/ Katrina Recovery

Imagery diverges

When the White House called for law and order to stop the looters, some saw that as playing on racial fears. One blog cited the difference in photo captions on news Web sites – one describing two black men carrying groceries as "looters" and another depicting a white couple carrying food supplies as "finding bread and soda from a local grocery store."

In the imagery of so many minority faces, experts said, some viewers see both victims and lawbreakers left in the hurricane's wake, while others see something else: a society that marginalizes the frail and powerless.

Twenty-one percent of Orleans Parish households earn less than $10,000 a year. Nearly 27,000 families are below the poverty level. Most of those families are black.

There were assertions, particularly in reports on CNN, that the subtext of race and class affected the government's response.

Jack Cafferty, a CNN anchor, cited a column by Slate.com's Jack Schafer, who noted that TV coverage has shied away from talking about how so much of the vivid imagery in the aftermath of the hurricane has been black people as victims or predators.

Mr. Cafferty asked: "What role have race and class played in the Gulf Coast crisis?"

White House spokesman Scott McClellan responded sharply: "Such allegations are baseless and absurd."

Analysts say it was impossible to miss the racial overtones in the pictures of hurricane victims.

"You've got extremely poor people, and if you look at the pictures, all you see are basically black people," said Jim Duffy, a political consultant and Louisiana native.

There has been an outpouring of donations from throughout the U.S. in response to the images seen in news coverage – but might it have been greater if those images did not show black faces?

"I do think the nation would be responding differently if they were white elderly and white babies actually dying on the street and being covered with newspapers and shrouds and being left there," said David Billings of the People's Institute, a New Orleans-based organization focused on ending racism.

Keith Woods, a New Orleans native and dean of the Poynter Institute, a media-studies organization, said the media's focus is not surprising considering that more than two-thirds of the city's population is black. Black people make up 12.1 percent of the U.S. population.

Mr. Woods said the fundamental division is not race but economic class. Poor white residents of Mississippi might be equally angry at the slow emergency response, but they blame geography and class, he said.

As for media coverage, he said, the problem is how viewers interpret what they are seeing.

"We turn on a TV and see five black people and one white person, and the white person disappears," he said. "We stop seeing the blackness of the rescue worker, and we only see the blackness of the hoodlums. We stop seeing the whiteness of the refugees, and we only see the whiteness of the helpers."

E-mail wslater@dallasnews.com