PressEthic

A headline on the front page of Tuesday’s New York Times reads “45 Bodies Found in a New Orleans Hospital.” The first paragraph of this Kirk Johnson article says:

The bodies of 45 people have been found in a flooded uptown hospital here, officials said Monday, sharply increasing the death toll from Hurricane Katrina and raising new questions about the breakdown of the evacuation system as the disaster unfolded.

In the next paragraph, we learn that hospital officials confirm “. . . at least some of the victims died while waiting to be removed in the four days after the hurricane struck. . .”

Then comes the third paragraph:

Steven L Campanini, a spokesman for the hospital’s owner, Tenet Healthcare, said the dead included patients who died awaiting evacuation as well as people who died before the hurricane struck and whose bodies were in the hospital morgue.

Died BEFORE the hurricane struck?!? Then. . . their deaths were in no way caused by the hurricane and the botched rescue and our racist president?? Wow. . .

I don’t know much about hospitals beyond what I see on ER or Grey’s Anatomy, but I’m pretty sure that people DIE there regularly. . . Anyone would agree that it’s a tragedy some of these people died while awaiting rescue. But, for the NYT to run an aggregate body count as a headline, without taking into consideration the normal hospital death toll and the ALREADY DEAD, is plain misleading. I don’t care how many bodies were “in a New Orleans Hospital,” and neither does the American public. We want to know how many people died because of the HURRICANE! But, the headline takes care of that. The casual reader would probably think it was 45.