Oops

Looks like the president of Jefferson Parish, Aaron Broussard, got his fact wrong in a now famous interview, which he recounted a story about a mother who supposedly drowned when she was not rescued over 4 days in New Orleans. What's more, she apparently called jer son every day during the course of that week for help until she died.

The problem? It turns out the entire timeline was entirely fictional. The son of the deceased came foward to say that he only spoke to his mother between the Saturday before the hurricane struck to Monday. His mother apparently passed August 29th.

So, what do we have here? We have a man who, on national television, got the details of the story so incredibly wrong that it's not out of the question that he lied on TV. However, the bigger problem is that this could be an allegory for the entire New Orleans story: that so many incidents of trauma could be distorted and exaggerated in order to maximize emotional response and cause a visceral disgust against the federal government, or more probable, just to make news.

Case in point: where in the world are the supposed 10,000 potential fatalities? Even if the number of recorded deaths doubled, we'd still only have 1,632 deaths, which is by no means an attempt to minimize the losses incurred. Reports that the draining of New Orleans could take months? How about weeks.

The ultimate result of this is too many people speaking and writing with their emotions, not their minds.