Extreme Makeover

The right blogosphere has been fully erect the past couple of days because they've been allowed to engage in their favorite sport: bashing the "MSM". But this is such a 360 that it's laughable.

See, in the early days of the mess of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans, folks like Michelle "In Praise of Internment" Malkin, Peggy Noonan and plenty of others breathlessly reported horror stories from the streets, tales of snipers, mass looting, murders and rapes. It appears that these were all overhyped bullshit. Conditions in the Superdome and the Convention Center were horrible from a humanitarian perspective (no food, no water, stifling heat), but there don't appear to have been any major gangs of armed thugs. There weren't mass killings:

Following days of internationally reported killings, rapes and gang violence inside the Dome, the doctor from FEMA - Beron doesn't remember his name - came prepared for a grisly scene: He brought a refrigerated 18-wheeler and three doctors to process bodies.

"I've got a report of 200 bodies in the Dome," Beron recalls the doctor saying.

The real total was six, Beron said.

Of those, four died of natural causes, one overdosed and another jumped to his death in an apparent suicide, said Beron, who personally oversaw the turning over of bodies from a Dome freezer, where they lay atop melting bags of ice. State health department officials in charge of body recovery put the official death count at the Dome at 10, but Beron said the other four bodies were found in the street near the Dome, not inside it. Both sources said no one had been killed inside.

At the Ernest N. Morial Convention Center, just four bodies were recovered, despites reports of corpses piled inside the building. Only one of the dead appeared to have been slain, said health and law enforcement officials.

[...]

"I think 99 percent of it is bulls---," said Sgt. 1st Class Jason Lachney, who played a key role in security and humanitarian work inside the Dome. "Don't get me wrong, bad things happened, but I didn't see any killing and raping and cutting of throats or anything. ... Ninety-nine percent of the people in the Dome were very well-behaved."

We know, then, that the press did rely on eyewitnesses, who were playing a giant game of telephone, where rumor and innuendo build up and build up until the situation sounds far more chaotic that it actually was. I'm not going to defend them for their lack of skepticism, though in a chaotic situation eyewitnesses probably seemed like as good a source as any.

But there's a larger issue at play here, which is why posts across the left and the right have actually agreed on this issue, including the indispensable Digby, who was writing about how these reports seemed false very early on, and the implications.

It was one of the major excuses given for the slow rescue effort.  "We're trying to evacuate the people, but they're firing shots at us."  No one bothered to wonder that if these reports were so obviously false, the groups on the ground that were shot at wouldn't have turned tail and ran.  This turns into a vicious cycle.  There's a slow response, which is blamed on violence, which leads to a slower response, for which the people get more desperate and there actually might BE a little violence, which can then be used as evidence of the violence that causes the slow repsonse.

The point is that most everyone in the country found the reports of extreme violence PLAUSIBLE.  Somewhere in our collective lizard brains we're scared to death of a mass of angry black people, and we're therefore willing to wholeheartedly believe (and on the progressive side, possibly even make excuses for) the worst kind of human behavior.  I believe they call it the soft bigotry of low expectations.  Race has been considered as a factor in the repsonse, but it's never brought up in this fashion.  It's not "If this was Connecticut, the feds would've been there faster," it's "If this was Connecticut, nobody would have believed that kids were being raped and snipers were all over the place."  But that comes from the same place.  

Now, here's the crucially important point. In my view, the right wingers were the FIRST to report on stories of looting, of rapes, of murders, of snipers.  Remember Steve Sailer from VDARE's comment?

What you won’t hear, except from me, is that "Let the good times roll" is an especially risky message for African-Americans. The plain fact is that they tend to possess poorer native judgment than members of better-educated groups. Thus they need stricter moral guidance from society.

Here's the turn that the Right is making, however. They're using the "MSM" failure to report adequately on the violence in New Orleans as proof that NOTHING WENT WRONG THERE. Apparently, CNN made up the whole thing. There was no flood, no evacuees waiting desperately for help, no five days' worth of people pleading for medical attention. This is where the whitewash begins. Just because this belief that blacks were out of control and raging on the streets has been exposed, that doesn't mean that everything was hunky-dory down there. In fact, because you pushed the "Lord of the Flies" angle so hard (just google it and you'll see what I mean), it actually CONTRIBUTED to the slow and cautious response, making things even MORE fucked up.

We still have a major problem with race in this country, and that's what this revelation about Katrina's aftermath revealed. It in no way exonerates anyone at any level of government. Something really shameful still went down there. In fact, in the wake of these reports we should be doubly ashamed.