Unlike the original reports coming from the Superdome and Convention Center, the response to the tragedy in New Orleans is proving to have little to do with racism against the blacks in New Orleans.
However, Paul at Powerline writes that the way the media reported things and believed them was ripe full of racism!…
It isn’t just conservatives who are upset at the MSM for its horrible reporting in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, particularly with respect to New Orleans. Donna Britt, an African-American columnist with the Washington Post, is unhappy that “media accounts of post-Hurricane Katrina mayhem in New Orleans — the countless killings, piles of bodies and profusion of rapes — were greatly exaggerated.” She notes that “if the dome and Convention Center had harbored large numbers of middle-class white people, it would not have been a fertile ground for this kind of rumormongering.” Perhaps it’s Britt sense of diplomacy, or her loyalty to her profession, that causes her not to pose the more interesting and important question — whether, had the dome and convention center harbored mostly white middle-class people, the MSM would have believed and reported as fact the wild rumors.
It’s my view that even the MSM’s suggestion that the death count would reach 10,000 was based on stereotyping — the view that the poor and predominantly African-American residents who didn’t leave New Orleans couldn’t save themselves and, as a class, needed government intervention to survive.
In the initial hours after the disaster the actions of Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton, Louis Farrakhan, rapper Kanye West and others were disgraceful attacks of ignorance and malice for political gain, attention, or as noted, in Kanye’s case, what some saw as a way to sell a new CD. Whatever, the reason, it was wrong. I wonder how many other citizens, white, black, yellow, red,… were fuming to hear such racist remarks after they just donated clothes, or donated money, or took time to go help out at a disaster shelter. It would be great if the black community (and media and democratic party) would start looking more closely at their current leaders and the direction they have taken and are taking them. The comments of these “leaders” just days after the hurricane and in the midst of the disaster did nothing to help the country. Instead these men continue to divide and disgust.
Oh,…Charles Rangel is the latest black democrat to add to that list.
Update: M. Murphy sends this… “George Bush doesn’t like Cajuns!”
