MEDIA SHIFTS BLAME ONTO OTHERS
Yes, I'm playing with Lara Jakes Jordan's shamelessly biased anti-Brown headline from yesterday.
But it also happens to be true, in a sense. Check out this story and how it's framed.
On Sept. 1, with desperate Hurricane Katrina evacuees crammed into the convention center, Police Chief Eddie Compass reported: "We have individuals who are getting raped; we have individuals who are getting beaten."Five days later, he told Oprah Winfrey that babies were being raped. On the same show, Mayor Ray Nagin warned: "They have people standing out there, have been in that frickin' Superdome for five days watching dead bodies, watching hooligans killing people, raping people."
The ugliest reports _ children with slit throats, women dragged off and raped, corpses piling up in the basement _ soon became a searing image of post-Katrina New Orleans.
As an aside, as images go the AP's shot of those flooded buses would be hard to beat (the story we're blasting is an AP story). Yet the AP still hasn't done any serious follow-up on that part of the story, which their own photographer took the lead in breaking. Anyway--
The stories were told by residents trapped inside the Superdome and convention center and were repeated by public officials. Many news organizations, including The Associated Press, carried the witness accounts and official pronouncements, and in some cases later repeated the claims as fact, without attribution.But now, a month after the chaos subsided, police are re-examining the reports and finding that many of them have little or no basis in fact.
The framing has Compass taking the lead in rumor-mongering (which he did), then Nagin one-upping Compass (which he did), then the residents making up stuff (which some of them did). We have to wait until the fourth paragraph to learn that the media just passed all of this nonsense off without fact-checking any of it. Then we get a little mea culpa followed by some details from the NO PD (which probably isn't missing as many officers as once feared, since it can't miss officers that never existed--that angle is not in this AP story though).
No one forced the media to report, expand on, hyperventilate about, exaggerate and demand rolling federal heads from rumors. If the media reported rumors as fact, it is the media's fault. While congratulating themselves for speaking truth to power, the media actually just took one power's unreliable word for everything against another power--the power they chose to believe all had D's after their names while the powers spoken truth to all had R's. Yet by putting Compass and Nagin out front now, the blame for journalistic misconduct gets shifted away from actual journalists. And everyone now knows that Compass is out the door and Nagin is hanging by a thread. Both are expendable. Tellingly, the MSM still hasn't gone after Blanco though she participated in the same kinds of misconduct that Nagin and Compass exhibited. Blanco is not yet expendable. She may be after her testimony before Congress today.
Note, by the way, that the media will cut itself some slack now for all this misreporting (because it's Compass' and Nagin's fault) but won't then take a look at how the local officials' rumor mongering probably led to serious breakdowns in the federal-state-city interface. It's slack for me but not for thee. And ultimately it's all about the politics.