Thursday, September 01, 2005

finders looters

Now I Get It: I get it now. If you're white, you find things. If you're black, you're looting. - Scott Roeben, Las Vegas, NV


Scott has a good point. Both the above links come from Yahoo news photos - that is seriously biased reporting. Taking groceries from a grocery store seems like a reasonable survival tactic to me - looting is when you steal stuff that you don't need.

Caption for photo of two white people: "Two residents wade through chest-deep water after finding bread and soda from a local grocery store after Hurricane Katrina came through the area in New Orleans, Louisiana."

Caption for photo of black person: "A young man walks through chest deep flood water after looting a grocery store in New Orleans on Tuesday, Aug. 30, 2005." (though to be fair he is carrying a box of Pepsi and a large black bin-liner - saves making more than one trip to the shops I suppose).

3 comments:

Phil Wilson said...

did you see http://news.yahoo.com/page/photostatement ?

It's also worth noting that Yahoo! didn't write the titles, AP and AFP did.

Yewtree said...

Just goes to show that they should scrutinise the content they are hosting. Maybe one of the titles was written by one news agency and the other one by a different one, but the style of the two captions was very similar, which suggests they came from the same source.

Yewtree said...

Screenshot of original photos now available on Flickr. (Since Yahoo have now removed one of the offending photos.) Reading the Yahoo news statement again, it clearly says the captions came from 2 different sources.