Everybody makes mistakes, and I try not to dwell on assigning blame because it isn't generally productive of much. Usually when someone tries to avoid responsibility for assigning blame to others, I'm not terribly impressed, unless it appears that the person trying to shift blame helped create the problem. And I'm wondering what's going on with the Times Picayune's Brian Thevenot, who's taking a hard line in condemning earlier gruesome reports of crime which he now says were untrue:

As floodwaters forced tens of thousands of evacuees into the Dome and Convention Center, news of unspeakable acts poured out of the nation's media: evacuees firing at helicopters trying to save them; women, children and even babies raped with abandon; people killed for food and water; a 7-year-old raped and killed at the Convention Center. Police, according to their chief, Eddie Compass, found themselves in multiple shootouts inside both shelters, and were forced to race toward muzzle flashes through the dark to disarm the criminals; snipers supposedly fired at doctors and soldiers from downtown high-rises.

In interviews with Oprah Winfrey, Compass reported rapes of "babies," and Mayor Ray Nagin spoke of "hundreds of armed gang members" killing and raping people inside the Dome. Unidentified evacuees told of children stepping over so many bodies, "we couldn't count."

The picture that emerged was one of the impoverished, masses of flood victims resorting to utter depravity, randomly attacking each other, as well as the police trying to protect them and the rescue workers trying to save them. Nagin told Winfrey the crowd has descended to an "almost animalistic state."

Four weeks after the storm, few of the widely reported atrocities have been backed with evidence. The piles of bodies never materialized, and soldiers, police officers and rescue personnel on the front lines say that although anarchy reigned at times and people suffered unimaginable indignities, most of the worst crimes reported at the time never happened.

The above is certainly good news by any standard. But what's troubling to me is that some of the bad news was reported by Thevenot himself. By implication, he's now saying that his own story, which I was unfortunate enough to link before in the assumption that it was accurate, was either lying or exaggerated. The link I posted to Thevenot's earlier Times-Picayune story now goes nowhere except to the story Glenn links today. But via the Kansas City Star, here's the earlier Times-Picayune story [edited version, unfortunately] which still bears Thevenot's name:

The Times-Picayune of New Orleans, on its Web site, reported on an Arkansas National Guardsman, Mikel Brooks. It followed him as he stepped through the food service entrance of the convention center on 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 …”

“There’s an old woman,” he said, pointing to a wheelchair covered by a sheet. “I escorted her in myself.”

Of the four bodies that lay just inside the food service entrance, the woman in the wheelchair rattled Brooks the most. When he found her two days before among the sea of suffering in front of the Convention Center where one of the last camps evacuated, her husband sat next to her. He had only one concern when Brooks and some of his comrades carted her away.

“Bring me back my wheelchair,” he recalled the man telling him.

One of the bodies, they said, was a girl they estimated to be 5 years old.

Brooks and his unit came to New Orleans not long after serving a year of combat duty in Iraq, taking on gunfire and bombs, while losing comrades with regularity. Still, the scene at the Convention Center, where they conducted an evacuation this week, left him shell-shocked.

“I ain’t got the stomach for it, even after what I saw in Iraq,” said Brooks, referring to the freezer where the bulk of the bodies were kept. “In Iraq, it’s one on one. It’s war. It’s fair. Here, it’s just crazy. It’s anarchy. When you get down to killing and raping people in the streets for food and water … and this is America. This is just 300 miles south of where I live.”

....
Cain Burdeau, Dan Sewell and Tim Dahlberg of The Associated Press, Judith Graham of the Chicago Tribune, and Brian Thevenot of The Times-Picayune contributed to this report.

A Washington Post report quoted another soldier who concluded that three of the four people appeared to have been beaten to death, including an older woman in a wheelchair.

But Spc. Mikel Brooks, an Arkansas Guardsman who said he wheeled the woman's dead body into the food service entrance, said she appeared to have died of natural causes. Brooks went on to say that the woman had expired sitting next to her husband, who shocked him by asking him to bring the wheelchair back.

The Post also cited evacuee Tony Cash and three other unnamed sources saying a young boy died of an asthma attack, but multiple officials could not confirm that death.

....

other accusations that have gained wide currency are more demonstrably false. For instance, no one found the body of a girl - whose age was estimated at anywhere from 7 to 13 - who, according to multiple reports, was raped and killed with a knife to the throat at the Convention Center.

Something isn't right about this. I didn't save the full text of the original Thevenot story, and I'm now sorry that I ever linked to it.

