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John Leo sums up the ridiculous reporting of the media from New Orleans in the wake of Katrina.

On September 2, a CNN report cited an unidentified police officer who said he saw bodies riddled with bullet holes and one man with the top of his head completely shot off. Another unnamed officer, a sergeant, said he had to pass by the bodies of other police officers who had drowned doing their job. So far as we know, none of this was true.

. . . Times-Picayune staffers [wrote a] September 5 article [which] began, “Arkansas National Guardsman Mikel Brooks stepped through the food service entrance of the Ernest N. Morial Convention Center on Monday, flipped on the light at the end of his machine gun, and started pointing out bodies.” Unlike the CNN report, this piece named an actual person as the source, but it was written as if the reporter was authenticating all that Brooks claimed. Brooks says, “Don’t step in that blood-it’s contaminated.” Pointing out bodies, Brooks says, “That’s a kid. There’s another one in the freezer, a 7-year-old with her throat cut.” Under great pressure, reporters sometimes forget to ask pertinent questions, such as how did Brooks know the blood was contaminated, or that the dead girl-one of the most mentioned phantom figures in all the Katrina reporting-was exactly 7 years old? In fact, the reporter saw four bodies, not the 30 to 40 that was reported, and no dead girl.

. . .The Ottawa Sun reported that “a man seeking help was gunned down by a National Guard soldier” and a man was “run down and then shot by a New Orleans police officer.” . . . The New York Times reported: “Like passengers on a doomed ship, they [Superdome evacuees] were desperate to get out of the noxious, violence-ridden stadium.” Noxious it was, but the “violence-ridden” condition is harder to pin down. The Superdome “just morphed into this mythical place where the most unthinkable deeds were being done,” Maj. Ed Bush of the Louisiana National Guard told the Los Angeles Times. “What I saw in the Superdome was just tremendous amounts of people helping people.”

Post-hysteria reporting has not been kind to the general media coverage of the crisis. The state Department of Health and Hospitals counted 10 dead at the Superdome and four at the convention center. Only two of those are believed to have been murdered. (The city averages five or six homicides a week even without hurricanes.) Police Superintendent Eddie Compass, who did so much to inflame the panic, said on September 28 that there is “not one official report of rape or sexual assault.” Though rape is notoriously underreported, his sex-crimes unit investigated every rumor of rape or atrocity in the Superdome, made two arrests for attempted sexual assault, and concluded that the other attacks had not happened.

When will the media apologize for its awful job? I hope you aren't holding your breath.