Classical Values :: A tale of three freezers?

A tale of three freezers?

I think Brian Thevenot's changing story of the Convention Center freezer is worth a post all its own.

As of yesterday, Mr. Thevenot was complaining about "rumors" which led to a "widely circulated tale" about dead bodies in the freezer:

One widely circulated tale, told to The Times-Picayune by a slew of evacuees and two Arkansas National Guardsmen, held that "30 or 40 bodies" were stored in a Convention Center freezer. But a formal Arkansas Guard review of the matter later found that no soldier had actually seen the corpses, and that the information came from rumors in the food line for military, police and rescue workers in front of Harrah's New Orleans Casino, said Edwards, who conducted the review.

But the two Arkansas National Guardsmen were Thevenot's sources for the "tale" he now says was based on "rumors." They were presented almost as if they were his war comrades -- the type of people who'd never lie.

Here's the AJR version of the freezer tale -- from Thevenot's "Apocalypse in New Orleans":

One of my first stops was the Convention Center. I tried to walk through the food service entrance near the back when two Arkansas National Guardsmen stopped me.

"You don't want to go in there," one of them said.

"Why not?"

"There's bodies," said Arkansas Guardsman Mikel Brooks.

"That's actually kind of what I'm writing about," I told him, a bit sheepishly.

"Fine. You want to be a hoss? We'll escort you," Brooks said.

Just inside the door lay a man under a blanket, his decomposing arm sticking up in the air. Next to him, a child. A few yards away, an old woman in a wheelchair Brooks had carted in himself. Next to her lay an old man with his head bashed in.

They wouldn't take me to the freezer in the next room, which they said contained 30 or 40 bodies, a figure still unconfirmed amid a swirl of urban myths churned up by the storm. "I ain't got the stomach for it, even after what I saw in Iraq," Brooks told me.
I didn't particularly need or want to see more bodies, either. I'd seen quite enough.

I could tell Brooks had, too. I'd seen his type of agitated mannerisms before in Iraq, the soldier's mind just clicking, clicking, clicking, the mouth spewing out details of death and anarchy. The scenes of bodies would live in his head for some time. I know they'll live in mine.

Reading about scenes that will live in his head for a long time, would you get the impression that this is a tale? Or a rumor? That the reporter has been had? I wouldn't. There's a distinct sense of being there, being led directly through the carnage, of the reporter on the scene being so horrified that the images are literally seared into his memory.

Likewise, returning to the first version (Thevenot's September 6, story, which I was gullible enough to link), one doesn't get a sense of tales or rumors, but gruesome atrocities, factually and courageously reported:

Arkansas National Guardsman Mikel Brooks stepped through the food service entrance of the Ernest N. Morial Convention Center Monday, flipped on the light at the end of his machine gun, and started pointing out bodies.

"Don't step in that blood - it's contaminated," he said. "That one with his arm sticking up in the air, he's an old man."
Then he shined the light on the smaller human figure under the white sheet next to the elderly man.

"That's a kid," he said. "There's another one in the freezer, a 7-year-old with her throat cut."

He moved on, walking quickly through the darkness, pulling his camouflage shirt to his face to screen out the overwhelming odor.
"There's an old woman," he said, pointing to a wheelchair covered by a sheet. "I escorted her in myself. And that old man got bludgeoned to death," he said of the body lying on the floor next to the wheelchair.

Brooks and several other Guardsmen said they had seen between 30 and 40 more bodies in the Convention Center's freezer. "It's not on, but at least you can shut the door," said fellow Guardsman Phillip Thompson.

The scene of rotting bodies inside the Convention Center reflected those in thousands of businesses, schools, homes and shelters across the metropolitan area.

And now we are told that this scene -- so articulately portrayed by Thevenot, was a tale based on rumors.

I am not impressed. And I am even less impressed by the heavyhanded references to scenes of war carnage which Thevenot repeatedly invoked. It would be one thing had he limited himself to Iraq. After all, he was under stress and he'd been there. But Rwanda?

Yes. Rwanda:

The similarities were striking: days that bled one into another, the constant whirr of helicopters, death, the heavy weight of history.

But a week in post-Katrina New Orleans felt like a month in Iraq. Iraq was Iraq. This was home , suddenly plunged into a scene out of "Hotel Rwanda." We've all run out of adequate descriptors, words we couldn't believe appeared on our screens or notepads even as we wrote them: Armageddon, Bedlam, Chaos, Apocalypse, Hell.

(I don't think I need to get into detail about Rwandan genocide, but Rwanda was not a place where hundreds of people died in flooding from a hurricane.)

