The MSM had the country believing there would be ten-thousand deaths in New Orleans. They pushed that number as soon as Mayor Nagin uttered it and no one took a second to think about the enormity of how many deaths that is. The American Thinker has some thoughts along these lines:
As the days passed and the body count in New Orleans stayed in triple digits, shouldn’t some of the talking heads at the major networks or the pundits at the national newspapers have begun to ask themselves where were all the bodies? Before self-appointing itself the role of discovering all the failures of the Bush administration in the ongoing national disaster, perhaps they should try to account for how they could have spent so much time informing the American people of a catastrophic loss of life that never occurred. Much of the public perception of governmental incompetence and failure in the relief effort was based on their vastly exaggerated projected body count.
10,000 deaths is a ghastly amount. As someone who is not in New Orleans, I heard that number and it sounded high, but not inconceivable. For a reporter on the scene, it should have been evident that there was no way that many deaths had occurred.
Friday, September 16, 2005
Where are all the Bodies?
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3 comments:
I don't think it is fair to equate an over-estimate of bodies with anti-Bush sentiment. Certainly a very similar phenomenon occured around 9/11. This would be a case of seizing on the dramatic, not seizing on something that would damage Bush.
Dave,
I don't see any mention by me of Bush or anti-Bush. That was not my point, lazy journalism was.
You know damn well that as soon as the media reported it, it became the number that people had in their minds.
The MSM and the left did indeed use that number to slam Bush as did I:
http://environmentalrepublican.blogspot.com/2005/09/fema-failed-and-so-did-bush.html
Your point perhaps. The quote from the American Thinker seemed to imply that this was part of hatred for the Bush administration.
Perhaps though it is just because I have seen other's articulate the idea that the media went with the most extreme death toll because of an anti-Bush partisanship I was overly sensitive to that here.
I think that the media are lazy first, commercial second and anti-Republican or anti-Bush at a distant third. Most media foibles are fully explained by the first two.
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