This Week:

Quote of the Week

"Some of Us Did Not Realize this America Existed" Race, Class, and Hurricanes

Emotions and the News

Greetings,

Welcome to all the new readers of Nygaard Notes.  I've been out in the community some this month (that's part of the reason for the long gap since the last issue), and many of you signed up to get the Notes.  Thanks!  I thrive on feedback, so please feel free to send in your comments, corrections, ideas, and other thoughts.

Not much room for this editor's note, but I will say that I hope to have a word or two to say in the next issue about some fairly big news items that have gone essentially unreported in the corporate press.  Have you heard about the stolen billion dollars in Iraq?  How about "Operation Offset?"  I hope to report on those--and who knows what else?--in the next Nygaard Notes.  (Unless I report on something else.  You know how that goes.)

Until then, I remain,

Nygaard

"Quote" of the Week:

In the New York Times (All The News That's Fit To Print!) of September 17th, on page 20, ran an article headlined "Experts Assess Deregulation As Factor in '03 Blackout."  It was a pretty good article, talking about the Energy Department and its Canadian counterpart holding their first public technical discussion on the "blackout that darkened cities from New York to Toronto and Detroit" two years ago.  According to the Times, the officials talked about "one factor widely considered to have been behind it: the deregulation of the electric system."

The article gave some technical reasons as to why, exactly, deregulation could lead to blackouts, and it also mentioned that a full study on the role of deregulation in the blackout "has never been done," likely because the investigation of the blackout so far has been "managed by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, the architect of utility restructuring in the United States."  That is, the group pushing deregulation under Bush's leadership.

That's all pretty interesting, but it's not the "Quote" of the Week.  That honor goes to a Canadian participant in the discussion, one Kellan Fluckiger, who is the executive director of the electricity division at the Alberta Department of Energy, who said:

"The most serious mistake we can make is pretending that markets do things that they do not do. Markets allocate risk, they allocate capital, they provide price signals.  Markets do not have a conscience, they do not provide social policy, and they do not do things they are not paid to do."

"Some of Us Did Not Realize this America Existed"  Race, Class, and Hurricanes

Since Hurricane Katrina struck, the world has seen headlines like "Katrina Pushes Issues of Race and Poverty at Bush" (which appeared in the September 12th Washington Post) and "Disaster Aid Raises Race Issue; Critics Say Poor Blacks Not Considered in Planning for Emergencies, Evacuations" (from the September 3rd San Francisco Chronicle) and "Images of Hurricane Victims Expose Poverty and Racism" (Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, September 8).  Headlines like this may give the impression that a concern with social justice is part of what is driving media coverage of the disaster.  Is that true?  And what does it mean to say that this disaster "exposes" poverty and racism?

To get a feeling for how the general public might be making sense of events in the news, it is often helpful to look into some of the nooks and crannies of the news media.  I'm talking about places like the entertainment sections of the newspaper, and the sports pages.  Consider this comment, for example, which I ran across in the sports section of the September 10th New York Times:

"Horrifying images since the storm have underscored the reality that there are multiple tiers of America and of Americans.  The images of death, desperation, hopelessness and poverty, flushed into full view, have made many of us wonder where this America was hiding.  We did not recognize it.  Some of us did not even realize this America existed."

Now, it may be true that some of us did not realize that this America existed.  Or, it may be that everyone realized it and simply preferred not to think or talk about it.  In either case, the media plays a role in allowing people to claim shock and amazement at these ongoing realities that are, after all, not that hard to see, if one cares to see them.

Does the Media Care About Race and Class?

The media has engaged only reluctantly with the issues of race and class in regard to Hurricane Katrina.   ThinkProgress, a liberal media blog, conducted a review of transcripts from the three major cable news networks over a full week--Saturday, August 28 to Saturday, September 3--for coverage of the race and class issues exposed in Katrina's wake.  They found that, over the first four days of the crisis, not one of the 1,300 stories about the hurricane made race or class issues the primary or substantial focus of the report.  For the first full week, they found only 22 segments that made race or class issues the primary focus.  Only 7 of those segments aired during primetime.

Ongoing reports on the hurricane and its aftermath have featured race and poverty a bit more, but already one can see the attempts to minimize or justify America's "poverty problem."  In a  September 21st editorial called "Discovering Poverty (Again)" by Robert Samuelson, the senior Washington Post columnist felt free--or felt compelled, it's hard to say--to write things like this:

"One myth [about poverty in the United States] is that we haven't made any progress." . . .  "The dramatic improvement [in poverty among blacks in the past decade] ...could stem from the 1996 welfare reform, which restricted benefits and imposed tougher work requirements." . . .  "[M]uch poverty involves personal behavior that government can't easily alter."  And so forth.  Your basic "relax, it's not so bad" reasoning, with a dash of "blame the victim" thrown in.

Looking Like the Third World

Meanwhile, reporters on the ground in the Gulf Coast struggled to convey to their viewers and readers what the situation was like.  Unlike in Iraq, elite reporters found themselves embedded with regular people, with residents of the city.  That was, in part, because the authorities and their made-to order press conferences were so late in arriving. (Aaron F. Broussard, president of Jefferson Parish, wept on September 4th as he described the Federal government's talk with no action to back it up: "I'm sick of the press conferences.  For God sakes, shut up and send us somebody.")

The most common device used by elite reporters to convey the emotional impact of what they were seeing was to compare the region to "the Third World."  The New York Times remarked that "a Third World country [has] suddenly appeared on the Gulf Coast." USA Today remarked on "the heartbreaking pictures coming out of [New Orleans]" that "were reminiscent of Third World refugee camps."  CNN producer Michael Heard said that Interstate 10 in New Orleans was "very Third World."

