How the media shaped Katrina

Shearer ponders the mystery that, even when all the cameras are on, the big story slips by: "It's like they're all staring at the sun and the center of their visual field is burnt out, so they see only the periphery. It's also the herd mentality."

Wildfire rumors tainted early reports. Jordan Flaherty, a New Orleans-based author, says, "The great injustice was how the coverage changed from sympathy for the victims to the depiction of those who remained in the city as armed criminals and street gangs."

Tierney says, "There were rumors of shooters, looters, arsonists, rapists, marauding gangs, terribly ugly rumors about the Superdome. It became a real echo chamber. Police were reported to be firing on crowds from helicopters. . . . None of it true."

Tierney, who appeared on PBS's The NewsHour With Jim Lehrer at the time, says: "Their first question was about looting and lawlessness. I said, 'We're going to find it's being overstated.' " And it was. When troops searched the 39,000 people at the Superdome for weapons, they found about 50, plus four bodies, only one of which was thought to be a homicide.

"It was reported New Orleans was under martial law. It was never under martial law," Tierney says. "Yet some reported police were authorized to shoot to kill."

Lt. Gen. Russel Honoré, leader of Joint Task Force Katrina, fought the hysteria, berating locked-and-loaded National Guard troops rolling toward the Superdome: "Put those damn weapons down. . . . Get those goddamn weapons down."

Katrina was portrayed as a black disaster, when poor and working-class people of all races were left stranded. Lolis Eric Elie, a writer for the New Orleans Times-Picayune and coproducer of the documentary Faubourg Treme: The Untold Story of Black New Orleans, says that where blacks were concerned, the media failed to connect poverty with the urban African American experience.

"America pretended to be surprised that there existed a pocket of poverty in our country so deep that people were unable to leave even when their lives depended on it," he says. "New Orleans was painted as exceptional when, in the matter of African American poverty, we are in step with too much of the rest of our nation, both rural and urban."

Instead, black became connected with criminal. "It's easy to do," says Tierney. "Right after reports of looting, you're shown an image of a black man carrying a loaded garbage bag. But in that bag, maybe he's just carrying everything he has in the world."

Media-stoked myths of lawlessness, social chaos, and violence may have hurt relief efforts and cast a pall on a city trying to rebuild.

"No doubt, that legacy is still with us today," says Flaherty. "The Saints' victory in the Super Bowl" in February "was the first time in years many Americans saw the people of New Orleans as anything but lawless victims."

Day acknowledges the dark side of the coverage, but says it made New Orleans into "the face of the modern American city - and I think the whole world learned from us, in terms of education reform, governmental reform, community rebuilding.

"We can't stop people from telling our stories," Day says, "the good, the bad, the happy, the sad - that is our reality. But what the storm did is it shocked locals and the world into recognizing they had been taking a great city for granted. There are too many people who love this place to let it fade into history."