Pictures have been floating around for several days now (first seen by myself at Pecunium's LiveJournal) of a pair of images published the same day on Yahoo News. The first was from the Associated Press, describing the black man in the picture as a looter:
The other picture, from the Agence France Presse, depicting a pair of lighter-skinned people described as "finding bread and water":
This turned out to be the start of a long series of images posted apparently continuing this theme: black people consistently labeled as looters, both by the Associated Press and the Canadian Press, with caucasians labeled... less consistently. Another image by the AFP showed that they weren't avoiding the term 'looting' as a matter of policy, either.
Salon wrote an article about this (membership required), in which Jack Stokes, AP's director of media relations, claimed that there was nothing unjustified about it.
The AP database includes two other images from the same scene by photographer Dave Martin that refer to looters in the captions, though neither actually shows an explicit act of looting. Jack Stokes, AP's director of media relations, confirmed today that Martin says he witnessed the people in his images looting a grocery store. "He saw the person go into the shop and take the goods," Stokes said, "and that's why he wrote 'looting' in the caption."
Chris Graythen, the photographer of the AFP image (who himself had suffered grievous losses in New Orleans, and has apparently received a large amount of hate mail over his decision to not use the word 'looting'), wrote an explanation on the Sports Shooter message board, the most notable paragraph being:
I wrote the caption about the two people who 'found' the items. I believed in my opinion, that they did simply find them, and not 'looted' them in the definition of the word. The people were swimming in chest deep water, and there were other people in the water, both white and black. I looked for the best picture. there were a million items floating in the water - we were right near a grocery store that had 5+ feet of water in it. it had no doors. the water was moving, and the stuff was floating away. These people were not ducking into a store and busting down windows to get electronics. They picked up bread and cokes that were floating in the water. They would have floated away anyhow. I wouldn't have taken in, because I wouldn't eat anything that's been in that water. But I'm not homeless. (well, technically I am right now.)
Yahoo News put out their own statement on the controversy, noting that they had pulled the AFP photo at AFP's request.
Snopes, the urband legend reference site, also looked into it, stating in their analysis that:
It's difficult to draw any substantiated conclusions from these photographs' captions. Although they were both carried by many news outlets, they were taken by two different photographers and came from two different services, Associated Press (AP) and Getty Images via Agence France-Presse (AFP). These services may have different stylistic standards for how they caption photographs, or the dissimilar wordings may have been due to nothing more than the preferences of different photographers and editors, or the difference might be the coincidental result of a desire to avoid repetitive wording (similar photographs from the same news services variously describe the depicted actions as "looting," "raiding," "taking," "finding," and "making off"). The viewer also isn't privy to the contexts in which the photographs were taken — it's possible that in one case the photographer actually saw his subject exiting an unattended grocery store with an armful of goods, while in the other case the photographer came upon his subjects with supplies in hand and could only make assumptions about how they obtained them.
In spite of this, a number of people are quite upset, with entries such with titles such as 'black people loot, white people find' being somewhat typical of the reactions. There is likely a good deal of racism involved in various aspects of this disaster, from the planning to the recovery (over 70% of the city's population is black), and sensitivities to this sort of language is high.
It's interesting to compare the actions of the AP and the AFP on this, and the reactions of the public. In a situation where perishable goods will in any case perish well before the rescue is completed, and lives are at stake, and ownership might actually be in question, one would think that labeling someone a looter would require a higher barrier than not doing so... and yet the AFP pulls their image, while the AP defends theirs. It's hard to justify people hauling off jewelry, televisions, or CDs, but clothing, food, and fuel are another matter, and there's probably a lot to be said for giving people in a bad situation the benefit of the doubt.
