Seven at New Orleans Times-Picayune Win Duranty-Blair Prize

New Orleans Times-Picayune reporters Brian Thevenot, Gordon Russell, Jeff Duncan and Gwen Filosa; managing editors, news, Peter Kovacs and Dan Shea; and editor Jim Amoss, are the newest winners of the Duranty-Blair Prize for Journalistic Infamy, for their September 26, 2005 attempt to “untell” the story of the savage violence that befell New Orleans just before and after Hurricane Katrina made landfall on August 29 of last year.

The previous Duranty-Blair winner was former CBS News producer Mary Mapes, who engineered what became known as the “Memogate” (aka Rathergate) hoax, shortly before the 2004 election, in an effort to swing the election toward Democrat presidential challenger, Sen. John Kerry (MA).

The Duranty-Blair Award is this author's creation, named for two of the most notorious scoundrels in the history of American journalism, Walter Duranty and Jayson Blair, both of whom were New York Times reporters.

On April 17, the Times-Picayune won a Pulitzer Prize for public service for a September 26, 2005 story that had immediately been discredited by the bloggers “ziel” of Your Lying Eyes and Eric Scheie at Classical Values.

Thanks primarily to the new Duranty-Blair winners, one year and three weeks after Hurricane Katrina made landfall the general public knows much less about what happened in New Orleans than it did a year ago.

The two most influential stories on post-Katrina New Orleans were both published by the Times-Picayune, the city’s only major newspaper, on September 6 and September 26, 2005, respectively. For brevity’s sake, hereafter I will refer simply to “9/6” and “9/26,” respectively.

When 9/6 was published, telling tales of bone-chilling savagery, it immediately became part of the worldwide, 24/7, mainstream media (MSM) echo chamber. Twenty days later, 9/26 thoroughly contradicted and sought to discredit 9/6, painting a picture of New Orleans as racked with looters, desperation, and contaminated floodwaters, yet free of violence.

The 9/26 story never cited 9/6, much less noted that 9/6 had been published by the same newspaper, and that one of the 9/26 reporters, Brian Thevenot, had been the sole author of 9/6. The 9/26 story immediately became part of the worldwide, 24/7 MSM echo chamber with no MSM personalities questioning the veracity of 9/26, mentioning the discrepancies between the two stories, or the fact that both stories were published by the same newspaper.

Whereas the politically unpalatable 9/6 story was sent down the memory hole, the politically acceptable 9/26 story has been promoted ever since by the MSM. Somewhere, George Orwell is smiling.

In 9/6, entitled, “Mayor says Katrina may have claimed more than 10,000 lives; Bodies found piled in freezer at Convention Center,” Times-Picayune reporter Brian Thevenot wrote of visiting a room at the Ernest N. Morial Convention Center which held four corpses covered in sheets, and of the National Guardsmen, a combat veteran from the War in Iraq who accompanied him and who was left “shell-shocked” by what he saw. “[Mikel] 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.”

Article Author: Nicholas Stix

New York-based, dissident journalist Nicholas Stix, has the dubious distinction of being arguably America's most frequently censored writer, having at different times outraged black supremacists, socialists, feminists, white supremacists, paleocons, neocons and libertarians. …

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