Katrina Coverage

George Clooney has a new film coming out, and this blogger attended a screening at which the heart and soul of the MSM were on hand, including Nicholas Lemann, the Dean of the Columbia Journalism School who also sits on the Pulitzer Prize board. Unfortunately, the post jogs all over the place and doesn't report what exactly was asked and what was replied, but:

…I have to go with Lemann trotting out an article in the Times-Picayune to "rebut" my criticism that the media did not correct their many erroneous reports in a significant way…

…When I do precisely that he attempts to refute my response (again refusing to turn my question over to the panel) by citing an article in "his hometown paper", the Times-Picayune. Lemann is referencing Rumors of deaths greatly exaggerated written by Brian Thevenot and and Gordon Russell and published on September 26, 2005.

…Lemann could not have possibly picked a story that better illustrates my point not only about the Katrina coverage but the failure of the media to correct the record and it's habit of honoring fiction as fact…

I happen to be familiar with this article because Thevenot recently made vague legal threats against an MBA member which ultimately came to my attention under the auspices of the MBA Legal Defense Project. In his blog Classical Values, MBA Member Eric Scheie wrote a comprehensive, devastating post on the many problems with the very "mea culpa" piece (a post which prompted an angry response from Thevenot and hence my involvement) cited by Lemann.

That post says the IP address of the sole Thevenot response came through a San Diego hotel, leading to the possibility that it's a fake. However, it also includes an (apparently) later note saying that the email address in the email had been redacted, so perhaps that's what the "vague legal threats" were about.

Lemman would have good reason to be familiar with this article and the author, Brian Thevenot, because another article by Thevenot, published during the immediate aftermath of hurricane Katrina, Apocalypse in New Orleans, is currently being touted as a candidate for the Pulitzer Prize on whose board, you will recall, Lemann sits. It is, in part, that article which Thevenot is "correcting" in Rumors of deaths greatly exaggerated. But "Apocalypse" did not just run in New Orleans. No. Thevenot's account was picked up and run by newspapers and television stations around the world and became one of the seminal accounts of the "animalistic" chaos in New Orleans in the days after the storm.

In fact, Rem Rieder, Editor and Senior Vice President of the American Journalism Review, recently cited "Apocalypse" as a prime example of the media's "impressive coverage of hurricane Katrina" and singled out Brian Thevenot as "Exhibit A" in reminding "us" of the "remarkable commitment journalists bring to their jobs"

But there is a bigger problem with Thevenot's "Convention Center" story than it being untrue and one that raises serious question as to why editors at the T-P would assign Thevenot to write the paper's "mea culpa" piece on Katrina. The AJR version of Apocalypse in New Orleans describes the article as a "firsthand account of how a small band of Times-Picayune journalists covered devastation and misery in their shattered home."

UPDATE: I didn't watch the videos at the first link since there's only one of me, but the first comment says there's extensive subtitling.

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