racism in the media

One of my linguistics professors, Eric Bakovic, posted on Language Log about possible "systemic racism" in the media's coverage of Hurricane Katrina. He refers to an animated gif which shows that the verb "loot" is used for describing black people's activity, and "find" is used to described the same activity of white people. Many comments mention that the description of blacks "looting" is found in an AP article, while the description of whites "finding" is found in an AFP article, and since they are different news agencies, it somehow weakens the evidence for (word usage) racism by the media. Eric replies that he's just trying to show that there's systemic racism, i.e., that there's a problem 'with the distinction between "looting" and "finding", as the title of my post says explicitly, and with the fact that the former is attributed to blacks and the latter to whites.'

I decided to go to GoogleNews and Yahoo!News and search for "looting". There are articles by non-US media describing what was happening in New Orleans, yet none of them had pictures describing the looting: for each of these articles, there's no distinction made between "white finding" and "black looting". An article from Britain and an article from down under both mention that tourists even joined in the "looting", but unfortunately (for this post) neither give the skin color of the tourists. In response to Eric's problem with the distinction between "looting" and "finding", I think he'd have to suppose that the groups of tourists mentioned by the Aussies and Brits were comprised of blacks.

Eric makes clear that he's not suggesting malicious intent by the media, but I think there is a connection between malicious intent and systemic racism. For what it's worth, photographer Chris Graythen, who took the photo of the white people "finding", has stated here why he described them as "finding" and not "looting". From what he says, and from the use of the word "looting" by so many different sources without an accompanying photo/caption, I don't see the support for "the prevalent racism in the US media" (malicious, not systemic): the photo/caption pairs with "loot" and "find" are nugatory compared to the amount of articles I noticed. ( In truth, I actually didn't find any photo/image pairs). Of course, I'm writing this a few days after the AP and AFP articles were posted, so it may be that I just don't see the many photo/caption pairs with "loot" and "find", or it may be that those were all taken down when people like Kanye West spoke out about the inequality. If anyone knows where all these photo/caption pairs are, please let me know.

[all posts in /ling/]  [permanent link]