PressEthic

Since we're reading Bias, this article in the New York Times seemed appropriate blog material.

In the beginning, it seemed that wherever the Louisianans went, people stopped them on the street, figuring that because they were black, they must be from the hurricane.

Is this Mr. Cooper's opinion? If this is a narrative from his perspective, there would surely be some attribution that the Oklahoma residents he encountered assumed this, or that someone said something to that effect. You would hope at least, because alone, that loaded phrase, "figuring that because they were black, they must be from the hurricane," is left wide open to interpretation.

Maybe the snow white people of Oklahoma were so sheltered they thought a black man walking down their streets couldn't possibly live there. Maybe the black man got this impression from people's reactions.

Maybe the reporter needed to elaborate.

Blacks do make up quite a small portion of Oklahoma's population, but those few little words still bring a host of implications about blacks, whites and the way races are seen in the media. The only person for sure "figuring" anything was reporter Isabel Wilkerson, when she figured what everyone in Oklahoma was thinking.

An example of this stereotyping with a more extreme consequence can be found in Laura Grow's blog. In principle, these two instances are not far removed from each other - the complexities of everyone's race, religion and beliefs boil down to a caricature that some members of the media seem quite ready to perpetuate.

Going back to Bias, Bernard Goldberg writes about how leftist the "liberal media" is. Funny, I thought one perk of being liberal was that you were open-minded; yet Wilkerson seems to ignore the possibility that there is one person in Oklahoma who would not see a minority and react with a double-take.

Oklahoma is a red state - so is my home state of West Virginia, which has also seen its fair share of stereotyping. I'm liberal, as are a lot of people I know. And believe it or not, I'd seen black people before I moved to New York. I've even - gasp! - talked to them. And I've never been to Oklahoma, but I'd bet the same is true for at least one or two people there.

Of course you wouldn't know it from the article, so just do what this reporter did - assume.