Considering that such extreme hyperbole was based on rumors, I'm troubled by Thevenot's claim to ownership of the story:

...we've cranked out better journalism in the last two weeks than we have the last two years, and we're getting stronger every day. And Katrina remains our story to own, and we mean to own it.

Well, he did write it, so I guess it's fair that he should own it.

(Story, tale, rumor, whatever.)

AFTERTHOUGHT: Considering Thevenot's statement that the "horrors of Katrina" trumped anything he'd seen in Iraq, I'm wondering whether the horrors now include "widely circulated tales" based on rumors.

(In either place, of course....)

MORE: Tom Maguire wonders whether we can "look forward to a story praising Bush for refusing to put troops in New Orleans on the basis of phony intelligence."

UPDATE (10/02/05): In an email to me, Brian Thevenot admits his own mistake, and says he has repeatedly admitted the mistake before. This is news to me, because I have not seen any clear admission by him of his own mistake, nor have I seen anything confirming that he exposed himself, as he says. Here's the email from Brian Thevenot:

From: "Sports laptop" (xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx@xxxxxxxxxx.net) To: escheie@yahoo.com Subject: Classical Values Date: Sat, 1 Oct 2005 02:47:22 -0500 From Brian Thevenot: Did you somehow miss the portion of the follow-up story in which I debunked my own myth about the 40 bodies in the freezer? Did you not bother to read the whole story? I admitted my own mistake, under my own byline, and in again in interviews with news stations and newspapers that interviewed me about myths at the Dome and Convention Center. And now you purport to expose me after I exposed myself? xxxxxxxxxxxxx@xxxxxxx.com

I replied as follows:

I'll note your response in an update to my post, but I reread the last report carefully and it's not clear to me where you admitted your own mistake or exposed yourself.
It wasn't my goal to expose you, as if course you wrote the story. Rather, my complaint was that you were not admitting your own role or own mistake, nor had you issued a retraction or correction. Now that you have (at least in this email), I'll certainly note it.

If I am missing something or there is something more recent, please let me know.

Eric Scheie

There may very well be an admission by Brian Thevenot somewhere that I have missed. If and when I find it, I'll update this post again, with my apologies to Mr. Thevenot.

In any event, he's certainly admitting his mistake now, which is good.

MORE: I have no way of knowing whether the above email was in fact sent to me by Brian Thevenot, but I am assuming -- as I should in good faith -- that it was. However, for the record I think I should note that the originating IP -- 12.16.159.38 -- seems to be from a hotel in San Diego, California:

OrgName: STARWOOD HOTELS
OrgID: STARW-29
Address: 701 A ST
City: SAN DIEGO
StateProv: CA
PostalCode: 92101
Country: US

NetRange: 12.16.158.0 - 12.16.159.255
CIDR: 12.16.158.0/23
NetName: STARWOOD43-158
NetHandle: NET-12-16-158-0-1
Parent: NET-12-0-0-0-1
NetType: Reassigned
Comment:
RegDate: 2005-03-17
Updated: 2005-03-17

OrgTechHandle: BH1033-ARIN
OrgTechName: Hassett, Buddy
OrgTechPhone: +1-914-640-8477
OrgTechEmail: xxxxx.xxxxxxx@xxxxxxxxxxxxx.com

This raises my suspicions (because there's urgent reporting still to be done in New Orleans), but it's certainly possible that Mr. Thevenot was in San Diego yesterday, or that his email was routed through a San Diego hotel IP.

MORE: Earlier today on CNN, Glenn Reynolds said, "journalists ought to tell us what they know."

I agree.

Shortly thereafter, Howard Kurtz asked Glenn about the bad reporting in New Orleans:

KURTZ: Glenn Reynolds, the dilemma for reporters is that in some cases -- New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin said 10,000 people could be dead, the police chief, Eddie Compass, said there were babies being raped in the Superdome. Did bloggers play a role in either knocking down some of these reports or at least being more skeptical about them?

REYNOLDS: Some of both. I compared the reports coming out of New Orleans to a disaster novel, and little did I know that was also because they were fiction. I think that there's a lot of accountability. With all the resources that the big media through at this story, it's really amazing how much of it turned out to be wrong. I think it is fine to invoke the fog of war or the fog of disaster. But I think it is funny that members of the press who set such high expectations for everybody else aren't willing to fess up and admit that they were reporting rumor and frequently getting it wrong.

There's one other point, which is, I wonder how quick they would have been to report reports of babies being raped and cannibalism and such if it had been a group of middle-class white people involved. I think even when politicians talk, I think we would have been more skeptical.

As I said, I should have been more skeptical. And right now I couldn't possibly be more skeptical.

MORE: As a courtesy to Mr. Thevenot, the email identifiers have been deleted.