MSM -- Makes Stupid Mistakes; Major Sinister Mover

Have you noticed that, aside from accurately reporting that a Hurricane had indeed hit the Gulf Coast and that New Orleans was flooded, every other thing the MSM has reported has been wrong -- either it never happened, or it didn't happen the way the press said it did, or the press's gloom and doom predictions have been way off the mark? Here's the latest (Thank God) on the 10,000 and upwards dead:

Alarming predictions of as many as 10,000 dead in New Orleans may have been greatly exaggerated, with authorities saying Friday that the first street-by-street sweep of the swamped city revealed far fewer corpses than feared. 'Some of the catastrophic deaths that some people predicted may not have occurred,' said Col. Terry Ebbert, the city's homeland security chief. He declined to give a revised estimate. But he added: 'Numbers so far are relatively minor as compared to the dire projections of 10,000.'

Here's the latest on the press's initial claims that it will take half a year to a year to drain N.O. (and an improvement even on the Engineers' 80 day prediction):

Engineers say it may take less time to drain floodwaters from New Orleans than they originally estimated. The Army Corps of Engineers is using a computer model of the New Orleans basin to help guide its efforts to drain the city. Earlier this week, the model suggested it could take up to 80 days to fully drain parts of the city. Now, engineers say most flooded areas could be dry in just 40 days.

Here's the latest on the press's huffing and puffing about the instant appearance of an epidemic of deadly diseases:

Although health officials were preparing for outbreaks of deadly diseases in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, the federal Centers for Disease Control said Thursday that no epidemics had materialized so far. Doctors are seeing some clusters of diarrhea, along with skin rashes and infected wounds. But the CDC said an epidemic of cholera or typhoid was "very unlikely." Medical experts said the main concerns currently are potential outbreaks of gastrointestinal disease and flu-like illnesses in the shelters, where thousands of refugees from the New Orleans area are still living in cramped quarters.

I've already pointed out that most (although, sadly for the victims, not all) of the horror stories from the first three days of the flooding have been debunked, no doubt in part because these canards -- put forward by Democrats -- tended to feed directly into the worst stereotypes about African-Americans. The complete wipe-out of the oil industry that the MSM also predicted has also not occurred. In a normal business context, the fact that the MSM has been wrong, wrong, wrong, would ordinarily be a problem solely for the MSM itself. Any other business with that kind of track record, would simply (and appropriately) get destroyed in the marketplace. The unique thing about the MSM is that it gets away with this kind of gross error. Indeed, to the extent that it coupled its gross error with political attacks of the worst kind, it's actually gained traction -- if traction is defined as achieving its goal of discrediting the Bush administration. In other words, the MSM is simultaneously an example of an extreme failure, in that it's been utterly incapable of carrying out its main task, and an extraordinary success, in that it's getting ever closer to its goal of bringing down a successful political party. When a press exactly like this functioned under the name Pravda, we knew it for what it was -- a corrupt and dishonest branch of a political party. However, here, because the American press is not officially allied with a political party or the government (and because it denies that allegiance, all evidence to the contrary), it gets to trumpet its particular brand of bias, dishonesty and ineptitude, unhampered by the skepticism it would properly receive if its out-and-out allegiance to the Democratic party were properly acknowledged. It is not a free press; it is an anti-democratic (small "d") institution, and it is very scary, since fighting it is rather like fight a chimera.