Fountains of Misinformation
In a hypercharged post-hurricane situation, whirlwinds of inaccurate information swirl over a community.
One of the more humorous pieces hit us Friday night, the night the storm began, when someone from "CBS News" called co-Managing Editor Ron Franscell to verify that a Beaumont Enterprise editor was going to ride out the storm in a bank vault.
Uh, no.
Then there was a news conference in which Texas Gov. Rick Perry called Rita a "glancing blow." Maybe he considers the atomic bomb drop on Hiroshima to be a glancing blow as well.
A local radio station became the king of inaccuracies. On Saturday, after Rita's winds and rains had subsided, talk show host Jack Piper, who was at the live news helm, said that every media entity in town, including the Beaumont Enterprise, had fled before the storm.
We had to straighten that out.
Unable to get through on the phone, I drove over to the station, and they put me on the air for 10 minutes, giving me a brief chance to plug our web site, boast about our coverage and assure listeners that we weren't a bunch of nervous, carpet-wetting poodles abandoning our news posts and cowering under a couch somewhere far away.
A day later, I ran into Piper at the command center of the emergency response teams, and he said he was about to go on the air to say we were charging people to view our hurricane photos online.
I knew this was not true, because we were having technical difficulties and had published only four photos, all of which were on the web site's front page. And we had no intention of making people pay for the photos in the first place. At this point in the coverage, we were practically a non-profit organization, serving only as an information resource. We had no advertising-rich hard-copy product.
A FEMA official told me earlier in the day of a radio report that the Ford Park arena on the west side of Beaumont had been converted into the same kind of shelter it was for thousands of Hurricane Katrina victims.
The inaccurate information, the FEMA official said, resulted in a sudden logistical nightmare of refugees for the federal emergency responders gathered at Ford Park, a staging area for the disaster assistance, from deploying generators to providing security.
FEMA's response was to call in 40 or so charter buses to ship evacuees to shelters in San Antonio and elsewhere.
Geysers of inaccurate information abound in a disaster zone, from overblown reports of crime and death to untrue simple things such as a gas station opening. Storm-shocked folks blame the federal government for not providing what they need right then. They blame local authorities. Blame. Blame. Blame.
People say the craziest dadblammed things in these situations.
One of the more humorous pieces hit us Friday night, the night the storm began, when someone from "CBS News" called co-Managing Editor Ron Franscell to verify that a Beaumont Enterprise editor was going to ride out the storm in a bank vault.
Uh, no.
Then there was a news conference in which Texas Gov. Rick Perry called Rita a "glancing blow." Maybe he considers the atomic bomb drop on Hiroshima to be a glancing blow as well.
A local radio station became the king of inaccuracies. On Saturday, after Rita's winds and rains had subsided, talk show host Jack Piper, who was at the live news helm, said that every media entity in town, including the Beaumont Enterprise, had fled before the storm.
We had to straighten that out.
Unable to get through on the phone, I drove over to the station, and they put me on the air for 10 minutes, giving me a brief chance to plug our web site, boast about our coverage and assure listeners that we weren't a bunch of nervous, carpet-wetting poodles abandoning our news posts and cowering under a couch somewhere far away.
A day later, I ran into Piper at the command center of the emergency response teams, and he said he was about to go on the air to say we were charging people to view our hurricane photos online.
I knew this was not true, because we were having technical difficulties and had published only four photos, all of which were on the web site's front page. And we had no intention of making people pay for the photos in the first place. At this point in the coverage, we were practically a non-profit organization, serving only as an information resource. We had no advertising-rich hard-copy product.
A FEMA official told me earlier in the day of a radio report that the Ford Park arena on the west side of Beaumont had been converted into the same kind of shelter it was for thousands of Hurricane Katrina victims.
The inaccurate information, the FEMA official said, resulted in a sudden logistical nightmare of refugees for the federal emergency responders gathered at Ford Park, a staging area for the disaster assistance, from deploying generators to providing security.
FEMA's response was to call in 40 or so charter buses to ship evacuees to shelters in San Antonio and elsewhere.
Geysers of inaccurate information abound in a disaster zone, from overblown reports of crime and death to untrue simple things such as a gas station opening. Storm-shocked folks blame the federal government for not providing what they need right then. They blame local authorities. Blame. Blame. Blame.
People say the craziest dadblammed things in these situations.
posted by Brian Pearson at 3:47 PM
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