Another Myth Goes Pop

This splendid editorial ran in the Tacoma News Tribune:

Hurricane Katrina wasn't merely a catastrophic storm. It became a mirror of America's racial stereotypes.

Many of the initial reports of riots and assaults in flood-stricken New Orleans -- some of them from city officials -- turned out to be greatly exaggerated or entirely fictitious.

Those lurid, distorted tales of murder, child-rape and rooftop snipers carried a distinctly racist subtext. The theme: black thugs running amok.

Now it appears that something else we "know" about the disaster -- that it disproportionately killed blacks and the poor who had no way out of New Orleans -- may be also wrong.

Examining available lists of the dead, reporters from Knight Ridder Newspapers concluded that the storm may have killed blacks, whites, poor and affluent in the New Orleans area roughly in proportion to their share of the population.

One group did die in disproportionate numbers: the elderly, many of whom were trapped in nursing homes.

People tend to impose their preconceptions on the news -- and questions of race tap deep wells of prejudice, suspicion and bias. Katrina didn't reveal the thuggishness of dark-skinned people, but it also wasn't evidence of a genocidal plot.

The reassessments of what happened in New Orleans argue for being a bit more careful about drawing broad conclusions -- especially racial conclusions -- from what the TV cameras seem to be showing us.

The only way the media can win back the respect of the large chunk of Americans who feel alienated from it is to be as bold in disowning and correcting its mistakes as it was in making them. But I don't think the Tacoma News Tribune was one of the main culprits here. And I haven't seen the main culprits run such an editorial as this.