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September 28, 2005
Media Gullibility, Part 2
Jonah Goldberg looks at the recent coverage of Hurricane Katrina and calls it "gale-force exaggeration." In it, he notes the major fact of what the media did wrong. It's not that they were biased or emotional. What happened with the Katrina coverage was, from a media perspective, much worse.
They got the story wrong.
In the last month or so, we've heard a lot of self-congratulation from the press about what a great job they've been doing. At the high water mark of their rain-soaked Katrina coverage, they started to sound like Stuart Smalley telling the mirror, "I'm good enough, I'm smart enough and, doggone it, people like me." Even the normally hilarious and cynical Jon Stewart of The Daily Show broke character to congratulate the press for its excellent work.I'll admit, I got heated and angry at the federal government's response to the hurricane. I can't imagine actually being on-scene and hearing the survivors talk about what was happening. The emotional intensity of that situation led many reporters to report anything that they heard, rather than verify the stories they were being given.We now know, thanks to valuable post-mortems by the Los Angeles Times and the New Orleans Times-Picayune, that a great deal of the "great reporting" was in fact great rumor mongering. The stories of rape and murder in the Superdome were all unfounded. Six people died in there, tragically. But nobody was murdered.
As Goldberg points out, they were not helped by New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin, who constantly provided unverified information to the press during his tirades.
Sometimes, a reporter will get facts wrong in a particular story. What reporters should avoid, though, is becoming so emotionally connected to a story that they lose perspective. This happened in New Orleans, and it led to dozens of reporters getting the story wrong. They reported false information. To keep their credibility, I hope news organizations investigate why their reporters showed such a lack of restraint when it came to rumor mongering, and take steps to prevent it from happening in the future.
Posted by slublog at September 28, 2005 09:11 AM
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