Katrina and the Racism Rehash

Marvin Olasky has a great piece in Townhall.com, Racist News Media, wherein he takes a long look at the things which were being said – and by whom – immediately after the levees broke. Recall that immediately after Katrina departed, everyone had thought that the city had dodged a bullet.

Writes Olasky,

In a congressional hearing Tuesday, liberals said that racism caused delays in Hurricane Katrina relief and rescue. They’re right, but they misidentified the culprit.

As I’ve reviewed records of the week of Aug., 28, an ugly picture has emerged: Some politicians and journalists painted a portrait of impoverished, overwhelmingly African-American masses of flood victims resorting to utter depravity, randomly attacking each other as well as the police and rescue workers trying to protect and save them. For example, Mayor Ray Nagin said many of his constituents were in an “almost animalistic state.”

Four days after the storm hit, black political organizer Randall Robinson said the “thousands of blacks in New Orleans … have begun eating corpses to survive.” Even for those who see cannibalism as benign, a feast after only four days is premature. CNN became hysterical about “groups of young men roaming the city, shooting at people, attempting to rape women.” Author Michael Lewis reduced the television message to a sentence: “Crazy black people with automatic weapons are out hunting white people, and there’s no bag limit.”

None of these rumors was true, as The New York Times belatedly reported a month after the winds died down: It called them “figments of frightened imaginations.” New Orleans Times-Picayune editor Jim Maoss also noted after the fact that if media had been characterizing the attitudes of “sweaty, hungry, desperate white people, middle-class white people, it’s hard to believe that these kinds of myths would have sprung up quite as readily.”

You’ll want to read the whole thing. I confess I turned off the television, so I didn’t get to hear Wolf Blitzer repeating that Katrina victims were “so poor, and so black…” Had I heard him, I would have sent this to him.

We saw earlier this week that those who speak most loudly about the evils of racism – and it is evil – are sometimes surprisingly slow to do more than speak loudly. Having the opportunity this week to peruse this book last weekend,

I learned that Michael Moore and Al Franken, who also sport very big mouths on the subject of how awful and racist Americans are, particular if they are those terrible conservative types, seem also to talk the talk while walking an entirely different walk.

Is racism a problem in America? Sure. It’s a problem everywhere. People always fear what they do not know or understand and stereotypes abound. But maybe it’s time for the press to acknowledge the tremendous strides that have been made since the GOP sponsored the Civil Rights Act back in the 1960’s. I’m not saying anyone has gloss over the problems that remain, but how about some stories about how many battles have been won? Or, you know…how about simply NOT reporting stories that are demonstrably untrue, simply because they are sensational or because they fan the flames and get the blood going?

Maybe this is why I came away from the Katrina story with a new respect for Lester Holt. He alone seemed sane and rational among the chattering newspeople. I hadn’t thought about it at the time, but perhaps he simply wasn’t interested in perpetuating stories and myths about African Americans which made them appear unable to function without government assistance, lacking heart, or spirit or initiative. Hello? Anyone recall Jabbor Gibson? He showed plenty of heart, spirit and initiative when he took one of the buses Mayor Nagin couldn’t be bothered deploying and rescued 100 people.

When the retrospects of 2005 are playing, later in the month, the story of Katrina will be told again. Will the press tell it straight, even unto admitting just how shoddily they had done their jobs? Or will we get the racism rehash?

Gateway Pundit has more, some of which suggests that the press will go for the Racism Rehash.

UPDATE/CORRECTION: This post orignially cited the title of Olfasky’s piece as “Flooded by a Shallow News Media,” which was incorrect. That brilliant headline came courtesy of a heads-up email from Fornow. And it’s a much better headline than the other, so good, that I didn’t even notice it was not the headline that was published. All apologies to ForNow.