Katrina - and Federal Government - Not as Racist as Reported

I'll bet you think that most of the victims of Hurricane Katrina were from the poorest black neighborhoods in New Orleans where an indifferent Federal government just let them die. You'd certainly believe that if you believed many of the mainstream media reports from the major media outlets.

Looks like they were wrong:

The bodies of New Orleans residents killed by Hurricane Katrina were almost as likely to be recovered from middle-class neighborhoods as from the city's poorer districts, such as the Lower 9th Ward, according to a Times analysis of data released by the state of Louisiana.

The analysis contradicts what swiftly became conventional wisdom in the days after the storm hit — that it was the city's poorest African American residents who bore the brunt of the hurricane. Slightly more than half of the bodies were found in the city's poorer neighborhoods, with the remainder scattered throughout middle-class and even some richer districts.

"The fascinating thing is that it's so spread out," said Joachim Singelmann, director of the Louisiana Population Data Center at Louisiana State University. "It's not just the Lower 9th Ward or New Orleans East, which everybody has heard about. It's across the board, including some well-to-do neighborhoods."

[...]

Of the 828 bodies found in New Orleans after the storm, 300 were either recovered from medical facilities or shelters that offer no data on the victim's socioeconomic status, or from locations that the state cannot fully identify. Of the 528 bodies recovered from identifiable addresses in city neighborhoods, 230 came from areas that had household incomes above the citywide median of $27,133. The poorer areas accounted for 298 bodies.

So why were these reports so wrong? The herd mentality of the media took over, and given the fact that the media is quick to believe racial charges against GOP officials, there was little introspection on the part of the media before breathlessly reporting these racist charges of indifference toward black victims as facts.

The media got it wrong, and created a lot of bad blood in the country as a result.