http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/local/bal-md.kane03sep03,1,2969794.column?coll=bal-home-columnists
Two photos pose puzzle: When is it not looting?
***........So the black kid "looted" a grocery store. The white couple "found" their goods.
Quite a few black folks - not all of them prone to a knee-jerk charge of white racism -noticed the difference. Internet chat rooms were soon abuzz with debate about whether race was a factor in the way the two captions were phrased.
To determine that, we have to look closely at the circumstances under which the photos were taken and discern the differences. And the first difference in the captions is that, whatever sins AFP/Getty committed, its writers at least correctly hyphenated the compound modifier "chest-deep." (We journalists can be a nit-picking lot.)
The second difference was noted by AFP/Getty photographer Chris Graythen - who took the photo of the white couple - in Jim Romenesko's online column at the Poynter Institute Web site.
"I believed in my opinion that they did simply find them," said Graythen. "The people were swimming in chest-deep water, and there were other people in the water, both white and black. I looked for the best picture. There were a million items floating in the water. We were near a grocery store that had five-plus feet of water in it. It had no doors. The water was moving and the stuff was floating away. These people were not ducking into a store and busting down windows to get electronics. They picked up bread and Cokes that were floating in the water. They would have floated away anyhow."
That sounds like a reasonable and cogent defense of why AFP/Getty editors went with the caption they chose. But then the muckety-mucks at AFP/Getty shot themselves in the foot: they asked Yahoo and other news services to yank the offending picture from their databases. Yahoo complied. But that prompts the question: If there was nothing wrong with the photo or the caption, why pull them?
One clue: AFP stands for Agence France-Presse. You figure an operation run by the French - the same folks who have made cop-killer Mumia Abu Jamal an international cause celebre - would wimp out to political correctness.
That being said, we must return to the young black man who "looted" the grocery store, as opposed to just "finding" something floating out of it. Mind you, this lad wasn't one of the idiots looting television sets. (Those poor souls apparently forgot that you can't eat a television set and that there's no electricity to power one.) .........***
A cry in the black education wilderness [LINKS to stories]
It's laughable...if the guy was part of the Poynter Institute...he's a lib. So the Black Caucus is even upset at what the liberals are saying? I heard the guy on BOR say that he was upset because they're calling them "refugees" to which Bill noted they're calling black and white people refugees.
Truth is NO is something like 68 percent black.
Black people are being rescued by the hordes, but at the same time, the ones that are having to wait long times are blacks.
I hardly see any whites in the pictures coming out of NO...that's just a logistical fact due to demographics of the city.
But the American people aren't stupid, and they see white person after white person, helping these people, and it destroys the myth that there is "racial bias"...pictures and actions speak louder than words. (BTW anybody see any members of the Black Caucus down there wading through the water to hand out an MRE or at a Red Cross Shelter...heck no.)
It depends on what was taken. The photo of the white couple clearly states that they 'found' bread and Coca-Cola. In other words, something to eat and something to drink.
Yet the photo of the black youth doesn't mention what was 'looted'. If it was beer and cigarettes, that's looting. If it was bread and bottled water, no it was not. But only the photographer and the black youth know for sure.