Regardless of who was responsible (and regardless of who refuses to accept responsibility) I find myself in full agreement with Glenn:

THE PRESS'S PERFORMANCE DURING KATRINA wasn't any better than the governments involved.

Yeah, I guess there are a lot of similarities.

MORE: I am not the first to raise these concerns about Thevenot's reporting. Here's a letter to the Editor of the Times Picayune:

To the Editors of the Times-Picayune:

* Jim Amoss, Editor,
* Peter Kovacs, Managing Editor, News
* Dan Shea, Managing Editor, News

On September 6 the Times-Picayune published an article by Brian Thevenot entitled, “Mayor says Katrina may have claimed more than 10,000 lives, Bodies found piled in freezer at Convention Center.” The article quotes Mikel Brooks, an Arkansas National Guardsman, as he described a horrific scene in the Morial Convention Center.

Specifically, Mr. Thevenot reported Brooks describing the bodies of children in the Convention Center, one of which he said had been 7, gang-raped, and murdered when her throat was cut. The other body was “estimated” to be that of a 5-year-old.

Mr. Thevenot adds credence to this story by reporting he actually viewed a “smaller human figure under the white sheet.” He does not report that he actually lifted the sheet and saw the body of a child, but the implication is strong that it actually was a child.

This story received widespread circulation all over the world. I followed the links to your archive and when I read the story there, I regarded it as factual.

Unfortunately, CNN and other news agencies have since reported Police Superintendent Eddie Compass’ statement on September 7 that reports of dead children in the Convention Center were merely “vicious rumors.”

So is Brian Thevenot’s story a “vicious rumor” or not? Media accuracy is extremely important, especially during times of crisis. Either the story is true because you printed it as fact, or it is not true and a correction must be printed.

Personally, it is my hope that no children were harmed or killed in the Convention Center, and I would be glad to hear none were. I realize, however, that admitting such an error would be embarrassing for your newspaper, especially since it was such a widely circulated story. But I have faith in the Time-Picayune’s devotion to accuracy.

Sincerely,

Bonnie Wren

MORE: Hugh Hewitt has a more complete version of the Thevenot text:

"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. (Emphasis added.)

(Really, it's as if I should apologize to him for relying on his own story and linking it in my blog....)

MORE: If allegations about humans are this bad, need I mention the alligator "alligations" again?

AND MORE: I have located what appears to be the full text of the Thevenot story, and the link works. I'm sure Thevenot wouldn't deny writing his own story, but I still haven't been able to find a retraction. (And in any case he isn't saying anything about it.)

UPDATE: Via Glenn's update, I see that John Cole thinks that money ($250 billion) might explain some of the hurry by journalists to shun any honest discussion of factual errors:

I can see why we wouldn’t want facts to get in the way of the ‘story.’

a large part of the movement to engage in these power grabs and re-organizations was fueled by the hysteria immediately following the disaster, much of which has turned out to be false.

"Get it right and make sure the rest of us d[o] too."

MORE: Was there an attempt to foment (or exploit) racism by circulating these bogus stories? Who would do or encourage such a thing? Reporters? Government officials? The mayor and the chief of police? Oprah? Why?

...why was everyone so quick to believe (and report) that a mostly black group of mostly poor gathered together would turn to such violence? Even early reports on cannibalism? These are people like you and me, not some sub human race. When I watched the news reports I wasn't fully buying into the wildest stories, but of course the wildest stories made the news. And they made the news often, without being questioned or fact checked.

One thing is abundantly clear: the MSM (probably working with corrupt government officials) deliberately whipped up a climate of hysteria. Whether they'll get away with blaming the people who fell for it remains to be seen.

(Hey, at least I've admitted my mistake in falling for Thevenot's story the first time.)

MORE: I think that spreading false reports of "cannibalism" is about as hysterical as it is possible to get. Yet the "reporter," Randall Robinson, is a Harvard Law School graduate. I'm just wondering.... did he really believe this wildly implausible story? Or did he just think others might?

AND MORE: I'm now wondering whether in fact "many black New Orleanians" really did tell WaPo's Eugene Robinson that "the levee breaks had been engineered in order to save the French Quarter and the Garden District at the expense of the Lower Ninth Ward, which is almost all black." In a previous post I assumed Robinson was accurately reporting what he was told.

Sigh.

I now find myself questioning the premises of my premises!

UPDATE (09/29/05): Baldilocks suspects the problem is more along the lines of media laziness than racism, and offers an observation:

No matter how much disdain many of us have for the mainstream media, we shouldn’t mistake sloth for malice.