The miasma of fear was in fact predictable, says Patricia Turner, a scholar in African-American studies at the University of California at Davis who has researched how rumors proliferate. "The odor, lack of hygiene, the heat -- death comes with the same odor that apparently was in the air, just choking people in there," Turner says. Worse yet, she says, was the lack of information. "I think that human beings are inclined to create stories that satisfy a lack of news and closure to things." People have a set of norms they associate with worst-case scenarios, she says, including the breakdown of social order and acts of raw brutality. As rumors get passed along in such an atmosphere, people often "validate" what they've heard by claiming to have witnessed it themselves.
Lennie Echterling, an expert on crisis intervention and a professor of psychology at James Madison University, calls this phenomenon an "emotional contagion." In crisis situations, he says, people's suggestibility goes way up. According to Echterling, neurological studies have shown that when confronted with dangerous or disturbing circumstances, the amygdala, a neural structure in the brain strongly linked with emotions, takes over, and can defeat rational thinking and response. Echertling says a person looking at a poisonous snake at the zoo shows how this works: He or she will typically jump back in fear if the snake strikes, despite knowing that the reptile is safely behind a glass barrier.
But while the tales of mayhem and murder were spread by frightened evacuees, they were further perpetuated by the media itself, in a kind of feedback loop: According to Maj. Bush, those stuck inside the Superdome were also hearing the reports on AM radios they'd brought with them -- apparently conflating what was happening at the nearby convention center. After the crisis abated, officials confirmed that armed thugs had been largely in control of the convention center until the Arkansas National Guard arrived on the afternoon of Friday, Sept. 2. Deputy Police Commissioner Randy Winn later confirmed that his SWAT unit went into the convention center about 10 times, responding to reports of gunshots, though they said they heard shots and saw muzzle flashes on only one occasion.
Maj. Bush said news organizations often generalized what was happening in the city. "Did it all probably get lumped together to where it got confused if it was heard over an AM radio?" he asked. "I'm sure it did."
The coverage of Katrina's aftermath raised the question for many of whether the fact that the population of stranded evacuees was overwhelmingly black helped unleash the flood of false stories. The editor of the Times-Picayune, Jim Amoss, told the Los Angeles Times on Sept. 27 that "if the dome and convention center had harbored large numbers of middle-class white people, it would not have been a fertile ground for this kind of rumor-mongering."
Turner says Amoss had a point, though she says the impact of class cannot be overlooked, as the vast majority of people stuck in the downtown centers were poor and had no other option but to land there. "The desperation, the poverty and the race of the evacuees" combined, Turner believes, made the media, and perhaps its audiences, more credulous about the atrocities.
Steve Rendall, senior analyst at media watchdog Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, said excessive focus on black looters in the immediate wake of the storm -- especially by Fox News -- served to equate African-Americans with crime and set the tone for later coverage. That made the stories of widespread violence at the convention center and Superdome "more believable and thus reportable for journalists," Rendall says.
As for the evacuees' role in the rumors, both Turner and Rendall point to African-Americans' long history in the South of experiencing racism and victimization -- including the Tuskegee experiments and the deliberate flooding of some of New Orleans' poorer parishes in 1927. The latter buoyed anti-black conspiracy theories after Hurricane Betsy submerged poor neighborhoods in 1965 -- areas like the Ninth Ward, which were also devastated by the fallout from Katrina this year.
At the height of the crisis in New Orleans -- from Wednesday, Aug. 31, to Friday, Sept. 2 -- newspapers, radio stations and TV channels were also filled with reports of rogue gunmen firing on rescue helicopters.
A Fox News report from Sept. 2 quoted an unidentified ambulance official who said a shot was fired at a military helicopter at the Superdome. "There are people just taking potshots at police and at helicopters," Lt. Cmdr. Cheri Ben-Iesan, a spokeswoman for the Coast Guard, told Fox. Additionally, the Associated Press, CBS News, NBC News, MSNBC, CNN and the Los Angeles Times all reported as fact on at least one occasion that shots were being fired on helicopters, while a Washington Post article stated that "angry crowds have repeatedly shot at rescue crews."
According to Officer Austin Banks of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, a 20-year-old resident of the Algiers district in the West Bank area of New Orleans was arrested on Sept. 5, after neighbors said they witnessed him firing at a helicopter. Federal authorities found two revolvers and a box of ammunition in his apartment, and the suspect has been charged with shooting at a military aircraft by the U.S. Attorney's Office in Baton Rouge.
But according to military and Coast Guard officials, no other reports of helicopter shootings have been corroborated. Maj. Bush of the Louisiana Guard says that Task Force Eagle, the military command in charge of all the planes and helicopters that entered the New Orleans area, had no confirmed reports of people firing at aircraft. A civilian had told a guardsman that he'd witnessed a helicopter taking fire while approaching the Superdome, but the report turned out to be false. Likewise, Lt. Col. Edwards of the Arkansas Guard, which operated around the more volatile convention center, knew of no such incidents.
Capt. Bob Mueller, who was in charge of the Coast Guard's relief efforts in New Orleans, provided Salon with a similar account, saying there were no verified reports of anybody firing upon Coast Guard helicopters. And as Knight Ridder reported on Oct. 3, representatives from the Air Force and the Department of Homeland Security have also been unable to confirm a single incident of gunfire at helicopters.
Woods, of the Poynter Institute, says that because information in post-Katrina New Orleans was so difficult to verify, that made it all the more critical for reporters to press their interview subjects about the information they were providing. He credits the Times-Picayune staff, which managed to operate under extreme conditions, for continuing to report out stories of the aftermath -- including the ones they got wrong initially.
Thevenot says he was grateful for the opportunity to go back and correct the record. "Among the Picayune New Orleans team, we all heard far more outrageous tales of violence and death than we actually reported," he said. "Most of it stayed in our notebooks, unconfirmed and unpublished."
This story has been corrected since it was originally published.
About the writer
Aaron Kinney is an editorial fellow at Salon.
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