Disaster Reporting

The tone varies tremendously on how news about disasters is conveyed, the stereotypes that emerge or are re-inforced and the narratives, fictitious or real, that take hold. Campus progress, via, published a good interview with Kathleen Tierney about the behavior of major media outlets reporting on large-scale disasters:

Do you think that because the victims of both Haiti and Katrina were poor and black, the media approached the stories with a certain perspective?

Definitely. There is an institutionalized racism in the way these poor black disaster victims are treated. The victims of Katrina were treated with so much presumption, as if you could assume they were going to loot, because they were black. Just like we know that the people in Haiti are bad because they’re black. Black men especially are demonized. During Katrina, the media picked up on every rumor—whether it was raped four-year-olds in the Superdome or people shooting each other. Actually, for a paper me and a couple of my graduate students wrote called “Metaphors Matter,” we found some transcripts of TV programs in which members of the media expressed regret. They were saying, “We really blew it during Katrina; we acted on all of these rumors.” I myself was on Jim Lehrer’s show, where they were asking about the looting [in Katrina], and I got into it with a police officer, and he ended up agreeing with me that it was a myth. It’s not real. I thought the media would have learned something after Katrina, but evidently they haven’t. Here we go again

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The people of Haiti are up against a lot already without us bringing our fears of the poor and non-white to the table. This backwards reflex has us still in the cave, despite out evident progress. It's the way we can tell ourselves so much about the world to rationalize our own behavior. And not about doing nothing at times like these - but about doing so much at all other times to further this state of affairs instead of pushing it to point of elimination.

Hey, MLK day tomorrow! Let's stay home from work and simmer over those who brought us such an ungracious work stoppage with all that protest singing and German-shepherd taunting.