Overall I think a lot of the media criticism in the wake of Hurricane Katrina has been a little overwraught. Yes certain news organizations erred by reporting unverified rumors and speculation. Most of the U.S. press did not, however.
Certain members of the blogosphere seem keen to spread their own misinformation. For example, John Hinderaker writes today that the media engaged in “frequent repetition of Mayor [Ray] Nagin’s claim that 10,000 people had died in New Orleans.”
Not so — neither the mainstream media nor Nagin ever claimed 10,000 people had died in New Orleans.
Here’s what Ray Nagin said on the Today Show on Sept. 5:
MATT LAUER: Officials are going to start going door to door, Mayor, and you know this is the grim task of trying to calculate and recover the number of dead in your city. Louisiana State University using computer models came up with a figure. They think this could go over 10,000 fatalities. Do you agree with that number?
Mayor NAGIN: Well, you know, I think–I’ve always said, see, I’ve been on the ground since this thing started, and I’ve always said that I think this thing is going to be in the thousands. Now the exact number, I have no idea. But if you look at the New Orleans population of 500,000, we evacuated 80 percent of those, we’ve now gotten a second wave of evacuees that were stranded, which was another 50,000, so that left 50,000 more people out there. You pick a percentage, 5, 10, 15, 20 percent. It wouldn’t be unreasonable to have 10,000.
The AP moved several stories that included part of this quote. There was this story, which began:
NEW ORLEANS, La. (AP) – A week after Hurricane Katrina, engineers plugged the levee break that swamped much of the city and floodwaters began to recede, but along with the good news came the mayor’s direst prediction yet: As many as 10,000 dead.
(10 paragraphs later)In New Orleans, Nagin upticked his estimate of the probable death toll in his city from merely thousands to telling NBC’s “Today” show: “It wouldn’t be unreasonable to have 10,000.”
Given that the 10,000 figure was clearly a guesstimate on Nagin’s part, I think the AP erred by giving it such prominence. In another story moved on the same day, the news wire was more cautious, writing in the seventh paragraph, “A week after the storm, a definitive death toll remained elusive. New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin warned on NBC’s ‘Today’ that ‘it wouldn’t be unreasonable to have 10,000’ dead.”
Other news organizations were also cautious. As far as I could tell, my paper never even used the Today show estimate. In this story, the NYT wrote (quote starts with fifth paragraph):
Mayor C. Ray Nagin of New Orleans warned on the NBC program ”Today” that ”it wouldn’t be unreasonable to have 10,000” dead in the city.
Capt. Marlon Defillo, spokesman for the New Orleans police, said city officials did not expect to have even a rough estimate of the number of dead until the end of this week. By then recovery teams will have conducted block-by-block searches of the hardest-hit areas in the eastern part of the city, he said.
”It’s not going to be low,” Captain Defillo said.
So far only 23 bodies have been brought to the mortuary, and the official death toll for Louisiana stands at 71. Officials said the low count was due mostly to the arduous recovery process and the desire for accuracy. But some also said there was no way to make any kind of reliable projection, so the estimate of 10,000 deaths could turn out to be way off base.
The LAT wrote in the eighth paragraph of a Sept. 6 story that, “In New Orleans, Mayor C. Ray Nagin also tamped down expectations, warning that it would take 10 years to rebuild the city and that storm-related deaths could rise as high as 10,000.” The Washington Post took a similar approach in this story. Reuters’ tact: ”
A full week after Katrina crashed into the U.S. Gulf coast and ravaged one of America’s most popular cities, the home of jazz and Mardi Gras, no one knows how many people perished.
New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin said “it wouldn’t be unreasonable” for the death toll to rise to 10,000, although he admitted he had no idea of the exact number.”
In short, contrary to what our critics would have you believe, the mainstream media was in fact clear that the 10,000 figure was just the upper level of an estimate. No one claimed that 10,000 were dead. Yes, I think that one AP story was flawed. But so too are these bloggers’ claims.
For what it’s worth, on the next day, Sept. 6, Nagin again appeared on the Today Show:
KATIE COURIC: What about the number of fatalities? Is it true that it might be as many as 10,000 people?
Mayor NAGIN: I’ve heard that number. I don’t know how many it’s going to be. All I can tell you is I’ve flown over the city just about every day, every other day. There are bodies–bodies in the water. I’ve gotten reports from firefighters when they went to rescue people, they saw bodies in homes. It’s going to be awful and it’s going to wake the nation up again.
Interesting that the one thing you fail to note is that it was Matt Lauer that started the whole 10,000 dead meme.
Um, since Lauer clearly said LSU came up with that number, isn’t the school the one that started this rather than him?
Exactly. This was Nagin on the CBS Early Show on Sept. 6:
So the 10,000 figure did have some kind of basis in reality – it wasn’t just plucked from thin air. I do think there’s a legitimate basis for criticizing certain news organizations that gave that figure such prominence without explaining how it was arrived at, though.