MB reader Barton J. has a good analysis of the problem that led the media to get the post-Katrina violence story so completely wrong:
I think that each of the television networks should have used different correspondents to cover the hurricane itself than to cover the aftermath. All three broadcasting and all three cable news networks lost their perspective — mainly, I think, because they kept their people on the ground too long, without sleep, without a break and without any ability to detach emotionally from those who they were covering. They just got too close to the story.
This has nothing to do with whether they were too hard or not hard enough on the government. It has to do with the fact that we started to learn too much about what reporters thought, believed and felt about what was happening and by the fact the reporters started to repeat mere rumors as fact or near-fact — a common and understandable fault of those who are caught in the middle of a catastrophe.
My guess is that more dispassionate reporting might have hurt the ratings of a network that changed teams. But my guess is that the network, in retrospect, would have gotten the story right.
Of course, most of the public won’t know that the initial reports of hundreds dead in the Superdome and Convention Center were wrong unless the major national news organizations undertake investigative efforts on the model of the NY Times team that investigated Jayson Blair. That team set the standard for journalistic self-investigations of major failures, and you can’t read this story without thinking that a major failure has taken place.