What is Affirmative Action and how does it help POC? Explain the ‘Rise of the Nationalist Right’ and explain how it is OR is not detrimental to

Analyses of Social Issues and Public Policy, Vol. 6, No. 1, 2006, pp. 1–17

Race and Media Coverage of Hurricane Katrina: Analysis, Implications, and Future Research Questions

Samuel R. Sommers,∗ Evan P. Apfelbaum, Kristin N. Dukes, Negin Toosi, and Elsie J. Wang Tufts University

We analyze three aspects of media depictions of Hurricane Katrina, focusing on the relationship between race and coverage of the crisis. Examination of media lan- guage use explores the debate surrounding the terms “refugees” and “evacuees”— as well as descriptions of “looting” versus “finding food”—in light of the pre- dominantly Black demographic of the survivors in New Orleans. Assessment of the story angle indicates a disproportionate media tendency to associate Blacks with crime and violence, a propensity consistent with exaggerated and inaccurate reports regarding criminal activity in Katrina’s aftermath. A review of new media sources such as mass e-mails identifies stereotypical depictions of storm survivors that both converge and diverge from coverage found in more traditional media out- lets. Psychological explanations, implications for public attitudes and behavior, and future research questions are explored.

Upon seeing the first images of New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, Americans began to ask why there had not been better preparation for the storm and what could be done to prevent similar catastrophes in the future. Almost as immediately, people also took note of one unmistakable aspect of these images, namely that the overwhelming majority of individuals depicted on rooftops, at the Superdome, and in front of the Convention Center was Black. Accordingly, race-related questions about Katrina began to emerge as well: Why did race seem to covary with ability and willingness to evacuate before the storm? In what ways did the race of the displaced residents of New Orleans affect public perceptions of

∗Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Samuel R. Sommers, De- partment of Psychology, Tufts University, 490 Boston Avenue, Medford, MA 02155 [e-mail: [email protected]].

Note: Authors are listed alphabetically, with the exception of the first author.

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C© 2006 The Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues

2 Sommers et al.

the crisis? And, perhaps most controversially, to what extent did the race of these individuals influence governmental preparations for and responses to the storm?

The focus of this article is on another, related series of questions concerning the relationship between race and media coverage of Katrina. Media portrayals have the potential to both shape and reflect societal attitudes (see Entman & Rojecki, 2001; Gandy, 1998; Gerbner & Gross, 1976; Gilens, 1997), and their examina- tion therefore has broader implications concerning the psychological tendencies alluded to by the questions above. As such, the coverage of Katrina provides a unique, real-world opportunity to consider the relationship between race, popular media, and the general public. We focus on three specific aspects of this media coverage. First, we consider media language use, including two of the hallmark controversies of the Katrina coverage: debate regarding the use of “refugees” to describe survivors of the storm, and the widely circulated photo captions that de- scribed a Black man as “looting” and a seemingly comparable White couple as “finding food.” Second, we examine issues of story angle, particularly the media’s disproportionate—and, in retrospect, exaggerated—focus on reports of violent crime in New Orleans after the storm. Third, we explore first-person accounts circulated through “new” media outlets such as mass e-mails and weblogs, com- paring aspects of this coverage with that of more traditional media outlets. For each topic we offer analysis using psychological research and consider practical implications, all in the effort to identify new links between theory and real-world events and to generate avenues for future investigation.

Language Use

Describing the survivors. Much of the media controversy to emerge in the aftermath of Katrina focused on issues of language. Most notably, debate raged regarding the language used to describe the displaced survivors (Prince, 2005). Indeed, in the first days after the storm, the most common description for these individuals was “refugees” (“Media abounds,” 2005), a word infrequently used to describe American citizens still within the borders of the United States (Fen- ton, 2005; Kirgis, 2005). Within a week, President Bush decried use of the term, and many news organizations made formal announcements of a shift to the more traditional “evacuees,” “survivors,” or “victims.”

To more closely examine this issue we conducted a Google News search for stories appearing in the two weeks after the storm (meaning that at least half of our sampling window occurred after the “refugee” controversy exploded and after some organizations disavowed use of the term). Our search revealed 2,830 stories about Katrina using the word “evacuee,” compared to 1,040 using “refugee,” a difference that might be expected given the dubious applicability of the latter term. Thus, “evacuee” was the more popular word by a ratio of 2.7 to 1. The unprecedented nature of the Katrina crisis renders comparisons problematic, but

Race and Media Coverage 3

in a crude effort at such an analysis, we conducted a similar search for stories about Hurricane Rita, a storm that made landfall on the Gulf Coast three weeks after Katrina. This search revealed 1,510 stories that used “evacuee,” compared to only 257 references to “refugee.” This ratio of 5.9 to 1 is more than twice that observed for Katrina stories, suggesting that, by one comparison at least, “refugee” was used disproportionately more often in stories about Hurricane Katrina.

