Yesterday, Fox Sports reporter Chris Myers guest hosted The Dan Patrick Show and raised some eyebrows with comments about the flooding in Nashville. As noted by the sports blog The Big Lead, Myers said:
MYERS: It's a great country here. We have disasters issues when people pull together and help themselves and I thought the people in Tennessee, unlike -- I'm not going to name names -- when a natural disaster hits people weren't standing on a rooftop trying to blame the government, okay. They helped each other out through this.
And Mike Helton, president of NASCAR, Tony Stewart, among some drivers went from the race over to the middle Tennesee area where still a lot of hardworking, tax-paying, legal American citizens have been affected by the floods and are trying to rebuild their lives and they are helping out. And I think that other people around the country, of course the music industry in and around Nashville helping, without making a big deal out of it and I think that's a good thing.
Myers' comments about the people of New Orleans are disgusting.
People were not standing on their rooftops “trying to blame the government” -- THEY WERE TRYING NOT TO DROWN.
And many people did drown. According to The Times-Picayune, researchers have found that “two-thirds” of the more than 1,400 victims of Katrina in New Orleans “either drowned or died from illness or injury brought on by being trapped in houses surrounded by water.” And the “rest died from maladies or injuries suffered in or exacerbated by an arduous evacuation -- or an inability to evacuate quickly enough, including many who died in local hospitals that lost power and other life-sustaining services.”
(Also note Myers' framing of the people of Nashville as “tax-paying, legal American citizens.” Nice.)
Myers should apologize to the people of New Orleans, the people of Nashville and all Americans.
(You can contact Fox Sports president Ed Goren at ed.goren@fox.com.)