A week after Katrina hit, a reporter for the British Guardian
newspaper was curious whether there was any truth to the wild,
gossipy, and hysterical reports of murder, rape, incest, and
stacked corpses at the New Orleans Superdome.
He closely examined police reports, and records, the statements
of city officials, and eyewitness accounts. He didn't find
anything to substantiate the press reports, or official claims
of the bedlam. His story was ignored in the mainstream press,
and lightly mentioned on a few obscure websites.
A number of web respondents sneered at the story as a lie,
or an apology for black crime by a left leaning tabloid. New
Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin quickly jumped into the fray, slandered
his own city, and reinforced the worst racial stereotypes
with his violence-is- everywhere rant on Oprah and national
talk shows.
The
Guardian may have been an isolated, and to some suspect,
media voice with its counterspin on the mythical violence,
but it wasn't the only press skeptic that tried to separate
fact from fiction about alleged Katrina violence.
Reporters for the Associated Press and the Chicago Tribune,
which could hardly be tagged left leaning, also found
no credible evidence that marauding gangs terrorized
anyone, or they even existed.
A month after these lonely press voices took the time
to check facts, rather than run with gossip, a few newspapers
did a tepid mea culpa and admitted that the apoplectic
frothing tirades by a legion of talking head commentators
and their blood thirst headlines about Baghdad on the
Bayou, rape, murder, incest, stockpiled bloated corpses,
mass looting, the breakdown of civilization, and the
dark side of America, were exaggerated, or more bluntly
a pack of lies.
The media's mea culpa, however, came a month after New
Orleans and the black crime fixation had been firmly
pile driven into the skulls of millions nationally and
worldwide, and an urban legend created that the press's
belated, gentile, damage control could never shake.
This was not simply another overblown case of cheap
sensationalist tabloid news. That's become so commonplace
it barely draws a yawn from a jaded public. New Orleans
fit neatly into the standard equation black, especially
poor black, equals crime and violence. That equation
kicks in even when there is no crime, or whites commit
the crimes.
In a 2003 Penn State University study, researchers asked
white participants to examine newspaper pictures of
black and white crime suspects. Later they asked them
whom the stories had highlighted. In nearly every case,
the respondents incorrectly said that the suspects were
black. The researchers blamed what they called the "mismemory"
of whites on who commits crime on the top-heavy media
emphasis on black crime.
That mismemory was evident during another big disaster
a decade ago. This time it was the 1992 L.A. riots.
TV reporters constantly tailored their reports to depict
the violence as the handiwork of black rioters. But
TV was an open mirror. Viewers could plainly see that
many of those looting and burning were non-blacks. A
Rand study of the racial breakdown of 5,000 riot related
cases processed through Los Angeles municipal courts
found that the majority of those arrested for riot related
offenses were Latinos and whites. The arrest figures
were reported in the back pages of one newspaper and
ignored by the rest of the press.
More than a decade later, the L.A. riot is still indelibly
stamped as a black riot. The scapegoating of blacks
for America's crime problem hit full stride in the 1980s.
The assault on job, income, and social service programs,
a crumbling educational system and industrial shrinkage
dumped more blacks on the streets with no where to go.
The big cuts in welfare, social services, and skills
training programs during the past decade dumped even
more young black males, and females on the streets.
When some turned to gangs, guns and drugs much of the
press busily titillated the public with inexhaustible
features on the "crime prone," "crack plagued," and
the "blood stained streets" of the ghetto.
TV action news crews routinely stalked black neighborhoods
filming busts for the nightly news. The explosion of
Gangsta rap and the spate of Hollywood ghetto films
convinced even more Americans that the gangsta lifestyle
was the black lifestyle. They had ghastly visions of
the boys in the hood heading for their neighborhoods
next.
Much of the media instantly turned the crime problem
into a black problem and played it up even bigger in
news stories and features. New Orleans was a textbook
example of that. Those in the media, and public officials
such as Nagin, that ignored evidence to the contrary,
and spread wild tales of rape, murder and mayhem, edged
dangerously close to demonizing the thousands of blacks
that were forced to flee for their lives and endure
indescribable, inhumane conditions. It was irresponsible,
shameful, and reprehensible, but it showed that when
disaster and race collide, anything goes, including
the truth.
Earl
Ofari Hutchinson is a columnist for BlackNews.com,
an author and political analyst.
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