoax. If Thomas were giving a plainer account of what happened, he would have said something like this: Our reporting was guided by our prejudices, and even though the story turned out to be false, we stand behind our prejudices.
One should remember Hurricane Katrina Hit Florida as a Cat 1 hurricane,
hardly anything to talk about really. it spun up in the middle of the gulf
into Cat 3 and went to Cat 5 in 9 hoursThe Trajectory was also aimed at
Mexico, then Texas, then it took a hard right turn and headed right at Biloxi.
The Storm was of minor note on the Morning of the 27th, spun up to Cat 3
that Evening. It should be noted that while the State of Lousiana requested
federal Assistance that day, President Bush did not include Coastal Louisiana on the Emergency Declaration. new Orleans was faced with a Cat 5 storm in 36 hours and they evacuated 90% of the residents. Not bad considering they had no help.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hurricane_Katrina#Meteorological_history
and if it’s going so great in Nashville, then they should ask everyone from FEMA to go home and return the Federal Aid.
I realize my primary mistake, but I’m trying to figure out what jack is trying to say.
Ok, I have no idea what the Florida part has to do with anything.
I get the storm spin up quickly, but if you live along the Gulf of Mexico, you know the Gulf is fairly warm and hurricanes spin up. But I’ll assume the point is that it happened quickly.
He then suggests that the trajectory was towards Mexico, but that it took a hard right turn to Biloxi, yet then complains that the President issued an Emergency Declaration the day before (which was actually 2 days before) that interesting enough cover the parishs in the trajectory of the right turn.
I have no idea where he gets the 90% evacuation number. Moreover, he suggests that 90% were evacuated without federal assistance (I’ve never seen federal assistance in evacuating Houston) but then makes a crack that if everything is fine in Nashville, they should give back their federal aid. Well, no one is claiming everything is fine in Nashville. However, jack did claim that Louisiana managed to evacuate 90% of people just fine.
I just see a lot of contradications right there and ignorance as well. A state of emergency is not an evacuation order. Further, the day after Bush declared the state of emergency at request of Blanco, he was still trying to convince Blanco to evacuate the areas. The federal government, as in NWS, was having to put out emergency statements recommending landfall. Still, Nagin never gave the evacuation order until 19 hours before landfall, over 24 hours after Bush declared a state of emergency.
All this is at the wikipedia article jack linked. How could he get this all wrong.
Oh that’s right, this is the same jack that thinks nobody here complained about TARP. And he probably thinks nobody remembers Rand’s posts the day before Katrina made its 2nd landfall.
Rand, Rand, Rand. It’s always about the narrative. “Good journalism?” “Reality?” Surely you know those are just reichwing dog-whistles, code words for fascism!
Leland, if you ever expect that guy’s comments to make sense, you don’t know jack.
Leland, if you ever expect that guy’s comments to make sense,
Yes, that is my primary mistake.
you don’t know jack.
But I played the video game. It was much more entertaining.
I also did not notice armed white law enforcement officers standing at the Nashville city lines keeping folks of color from leaving the area as happened in N.O. The area of devistation is also much smaller. The city of Nashville’s social, political, and physical infrastructures have remained intact. In N.O. the police quit the job and went home to be with families that did not happen in Nashville. There was/is adequate housing to handle displaced people in Nashville but in N.O. the entire city was displaced. The feds botched hurricane Andrew in Florida as well as Katrina. And far too many state National Guard units are still sitting in deserts instead of saving people back home from floods.
Is that a jack sockpuppet? The LEO were keeping people in N.O., but the police quit the job and went home?
Looks that way. It’s certainly the same I-ate-too-much-acid-back-in-the-hippie-days speech pattern.