Well, there you have it: the media is coming to find that a lot of the chaos reported during the immediate aftermath of Hurricane Katrina simply didn't happen. Natural chaos? Sure. Criminal chaos? Not so much.

The NYTimes reports, in a Sept 29 story titled "Fear Exceeded Crime's Reality in New Orleans," that a lot of the coverage of extreme hostility, violent looting, and rapes was wholly inaccurate. To be sure, people were looting the local businesses, taking things necessary for survival and, in some cases, pilfering some shit they'd been wanting for a while anyway. But the bottom line is that the media gave us a picture of dark savages unleashed on the unpoliced streets of New Orleans, and this picture, predictably, had no foundation in reality.

Let me give you a few pieces of the NYTimes piece:

--[Police] Superintendent [Edwin P] Compass said that some of his most shocking statements turned out to be untrue. Asked about reports of rapes and murders, he said: "We have no official reports to document any murder. Not one official report of rape or sexual assault."

--For military officials, who flew rescue missions around the city, the reports that people were shooting at helicopters turned out to be mistaken.

--A contingent of National Guard troops was sent to rescue a St. Bernard Parish deputy sheriff who radioed for help, saying he was pinned down by a sniper. Accompanied by a SWAT team, the troops surrounded the area. The shots turned out to be the relief valve on a gas tank that popped open every few minutes.

And I'm totally not making up that last one.

The piece frames the paranoid coverage as a product of the rumor mill and of fearful imaginations. What it doesn't mention is the true underlying mechanism driving the representations of a city gone criminally insane: racism.

It's easy to see that this whole scenario--once the white people left town and before the National Guard showed up (fashionably late, of course)--was cast to be the manifestations of whites' fears of black 'savagery.' This is especially the case with the rape stories that circulated so widely in the media. In the absence of the rule of law, the black man, in accordance with his primitive nature, immediately reverts to his bestial behaviors.

It's almost like our nation's media took Birth of a Nation and rescripted it for the setting of post-Katrina New Orleans. And what's worse is that now that some branches of the media are coming to realize their poor handling of the situation, they still can't see how race dominated the coverage itself.