Our will is to keep the torch of freedom burning for all.

Who owes the families an apology? More importantly, who owes the public some better fact checking? Where do we go to get a retraction and correction when the entire media botches coverage of a large story, like New Orleans and Hurricane Katrina? Every newspaper, network, radio show and magazine told us that the victims of Katrina were "so poor, and they are so black" (Wolf Blitzer's words but it was the same message everywhere - see FAIR for examples).

And yet, as Barton Hinkle said in the Richmond Times-Dispatch a couple of days ago, Almost Everything You 'Knew' About Katrina Is Wrong.

Hurricane Katrina no longer is making banner headlines, but it should -- if only because so many of the original headlines turned out to have, on closer inspection, no basis in fact.

I got really worked up reading the article, but when I read the commentary at Cafe Hayek on Mr. Hinkle's article, in all honesty, I got distracted. (Cafe Hayek is such a good blog - their gems are the bright shiny objects that keep me from concentrating. Sorry.)

Back to Mr. Hinkle:

For instance, Knight-Ridder recently conducted a cross-tabulation of the location of corpses with Census-tract data from pre-Katrina New Orleans. Contrary to the almost universal impression left by early reports, the examination found that Katrina's victims were not dispropationately poor. Nor were they disproportionately black. For that matter, lack of transportation did not turn out to be a chief cause of death: "At many addresses where the dead were found," the wire service reports, "their cars remained in the driveways, flood-ruined symbols of fatal miscalculation."

Mr. Hinkle calls out the Washington Post and Newsweek for their false statements on Katrina's disproportionate devastation. I will call out my only paid news subscription - the Economist ran articles and even a cover photo that fed into the false and misleading reports that white people got out and black people drowned.
Where is the retraction? The apology to the reader?

A little more of Hinkle:

Hurricane Katrina exposed the establishment media's obsession with race and poverty, to the point of ignoring reality. Countless media outlets reported what amounts to a now entrenched urban legend -- one they invented themselves out of whole cloth. The figures demonstrating its falsity have received, by comparison, infinitesimal coverage: Fewer than two dozen newspapers carried Knight-Ridder's story about its findings. Revealingly, many of them wrote headlines to the effect that the numbers "bring surprises," or "shake beliefs," or show that "assumptions" were incorrect, or "challenge . . . assumptions." But those beliefs and assumptions did not materialize out of thin air. The initial news coverage greatly shaped them.
For too many in the media, it evidently is not enough for a massive storm to destroy a city and kill nearly a thousand people; it must do so in such a way as to permit lugubrious lectures on what Newsweek censoriously terms America's "Enduring Shame" -- "poverty, race, and class."

Okay, I will allow that some reporters and agencies are trying to expose the truth (Dave Zeeck sounds positive about it the situation), but it is not even a shadow of the divisive media frenzy that we saw rising like flood water immediately after Katrina. Selective sensationalism and the reporting of fiction as fact are simply acceptable practice - because everybody's doing it.