There are many potential explanations for this difference. Perhaps media out- lets learned that they could prevent controversy by avoiding the word “refugee,” and they adhered to this strategy when covering Rita. The damage and displace- ment caused by Katrina was unprecedented in recent U. S. history; perhaps the unique circumstances of the crisis rendered “refugee” more applicable (Pesca, 2005). Others, however, proposed a more controversial explanation. Even though initial media reports made virtually no mention of race in describing the scene in New Orleans (Shafer, 2005),1 the images transmitted from the Superdome and Convention Center left no doubt that the overwhelming majority of victims re- maining in the city was Black. To some public figures, the most parsimonious explanation for the unusual use of “refugee” was the demographic composition of those affected by the hurricane. Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton, for instance, argued that the use of “refugee” was racially biased, as it depicted the primarily Black population in outgroup terms and implied that the victims were less than full citizens (“Calling Katrina,” 2005).

Was the unique language used to describe victims of Katrina influenced, at least in part, by race? Linguist Geoffrey Nunberg has provided compelling evidence in the affirmative. Nunberg (2005) examined Nexis wire service articles in the first week after Katrina and found that those using “evacuee” (56%) outnumbered those using “refugee” (44%). This 1.3 to 1 ratio is even lower than that of our analysis, presumably due to the different time frame of Nunberg’s study (as well as potential differences in search engines). Most interestingly, in articles in which either “evacuee” or “refugee” appeared within 10 words of “poor” or “Black,” “refugee” was the more popular term by a statistically significant margin of 68% to 32%. This result cannot be accounted for by the race-neutral explanations identified above. Rather, these data support the conclusion that race played some role in the use of “refugee” in the coverage of Katrina.2

1 This tendency to resist addressing race is an interesting one in and of itself (see Kurtz, 2005). Shafer (2005) argues that it resulted from media concerns about avoiding the appearance of racism, a conclusion consistent with recent psychological research regarding the general reluctance of Whites to mention race in describing others, even when it is obvious and diagnostic information (Norton, Sommers, Apfelbaum, Pura, & Ariely, in press).

2 This analysis also raises the important question of whether the influence of race is separable from the influence of socioeconomic status (SES). Compared to social psychological investigations of race-related stereotypes and attitudes, far fewer studies have examined the specifics of people’s beliefs regarding SES. Still, many of the analyses offered in this article could also be used to support the contention that SES colors media depictions, a conclusion we address again below.

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The “refugee” debate was not the only language controversy to emerge. In early September, two news service photographs taken in front of a flooded grocery store received a great deal of television attention and achieved wide circulation on the Internet (“Loot loops,” 2005; Ralli, 2005). In one of the photos, a Black male was shown in waist-high water, carrying a carton of soft drinks and a full garbage bag. The other photo showed a White couple carrying food and drinks through similar floodwaters. Although nearly identical in composition, the photos were released with markedly different captions. The first caption—for the photo with the Black subject—began with “A young man walks through chest deep flood water after looting a grocery store . . .” The caption for the second photo read, “Two residents wade through chest-deep water after finding bread and soda from a local grocery store.” That comparable photos could carry such different captions was attributed by some to the major difference between the images: the race of the parties depicted.3 Although anecdotal in nature—and therefore not amenable to the type of analysis conducted above regarding the use of “refugee”—these competing photo captions are certainly consistent with the conclusion that race played some role in language use during coverage of Katrina.

Analysis, implications, and future questions. Given empirical evidence of the influence of race on perception and judgment in a wide range of domains (for review, see Fiske, 1998), it would be quite surprising if similar effects did not occur with media depictions. Race is one of the most salient characteristics people perceive when encountering others (Ito & Urland, 2003; Montepare & Opeyo, 2002). Interacting with—or even viewing faces of—Black individuals has been found to activate stereotypical associations regarding criminality, hostility, and other negative characteristics, and this process often occurs automatically—outside a perceiver’s conscious awareness—and absent explicitly prejudicial attitudes (e.g., Devine, 1989; Eberhardt, Goff, Purdie, & Davies, 2004; Fazio, Jackson, Dunton, & Williams, 1995; Greenwald & Banaji, 1985).

