It was the criminally bad journalism throughout, in which shifting blame away from the failures of the local Democrats in Baton Rouge and New Orleans to the Bush White House, rather than factual reporting of what was actually happening, was the priority.
But don’t expect to see any retrospective in the media about that.
NPR is usually a good bellwether for what the “liberal” party-line, what “liberals” are obsessing about, where their next assault on liberty will be, etc. Where I live, the local NPR station recently switched from a mostly classical-music format to news of interest to “the Community:” e..g, countless stories on Maya Angelou (sorry–“Doctor” Maya Angelou), ghetto graffiti artists, etc., etc. For two weeks–that’s right, TWO WHOLE WEEKS–their newish morning cultural affairs show, which occasionally has stories I’m interested in, has had at least three, sometimes more, stories about Katrina Ten Years Later, Katrina survivors, Katrina memories, etc.
You got a figure that when the State-shtuppers are concentrating their attention so much on one story, on one of their main propaganda outlets, there has to be an agenda somewhere.
So with all that un-biased NPR coverage did they say anything about the illegal/immoral gun grab perpetrated during the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina?
http://dailycaller.com/2015/08/24/a-decade-later-remember-new-orleans-gun-confiscation-can-and-has-happened-in-america/
A time when people probably needed their defensive firearms the most in their lives is when the police swung into action…grabbing law abiding citizen’s guns; 2nd Amendment be damned.
No one ever mentions that side of things.
No one ever shows the cps disarming the 70something lady, while the teen aged vultures she’d drawn down on originally, are STILL standing in HER yard.
No one mentions that some of the LEGAL guns were never given back because of things like parking tickets or past due property taxes that came due before NOLA was running well enough for people to be back at work so they could PAY their taxes.
No one mentions that the ‘security’ people at the dome, allowed gun wielding gangs to control the dome for almost 3 days.
Things like Katrina should drive home the concept that if you aren’t currently ready AT home, TODAY to feed, and clothe and keep your family safe, despite the ‘help’ of the FEMA Nazis, you’re falling behind your duty to the family.
It’s been ten years, since Katrina, it;s been 3 years since Sandy in the NE, and it’s will have been 14 years, in just a few days, since just 19 men, all but shut DOWN a country of 350M. They shut down flights in and out of the country. They shut down the world effectively, for anyone doing business with the U.S.
If 19 guys with 4 planes could do that, imagine what 20 or 30 could do with ??? weapon(s).
So, then, WTH are you waiting for?
While I agree that that should be remembered, IMHO the biggest thing to remember is those hundreds of school buses, which could have carried thousands to safety, left to the flood due to, at best, utterly moronic bureaucracy at the city level.
Bureaucracy kills.
ACJ,
the school bus idea got floated AFTER the Mayor and the Governor had turned down an offer from AMTRAK to move people out of NOLA for free.
As a former resident of the Big Easy (I graduated from Tulane), I paid pretty close attention to Katrina. At one point I read a report about a journalist saying he had witnessed flooding on Commodore Street in the French Quarter. The problem is the Quarter never flooded, and there is no Commodore Street in the French Quarter. I checked an online street map just to make sure.
Glenn’s point about the media exaggerations slowing relief efforts and scaring aid workers is accurate. I remember watching news footage of Army soldiers riding in the back of a truck, armed to the teeth and ready for war. Most if not all of them had already served at least one tour in Iraq or Afghanistan and they were at a similar level of readiness because they expected to be attacked. A general from Louisiana (he was the one who became famous for saying “Don’t get stuck on stupid.”) told them to relax and not treat the civilian populous as enemies. If the soldiers believed the media accounts, they were right to be concerned about attack. Fortunately, the media accounts were mostly lies but consider this – if armed soldiers were concerned about being attacked by hordes of people, you can guess what the unarmed relief workers were thinking.
That would be General Honore, who seems particularly well-named.
I took a Greyhound along the Gulf coast in the days after Katrina, I think it was two days after the storm. I remember a motel in Mobile that looked like a giant claw had swiped across it and just ripped off the whole front of the building.
What really gets to me about Katrina though was driving through NOLA two years later – the I-10 over the pond was still not repaired, with huge chunks of concrete missing, and New Orleans itself there were still lots of buildings without roofs. Two years later.