What is revealed here is an unconscious (at least, I'd like to believe it's unconscious) racist and ethnocentric assumption that desperation, deprivation, and suffering is, and should only be, a part of life in the so-called Third World.  That is, a place that is "over there," and that is populated by people who--whatever their circumstances--are not like "us."  These denizens of the "Third World" in fact are so different, so unlike "us," that some of us can convince ourselves--if we think about it at all--that their intense poverty and suffering is simply a part of living outside of Europe and the United States.  Seen from this perspective, there is no need to consider any possible relationship between "our" wealth and "their" poverty, no need to consider the economic attacks, the military attacks, or the myriad other ways that the disparity is enforced and protected.  And the news coverage follows the ethnocentric mythology, in any case too far away to merit the front page.

When elite reporters are forced to confront the fact that some of "those" people live in New Orleans, or even on the other side of their own towns, they are shocked.  It looks like "the Third World!"  When the "images of death, desperation, and hopelessness" that the sportswriter mentioned begin to pour into our living rooms through the TV screens, suddenly the privileged classes can no longer deny the segregated reality of the United States, the reality that is normally maintained by real estate values, social norms, police, and the Marines.  The 17th Street Levee is not the only thing that was breeched by the hurricane, it seems.

Speaking of the Third World...

On September 7th, in the midst of the  reports that Hurricane Katrina has made "these parts of the United States look more like the developing world," the United Nations Development Programme released its annual Human Development Report (HDR).  This year's report focused in part on inequality, both between nations and within nations.

Although the HDR went virtually unreported in the United States, the London Observer noted in its story on the report that "Parts of the United States are as poor as the Third World."  Among many important facts contained in this major study, the UN cited a report which found that  "eliminating the gap in healthcare between African Americans and white Americans would save nearly 85,000 lives a year."  Do most editors and producers believe that this story is less important than the story of Hurricane Katrina?  If not, then what can explain the difference in coverage of these two stories?  I think it lies in the structure of the media business itself.

A major one-time catastrophe, like a hurricane, offers lots of compelling footage, which draws in viewers.  And drawing in viewers is the fundamental job of a news organization.  (The job of selling ads to corporations who want to reach those viewers--related, but not the same--is done by others.)  Hurricanes, tornadoes, train wrecks, violence--these things are visual, and thus made for TV, while a catastrophe that affects one person or one family at a time in thousands of cities and towns across the nation is difficult to pull together in a visual way.  The result is that the visual event receives massive coverage--as it should--while the ongoing racial injustice--which is responsible for up to 233 people dying needlessly every single day--receives virtually no coverage.

With this in mind, I took a look at stories on poverty in the New York Times--the nation's newspaper of record--for the eight months before the hurricane.  I found a total of 29 stories, only 3 of which were actually about poor people in the United States.  The rest were about poverty in Brazil, Kenya, the Ukraine, and other places that not only "look like" but actually ARE  the "Third World," and far enough away to allow for more comfortable reporting.

Looking at patterns of media coverage over time, it should come as no surprise, then, that many of us (as the sportswriter put it) "did not even realize this America existed."  In the Alice-in-Wonderland world created by our political and corporate leadership and sold to us as "news," it doesn't exist.  Until a levee breaks somewhere.

Emotions and the News

The TV critic for the Star Tribune (Newspaper of the Twin Cities!), writing in the "Variety" section of that newspaper on September 8th, was talking about TV coverage of the hurricane.  In his column, on this day headlined "Mad TV," he was arguing against what he called the "long-standing rule that the press should never get emotionally involved in a story."  He called that rule "hogwash," and went on to say that "It's ...the reporter's job sometimes to get angry."

He then cited several occasions where TV reporters had gotten angry with the bungled (or worse) response to Hurricane Katrina.  After giving approving examples of righteous indignation on the part of some TV reporters, and an example of "pure lunacy" (Geraldo Rivera), the critic wrote, "It's important to note...that the overall coverage was conducted by cooler heads such as longtime Fox News correspondent Rick Leventhal ... In an interview Wednesday, he said 'I try not to get too emotional.  I don't want to be a robot, but I don't want to be too over the top so that I lose my grip.  I don't feel it's my role to cry.'"

The TV critic then wrote "For the most part, that's the right approach.  But if a few figureheads--the anchors, the pundits, the Blitzers--let their feelings fly occasionally, it can be a  powerful tool.  These are people with power, deserved or not.  They can make a difference."

And so they can.  But, if it is "the reporter's job sometimes to get angry," what are those times?  Are they only when the reporter is standing knee-deep in sewage and surrounded by dead bodies, waiting for the authorities to arrive?   How about when they are sitting in their offices in Minneapolis or New York, and the sewage and dead bodies are elsewhere?  Is it still the reporter's job to get angry?

Feelings are not only a "tool" to be used to convince audiences of the gravity and significance of a story (which I assume is the critic's point here).  The tears and the anger that sometimes come from the reporters in front of the cameras are important, sure. But far more important are the tears and anger of the producers and editors behind the cameras, the tears and anger that might make them sit up and take notice of, and then report on, the ongoing stories of poverty and racism in our own country, and the suffering that results from them.  When the "people with power, deserved or not" have an emotional response to a social reality--how about the 85,000 people in this country that are killed by racism every year?--then that reality will get covered, and resources will be allocated by their news organizations to expose the stories that will make that reality visible to all of us, even those of us in the "good" neighborhoods.

It was true before the hurricane that "parts of the United States are as poor as the Third World," and it will be true long after New Orleans has been rebuilt.  But will the tears and anger still be there?  Time will tell.