Part of the confusion and underling confusion is things like this
Bob

Photo captions from Katrina stir debate

JOCELYN NOVECK

Associated Press


NEW YORK - In one of the photos, a man wades through chest-deep waters with a large black bag filled with items from a grocery store. In another, two people wade through equally high waters, carrying bread and soda.

They were just two out of hundreds of stunning images transmitted Tuesday, the day after Katrina ravaged New Orleans. What has drawn attention to these two photos, though, is their captions.

In the first, the young man, who is black, is described as having "looted" the items. In the second, the pair, who are white or light-skinned, are described as "finding" the items.

The photos were by two different photographers working for two different news agencies, The Associated Press and AFP/Getty Images. But they appeared together on Yahoo News, and they sparked a flurry of blog entries, emails and calls contending the captions were unfair to blacks.

"The pictures appear to be identical but one individual is "looting" and the other is "finding" needed items!" one person wrote the AP. "This is irresponsible journalism and fuels the attitude that 'all' African-Americans are looters."

On Thursday, Yahoo withdrew the photo of the light-skinned pair at the request of Agence France Presse, which distributes Getty's U.S-produced photos internationally. In a note, Yahoo wrote it "regrets that these photos and captions, viewed together, may have suggested a racial bias on our part.

AFP said it withdrew the photo because it had been flooded with time-consuming phone calls and emails, while already stretched covering the enormous tragedy.

"It's safe to say that it was just causing us a lot of problems," said Bob Pearson, AFP's director of photography in the United States.

The Associated Press said its policy was clear.

"When we see people go into businesses and come out with goods, we call it looting," said Santiago Lyon, AP's director of photography. "When we just see them carrying things down the road, we call it carrying items."

Lyon said the photographer who took Tuesday's photo, Dave Martin, had seen the man go into the store and take out the items.

As for the other photo, Getty said it stood by its caption and its photographer, Chris Graythen, who says the subjects of his photo were simply picking up items floating by in the dank waters.

And Graythen, frustrated by the controversy, wrote an emotional response on a photojournalism Web site, SportsShooter.com.

"These people were not ducking into a store and busting down windows to get electronics," he wrote. "They picked up bread and cokes that were floating in the water. They would have floated away anyhow."

Yahoo said it believed the controversy was merely a result of the juxtaposition of the two photos.

"We've explained that this was two separate news organizations, two separate photographers and two separate occasions," said Joanna Stevens, spokeswoman for Yahoo Inc. "Once people understand that, they're no longer angry with us."

The views in this article you linked to made me want to puke.

>The welfare state--and the brutish, uncivilized mentality it sustains and encourages--is the man-made disaster that explains the moral ugliness that has swamped New Orleans.<

It seems to me that the notion that our country should be concerned about the welfare of our fellow countrymen is a "brutish, uncivilized mentality" is, well a "brutish, uncivilized mentality!"

I don't watch much TV and missed Meet the Press this morning but this segment with Arron Broussard president of Jefferson Parish caught my attention:

thinkprogress.org/2005/09/0...ndonments/

"We have been abandoned by our own country. Hurricane Katrina will go down in history as one of the worst storms ever to hit an American coast. But the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina will go down as one of the worst abandonments of Americans on American soil ever in U.S. history."

We all have a stake in this. Millions of our fellow Americans are impacted by this disaster. What we say and what we do will affect their lives, and our own too, for years to come.

One answer to the question you raise: "So what explains the chaos in New Orleans?" has got to be FEMA. The agency failed so miserably and excuses are meaningless. Mike Brown should resign, but demands to fire him should be heard wide and far.

Here is a quote from David Brooks, editorialist at the NY Times. I think its extremely accurate.

"liberals who think this disaster is going to set off a progressive revival need to explain how a comprehensive governmental failure is going to restore America's faith in big government."

Here's some text that preceded the above:

But of course this illustrates the paradox at the heart of the Katrina disaster, which is that we really need government in times like this, but government is extremely limited in what it can effectively do.

Katrina was the most anticipated natural disaster in American history, and still government managed to fail at every level.

For the brutal fact is, government tends toward bureaucracy, which means elaborate paper flow but ineffective action. Government depends on planning, but planners can never really anticipate the inevitable complexity of events. And American government is inevitably divided and power is inevitably devolved.

Speaking of Katrina, Sumiko Tan, a columnist for the Sunday edition of The Straits Times in Singapore, wrote: "We were shocked at what we saw. Death and destruction from natural disaster is par for the course. But the pictures of dead people left uncollected on the streets, armed looters ransacking shops, survivors desperate to be rescued, racial divisions - these were truly out of sync with what we'd imagined the land of the free to be, even if we had encountered homelessness and violence on visits there. ... If America becomes so unglued when bad things happen in its own backyard, how can it fulfill its role as leader of the world?"

Janadas Devan, a Straits Times columnist, tried to explain to his Asian readers how the U.S. is changing. "Today's conservatives," he wrote, "differ in one crucial aspect from yesterday's conservatives: the latter believed in small government, but believed, too, that a country ought to pay for all the government that it needed.

"The former believe in no government, and therefore conclude that there is no need for a country to pay for even the government that it does have. ... [But] it is not only government that doesn't show up when government is starved of resources and leached of all its meaning. Community doesn't show up either, sacrifice doesn't show up, pulling together doesn't show up, 'we're all in this together' doesn't show up."