Perhaps exposure to Black individuals also renders more accessible con- structs sometimes associated with “refugee,” such as “stigmatized,” “poor,” or “outgroup.” Consider the analysis of Mike Pesca (2005) of NPR, who wrote that even though legal definitions of “refugee” did not apply to Katrina (see Kirgis, 2005), the word seemed “apt” for other reasons. Automatic associations regard- ing the category African American may have played a role in beliefs that, in this instance, “refugee” just felt like the right word. Pesca (2005) draws analogies be- tween New Orleans and refugee scenes in Haiti and Kosovo (e.g., “the dynamic

3 This controversy suggests that at least some of the influence of race is distinct and separable from that of SES. The individuals in the two photos are not distinguishable in terms of SES, but are clearly members of different racial groups. Although it was almost certainly a combination of race and SES that had an influence on media coverage of Katrina, we believe that these effects would not have been the same were the survivors in New Orleans mostly poor White individuals.

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I witnessed was clearly of the dirty masses on one side and the soldiers and po- lice on the other”), but even more common were media comparisons to Africa or the “Third World” (Street, 2005; Wa Ngugi, 2005). Indeed, any overlap in as- sociations between “Black” and “refugee”—as suggested by Nunberg’s (2005) analyses—would have rendered the latter term more likely to surface in the minds of journalists covering Katrina. In this manner, pernicious intent or racial antipa- thy would not have been required in order for race to impact media coverage, and journalists’ denials of such influence would hardly preclude the possibility that bias occurred.

However, it remains elusively difficult to determine whether race has affected judgment in any particular instance (Norton, Sommers, Vandello, & Darley, 2006). People are often unaware of the extent to which race has been influential, render- ing unreliable their self-reports on the matter (Nisbett & Wilson, 1977; Shafir, Simonson, & Tversky, 1993). Moreover, in a culture where motivations to avoid appearing prejudiced are pervasive (Dunton & Fazio, 1997; Plant & Devine, 1989), few social category labels are as aversive as that of “racist” (Crandall, Eshelman, & O’Brien, 2002; Sommers & Norton, 2006) and people are remarkably facile at recruiting race-neutral justifications for potentially biased behavior (Norton, Vandello, & Darley, 2004). The justifications provided by the two caption writers for the Katrina photos illustrate the difficulty inherent in attempts to identify the influence of race. A spokesperson for the Associated Press, which published the photo caption of the Black individual, explained that the reporter “saw the person go into the shop and take the goods, and that’s why he wrote ‘looting’ in the cap- tion” (“Loot Loops,” 2005). The photographer who wrote the caption regarding the White individuals explained, “I believed . . . that they did simply find them, and not [sic] ‘looted’ them in the definition of the word . . . they picked up bread and cokes that were floating in the water. They would have floated away anyhow” (“Loot Loops,” 2005). Standing alone, either explanation is plausible. In fact, had only one of the captions been published, it is likely that no one would have ques- tioned the motivation behind it. But the rare presence of a comparison group in this instance led to the caption controversy and enables us to at least consider the possibility that race played a role.

We suggest that the explanations for these captions, though likely honest, are just as unreliable as typical self-report accounts for social judgment. Theory suggests that encountering the Black individual outside the grocery store would have activated associations such as “thief,” “immoral,” or “needy,” rendering the construct “looting” more accessible. Indeed, researchers have demonstrated that perceivers have a lower threshold for labeling an ambiguous behavior as criminal or threatening when an actor is Black as opposed to White (e.g., Correll, Park, Judd, & Wittenbrink, 2002; Duncan, 1976; Eberhardt, et al., 2004; Sagar & Schofield, 1980; Wittenbrink, Gist, & Hilton, 1997). By the same token, the journalist who photographed the White individuals ruminated on the circumstances leading up to

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their possession of the items, and decided to give his subjects the benefit of the doubt. Would he have exerted the same effort if the individuals had been Black? Or would he have been more likely to rely instead on stereotypical and heuristic thought processes? Of course, these are empirical questions.

Moving beyond the Katrina context, there are other interesting questions re- garding the language used by media to describe individuals of different races. For instance, is the qualifier “alleged” used more often to refer to White versus non-White criminal suspects? Does race covary with the use of other phrases with subtle differences in connotation such as “suspect,” “detainee,” and the recently ubiquitous “person of interest?” The real-world repercussions of such variations in media language use are also important considerations, as media coverage not only reflects, but also shapes public perception. For example, Dunn, Moore, and Nosek (2005) have shown that subtle variations in the words used to describe violent ac- tions have a significant impact on individuals’ attitudes toward terrorism, as well as their actual memory for events. In the case of Katrina, one might ask whether exposure to the same photo labeled with either a caption of “looting” or “finding food” could affect participants’ willingness to donate to relief efforts (see Iyengar & Morin, 2006). The factors predicting differential media language use—as well the attitudinal and behavioral consequences of this language—are issues that merit closer empirical investigation.

