Remember that terrible story about how someone in New Orleans shot at a helicopter trying to airlift sick people in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina? And the seven-year-old girl who was raped and killed in the Superdome? The stories of rampant lawlessness and rape, of gangs of thugs running amok at the very same Superdome?

Never happened, according to this excellent article in Reason magazine. None of it. Instead, there were rampant rumormongering, lousy journalism, and irresponsible public officials, like when Mayor Ray Nagin predicted that there’d be 10,000 New Orleans citizens dead from the hurricane. (The actual toll—still awful, of course—was about 900 at the time Reason went to press.)

The article doesn’t mention a pet peeve of mine, which I’ll bet my left pinkie could fall into this category of hysteria and hype: the reports of thousands of missing children which prompted CNN, in full milk-the-hurricane-for-every-rating-point-we-can mode, to run photos of “missing” children like an on-screen slide show.