polyglot conspiracy

I’ll just start with this quote by a Globe correspondent, Christina Pazzanese, quoted in this Salon article but originally posted on Jim Romenesko’s blog.

Seems to me the national ‘crisis mode’ coverage of Katrina in a predominantly black, poor part of the country presents a number of professional challenges for everyone in the media around the subject of racial and economic sensitivity.

I’m glad somebody else said it first.

Meanwhile, there’s a stir in the blogosphere about purportedly racially biased captioning of pictures on Yahoo! News. As in, pictures of white folks with bags of goods contain captions saying that they are “finding” or “looking through” them, whereas pictures of black folks with bags of goods contain captions saying that they are “looting” them. See this excellent thread at Poynter Online for more opinions from the journalism professionals.

An interesting little exchange, further on up the linguistic level, is this from Darrel Plant:

Note that the agencies and photographers responsible for the photos are different, and presumably supplied the captions. The shot with the “looting” label came from Dave Martin at AP Photo. AFP/Getty Images’ Chris Graythen is responsible for the shot of people “finding bread and soda from a local grocery store”, a construction you might almost think was a translation from a foreign language.

And this reply from Matt Mendelsohn:

Let’s not nitpick too much. The “finding bread and soda from a local grocery store” cutline on Chris Graythen’s Katrina photo might not win any writing awards but it’s not the worst I’ve seen either. Talented and brave photographers are busting their asses in Louisiana and Mississippi. Now’s not the time to poke fun at their sentence constructions.

I didn’t interpret Plant’s comment as insensitive, even if it was a little weird…he sounded like he sincerely thought it might be a translation, given that the photo is from the AFP. Which isn’t to demean the headline’s writing per se - it’s a perfectly fine English sentence too, but for a caption, it is a little heavy.

Back to the original issue at hand, the difference between the captions (regardless of who wrote what, how often this actually is an issue in the photos out there, etc.) is more startling given that the items specifically shown to have been “looted” were from places like grocery stores, not gun shops. I have to say that in this situation, I’m not so much opposed to looting. There’s no food, people! No water! No one to take your money at the cash register! Plus, you have no money! Sure this is disastrous for business, but…Katrina was already disastrous for them. I don’t know. “Looting” just has such bad connotations, and that’s why the little “fairness” light goes off when you see that word juxtaposed mostly with images of minorities, while something neutral or positive like “find” gets put next to whites.

Then again, if most of the people who remain(ed) in NOLA are(were) African-American, I suppose most of the “looters” will be, too: And it seems that the first part there is the more important - and less talked about - one. For which I’m glad we have Slate’s Jack Shafer, who wrote such a spot-on critique of this issue yesterday that I can’t help but quote what’s probably too much of it (because I don’t trust you to read it on your own, children!):

Race remains largely untouchable for TV because broadcasters sense that they can’t make an error without destroying careers. That’s a true pity. If the subject were a little less taboo, one of last night’s anchors could have asked a reporter, “Can you explain to our viewers, who by now have surely noticed, why 99 percent of the New Orleans evacuees we’re seeing are African-American? I suppose our viewers have noticed, too, that the provocative looting footage we’re airing and re-airing seems to depict mostly African-Americans.”
…
To the question of looting, an informed reporter or anchor might have pointed out that anybody—even one of the 500 Nordic blondes working in broadcast news—would loot food from a shuttered shop if they found themselves trapped by a flood and had no idea when help would come.
…
By failing to acknowledge upfront that black New Orleanians—and perhaps black Mississippians—suffered more from Katrina than whites, the TV talkers may escape potential accusations that they’re racist. But by ignoring race and class, they boot the journalistic opportunity to bring attention to the disenfranchisement of a whole definable segment of the population. What I wouldn’t pay to hear a Fox anchor ask, “Say, Bob, why are these African-Americans so poor to begin with?”

[UPDATE: In an NYT multimedia presentation, if you click on the tab for "Looting" images, among other things you'll find: a picture of a black man sitting on his car with a trunkful of looted beer after "raiding a drug store;" followed by a picture of a group of black people, who had tried to use a mail truck to escape the city, on the ground being spoken to by authorities; followed by a picture of two white people holding guns outside of their auto shop, "on the lookout for looters." I'm just saying: even if it isn't intentional (it SURELY isn't intentional), there's something to this.]

[UPDATE 2: Eric Bakovic at LL has linked to this site, which neatly juxtaposes the images and captions in question.]

[UPDATE 3: On the lighter side of the issue.]