New Orleans and poverty: a damning admission from the New York Times

It is impossible to deny the obvious: the horrific impact of the disaster in terms of human life and suffering was the product not primarily of a natural disaster, but rather of a social catastrophe that has been deepening in America for decades. A vast portion of the population has been driven into desperate poverty, and, in New Orleans, tens of thousands were left without the means to heed an evacuation order. They were abandoned to fend for themselves against the storm, and then left without aid for days as the weakest among them died in the city’s streets.

“Poverty so pervasive that it hampered evacuation would seem to have been worthy of the Times’s attention before it emerged as a pivotal challenge two weeks ago,” wrote the editor, Byron Calame, adding that coverage of issues surrounding the city’s levee system would also have been merited.

“Yet a look back over the past 10 years of Times coverage of New Orleans in its news columns raises serious questions about how well the paper helped readers recognize and understand these two major problems that have compounded the devastation and tragedy of the storm,” he continued.

The editor went on to acknowledge that, while New Orleans had the greatest proportion of its inhabitants living in poverty of any American city outside of Detroit, the Times’s coverage of the city consisted for the most part of “stylishly written articles about the city’s charm, cuisine and colorful characters.”

Adopting a mea culpa tone, Mr. Calame declared that “given the dimensions of poverty in New Orleans...the Times coverage of these problems over the past decade falls far short of what its readers have a right to expect of a national newspaper.”

While all of this is no doubt true, the Times public editor makes no response to the reader’s question that prompted his column to begin with: “Why didn’t the economic-social-racial conditions in New Orleans get some attention in the paper?”

Read More
http://wsws.org/articles/2005/sep2005/nyt-s14.shtml