My daughter had the Oprah Show on today, where Anderson Cooper and Lisa Ling are touring the devastation in New Orleans in an effort to regenerate public interest in restoring the area.

I would say I have a generally good opinion of Ms. Winfrey, whose generosity and good intentions are clearly genuine, and while I don't trust Anderson Cooper as far as I can throw him (an "emoting" anchor is basically a invitation to oversimplify complex issues...), I watched as Cooper and Lisa Ling (should I know her?) interviewed people and toured the devastation.

At minute 22 in the show (I don't have an easy way to extract a single image from the TiVo), the camera shows a house with the now familiar search and rescue code--an 'X' with specific data entered in each quartile. The top quartile has "9-5" spray-painted to indicate the date the site was examined, but then the camera zooms in an Ling intones in a voice over:

"September 5th, and that number at the bottom of the 'X' means that they found one person dead..."

The camera lingers and at the bottom quartile of the 'X' is a '1' with a circle around it, yet I noticed something odd right away--the '1' had a different tone to it, did not appear to be spray-painted and was noticeably different in character to the '9' and '5' numerals in the top quartile. The circle around the one on the other hand, was consistent with the other numerals and was clearly spray-painted.

Someone, likely someone from the Oprah camera crew, had placed a piece of tape inside the 'zero' to allow Ling to make the statement that someone had died in the house.

I will try to extract the frame and post it as an update here, but I have no doubt that the Oprah show breached journalistic ethics to show us a staged image. (I ended up taking a digital photo of the television screen in freeze frame...)

In a media environment where the National Press corps has a conniption over having their irrelevancy rubbed in their face by Dick Cheney, this perfectly illustrates the reasons why--an abstract vision of a "greater truth" that makes it necessary for media elites to lie to the American people.

Its reasonable to ask why I don't give the Oprah show the benefit of the doubt--the reason is the first go around on Katrina by Oprah's posse of celebrities. The posing with dead bodies was not just bad taste, but subsequently demonstrated to have been extremely misleading--dead bodies were not everywhere in New Orleans and in fact very few people died at all.

A year or so ago, I caught a similar episode of lying with pictures when a picture of Muskoxen grazing in the foothills of the Brooks range was captioned as the location for the proposed drill site. The actual drill site was more than fifty miles away on the coastal plain.

Again--inaccurate, but "true".

I have been unable to find a way to contact the Oprah show other than the web-site comment form, which is doubtful to be read in a timely fashion (if at all).

UPDATE: This Flickr archive was quite informative and shows how the search and rescue markings were employed and what they meant.

the bottom quadrant is for victims brought out. this one has a zero, which is a good sign: nobody found inside, dead or alive. due to its location and size, this lakeview area house was probably totally submerged for quite a while. zero is good.

the old way of doing things was to write something like "2 live, 1 dead" in the victims quadrant. on some of the pet search images i posted -- which didn't use this primary emergency X marking -- they used "doa" for pets they found dead.

but some of the X markings for preliminary searches were confusing. looking around flickr at recent images i found one that said "1A" in the bottom portion. one alive? i guess, unless one adult... or one ambulanced? i don't know. hopefully all the various teams and crews could interpret that. i know there was official concern about how to mark for recovered bodies in a more sensitive way than had been taught in search and rescue for years, because i found a homeland security document about being more sensitive to that. hope it doesn't cause confusion. i'm not sure being more obscure can really lessen the pain, but i sure understand the horror of seeing orange paint announce a death.