Race, Lies and New Orleans (Hutchinson Report)

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. <snip>

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. <snip>

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