It seems just about everything we were told about Katrina by the media in the days following the storm was wrong. They spent the next two months patting themselves ont he back for a job well done, and now they are discovering jsut about everything they said was simply not true. The latest piece of news is that Katrina was a Cat 3 when it hit, not a Cat 4. And I read the other day that while 2/3 of New Orleans was black, only about half the dead bodies found were, meaning that proportional to their population, more white people died than black within the city. Add that to the fact that the surrounding states are majority white, and you realize that a lot more white people died than black. I wonder if Kanye West will respond to the charges that he doesn't care about white people? I also wonder if he'll apologize to Bush, since he attacked the man based on untruth and innuendo. Oh, and post-disaster surveys have shown that the vast majority of people who stayed in the city had had ways to get out and decided not to. So much for the theory that the white man left them to die.

Historians will look back on this as a bad disaster that could have been lessened had the governments of New Orleans and Louisiana done their jobs better. They will also note that the levees were inadequate even for the intensity of storm they were supposed to be able to deflect, and that George Bush had absolutely nothing to do with that, but that Mike Brown was still a bad person to be the head of FEMA, but FEMA did its job fairly well anyway. They might also mention how the sensational and untrue stories spread by the media, the mayor, and the police chief of New Orleans diverted badly needed FEMA resources to events that were not happening. For instance, several large groups of rescue folk and people who deal with dead bodies went to the convention center to collect the over 200 corpses that the media reported. They found 6, and two of those died for reasons unrelated to the storm. Just think how many people actually in need might have been saved by these people had they not been on a wild goose chase at the behest of the media. Remember how things were going down in those days. The media would state something, and if FEMA did not immediately drop everything and rush to the rescue, the media slammed them. FEMA had no choice but to go on these wild goose chases or face a huge P.R. hit (which they did anyway). The media has a tendency to assume a superior knowledge about things, and in this case that totally fucked up the experts' abilities to do their jobs correctly. Shame on all those reporters who wanted stories so bad they reported rumor and innuendo as fact. When will they apologize for all the people they put in danger for their pursuit of ratings?