They failed to report what happened to the buses they failed to establish a chronology - so addicted did they become to the idea that at last, after two years of media collapse – I mean, we go back to Jayson Blair and Rather-gate and Eason Jordan - it's been terrible two years for the American media. They failed to report on the basic issues surrounding who deploys the National Guard they failed to report on why the Salvation Army and the Red Cross were forbidden by state officials to deliver supplies to the Superdome and the convention center. In fact I think that some of the journalists involved especially anchors became so caught up in their own persona and their own celebrity they missed important and obvious stories. And at least from where we stood we did our best to make people understand that everything we were getting came with extreme difficulty and with extreme skepticism. We knew the whole time that information out there, the flow of information was incredibly difficult. He said, can you take me to her right now? The woman said, oh, well, I actually heard this story from someone else. We've seen it happen.Īnd one of our reporters, I'll never forget said to one woman, really, you've seen this can you take me to the woman who has been raped? She said, absolutely. And when we went up to people and we said, have you heard these reports of people being raped, in many cases they said, oh, yes, absolutely. I stood outside there we had reporters make their way inside. We did have photographers at the convention center. The fact that we did not have the - by we, I mean the media, not NBC – the fact that we didn't have the resources to plow every square inch of the convention center or the Superdome is simply a matter of the fact that we were trying to cover the entire Gulf coast. Our concern when we got on the ground, my crew was actually working this camera right now, was that we had enough gasoline, was that we had enough bottled water, that we had rain gear for what we thought would play out to be a pretty standard although severe hurricane over the next 48 maybe 72 hours. Well, I think it's important to remember that we went down there to cover a hurricane - not to watch the drowning of one of our most historic cities. Exactly what Keith was praising I think led to one of the worst weeks of reporting in the history of American media, and it raises this question: If all of that amount of resources was given over to this story and they got it wrong, how can we trust American media in a place far away like Iraq where they don't speak the language, where there is an insurgency, and I think the question comes back we really can't. But America was riveted by this reporting, wholesale collapse of the media's own levees they let in all the rumors, and all the innuendo, all the first-person story because they were caught up in this own emotionalism.
There weren't stacks of bodies in the freezer. In fact, there were no rapes at the convention center or the Superdome that have yet been corroborated in any way. I have in mind especially the throat-slashed seven-year-old girl who had been gang-raped at the convention center - didn't happen. American media threw everything they had at this story, all the bureaus, all the networks, all the newspapers, everything went to New Orleans, and yet they could not get inside the convention center, they could not get inside the Superdome to dispel the lurid, the hysterical, the salaciousness of the reporting. The central part of this story, what went on at the convention center and the Superdome was wrong. Well, Keith just said they did not report an ordinary story in fact they were reporting lies.
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