Hurricane of media mendacity

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Dan Rather was on "Larry King" the other night and was asked about the Katrina coverage. Say what you like about Dan, but he knows his meteorological phenomena. I've always thought there was something quintessentially American about Dan's hurricane editions of the CBS news -- not the part of the show where he's reporting on the actual hurricane, but the bit where he says "And today's other headlines," as if it's the most normal thing in the world to be reading "The Dow closed 19 points down today" while wrapped around a lamppost in your sou'wester with a rusting doublewide flying over your shoulder.

Yet Hurricane Dan professed himself delighted with his successors. "They took us there to the hurricane," he told Larry. "They put the facts in front of us and, very important, they sucked up their guts and talked truth to power."

Er, no. The facts they put in front of us were wrong, and they didn't talk truth to power. They talked to goofs in power, like New Orleans' Mayor Ray Nagin and Police Chief Eddie Compass, and uncritically fell for every nutso yarn they were peddled. The media swallowed more bilge than if they'd been lying down with their mouths open as the levee collapsed. Ten thousand dead. Widespread rape and murder. A 7-year-old gang-raped and then throat-slashed. It was great stuff -- and none of it happened. No gang-raped 7-year-olds. None.

Most of the media are still in Dan mode, sucking up their guts and congratulating themselves about what a swell job they did during Katrina. CNN producers were advising their guests to "be angry," and there was so much to get angry about, not least that no matter how angry you got on air Anderson Cooper was always much better at it. And Mayor Nagin as well. To show he was angry, he used a lot of profanity. "That... Superdome," he raged. "Five days watching dead bodies, watching hooligans killing people, raping people."

But nobody got killed by a hooligan in the Superdome. The problem wasn't rape and murder, but the rather more prosaic lack of bathroom facilities. As Ben Stein put it, it was the media that rioted. They grabbed every lurid rumor and took it for a wild joy ride across primetime. There was a real story in there -- big hurricane, people dead -- but it wasn't enough, and certainly not enough for damaging George Bush.

Think about that: Hurricane week was largely a week of drivel, mostly the bizarre fantasies of New Orleans' incompetent police chief but amplified hugely by a gullible media. Given everything we now know they got wrong in Louisiana, where they speak the same language, how likely is it the great blundering herd are getting it any more accurate in Iraq?

Four years ago, you'll recall, we were bogged down in "the brutal Afghan winter." By "we," I don't mean the military but the media. Afghanistan was called the white man's grave.

Actually, it was the grave that was white, the man was more of a bluish color thanks to temperatures "so cold that eyelids crust and saliva turns to sludge in the mouth," according to Knight-Ridder's Tom Ifield. "Realistically," reported New York's Daily News, "U.S. forces have a window of two or three weeks before the brutal Afghan winter begins to foreclose options."

Er, no. "Realistically" U.S. forces turned out to have a window of four years, which is how long they've been waiting for the "fast, fast approaching" (ABC's "Nightline") brutal Afghan winter. It's Knight-Ridder's news reports that turn to sludge on your lips. The "brutal Afghan winter" is a media fiction.

How many times does this have to happen before the media seriously examines why so many of them get the big stories wrong in exactly the same way? After decades of boasting about "hiring diversity," everybody in America's newsrooms is now so remarkably diverse they all make exactly the same mistakes. Oughtn't be just a teensy bit disquieting even to the most blinkered journalism professor?