I have stated in the past that the media coverage on the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina was the worst in my lifetime. The narrative of that event is so firmly entrenched that it doesn’t even have to be explained. Just look at this story from the Associated Press which is about how the stimulus package ignores New Orleans.
It’s a significant change in tone from the Bush years, when any perceived slight of Katrina victims was met with charges that the Republican president who bungled the initial response to the disaster continued to callously ignore the Gulf’s needs years later.
Huh? The initial response wasn’t bungled. What are the facts from Katrina?
1) The city of New Orleans was missed by the center of the storm. The city itself experienced winds of a category 1 storm.
2) The levees broke and people who failed to evacuate were caught in their homes. Those people had adequate time and resources to leave. If there was any failure at all by government it was city and state governments who failed to evacuate their citizens.
3) The crime reported by the press during the disaster was exaggerated and in many cases didn’t happen at all.
4) The National Guard’s response to the storm was quicker that hurricanes Hugo and Andrew.
5) The state of Louisiana had many opportunities for four decades to fix the levies. The state is corrupt and environmentalists who were more concerned with alligators than humans blocked it.
Apparently Americans have watched too many Michael Bay movies and believe that rescue teams fall out of the sky immediately after a natural disaster. The journalists on the ground were more concerned with blaming Bush than covering the news. Bush’s biggest mistake was telling a crony Michael Brown he was doing a good job when it didn’t fit the media narrative. The press never apologized for all the mistakes they made and never held the local governments accountable for forty years of bad policy. Even the clown that claimed people were eating each other stood by his op-ed in the Huffington Post. There’s a lot of stuff Bush did as president that I don’t agree with, but the bugling of Katrina isn’t on the list. It’s a modern day fabrication.
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