Story Angle

Focus on violent crime. Related to how language is used to depict events is the broader question of which aspects of a story the media focuses on—or whether a story is deemed newsworthy at all in the competitive marketplace of information. With regard to Katrina, one story emphasis in the days after landfall was the outbreak of violent crime throughout New Orleans. “Looting” comprised one aspect of this coverage, but beyond property crimes, a great deal of attention was also paid to what was described as a “violent crime wave” within the city of New Orleans, particularly among evacuees at the Superdome and Convention Center (Loney, 2005). Reports described sniper fire aimed at rescuers, rampant homicide, and roving gangs of youths committing rapes against teenage victims and even babies (Pierre & Gerhart, 2005; Rosenblatt & Rainey, 2005).

One set of questions psychologists could ask concerns the deindividuation processes contributing to these acts. But another interesting aspect of these behav- iors is that, in retrospect, many of them did not happen at all, or at least not to the extent that media and local officials led the public to believe. With regard to allegations reported by CNN and other outlets on September 1 that gunfire directed at helicopters halted a hospital rescue mission, “National Guard officials on the ground at the time now say that no helicopters came under attack and that evac- uations were never stopped because of gunfire” (Pierre & Gerhart, 2005). That

Race and Media Coverage 7

same week, the New Orleans Times-Picayune reported that 40 murder victims had been found in a freezer at the Convention Center; one month later a govern- ment spokesperson reported that four bodies were found, and only one appeared to be that of a murder victim (“Auditing the early,” 2005; Rosenblatt & Rainey, 2005). Finally, although sexual assaults often go underreported even under normal circumstances, only one such assault (with an adult, not child victim) has been confirmed at the Convention Center or Superdome, hardly supporting allegations of a sexual assault wave (“Auditing the early,” 2005).

It is difficult to prove that the largely Black population in question led to this focus on—and overestimation of—violence, but other media analyses are consistent with the proposition that race was at least a contributing factor. Entman and Rojecki (2001) have chronicled a wide array of evidence demonstrating that media coverage of Blacks disproportionately emphasizes violent crime, and that this coverage is more likely to focus on race when a suspect is Black as opposed to White (see also Dixon & Linz, 2000). Biases are also evident in the public’s memory for media representations. In one study, when participants presented with crime stories and photographs were asked to reconstruct the faces they had seen, they selected features that were more Afrocentric than those of the original suspect, particularly when the crime was violent (Oliver, Jackson, Moses, & Dangerfield, 2004).4 Findings such as these are consistent with the more general tendency of social perceivers to fall victim to illusory correlations: overestimations of the co- occurrence of distinctive events and distinctive group memberships (Hamilton & Gifford, 1976).

Analysis, implications, and future questions. Much of the analysis above re- garding race and language use also applies to story angle. Automatic associations between “Black” and “criminal” likely color the perceptions of journalists and news producers even if they do not harbor explicit prejudice. Moreover, beliefs about which stories will interest an audience may also be affected by race. For instance, the extent to which a Black suspect at-large is viewed as a greater public safety threat than a White fugitive may influence the coverage his story receives. Such portrayals can then bias public perceptions, reinforcing preexisting beliefs about race and crime (e.g., Correll et al., 2002; Oliver et al., 2004). Coverage of Ka- trina may have had even more immediate behavioral consequences. Stories about violent crime deterred some individuals from rescue efforts (Pierre & Gerhart,

4 This association between prototypical Black features and stereotypes of criminality (see Dixon & Maddox, 2005; Maddox & Gray, 2002) is yet another interesting topic that would require too much of a tangent to address presently in sufficient detail. This issue was at the center of controversy in 1994 when the cover of Time magazine featured a mug shot of O. J. Simpson with heightened contrast and darkened skin tone. The magazine’s editorial staff explained the motivation behind the alteration as “aesthetic,” although many criticized it as an attempt to portray Simpson in a more threatening light by preying upon stereotypical associations with skin tone (Sturken & Cartwright, 2000).

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2005) and could have affected people from outside the region as well, rendering them less willing to make donations or more likely to minimize the hardships ex- perienced by evacuees (for potential example, see “Barbara Bush,” 2005). Media focus on crime also may have affected government officials. Several state and local governments ran criminal background checks on victims of Katrina who re- located to their jurisdiction, often as soon as these individuals stepped off a plane or bus (“Authorities hunt,” 2005), a move criticized by some as unprecedented and inappropriate (“ACLU criticizes,” 2005; Foley, 2005).

The unique aspect of the Katrina coverage, though, is that much of the reported information about violent crime turns out to have been false. Yes, the lack of re- liable channels of communication was unprecedented in contemporary America, obstructing the media’s ability to obtain and confirm information. But this was not the case at the Superdome and Convention Center, where operations were carried out by the National Guard and where reports should have been more easily con- firmable.5 Moreover, communication issues did not lead to similarly misleading coverage in storm-affected areas with largely White populations. Perhaps most tellingly, the inaccuracies regarding the behavior of the storm survivors seemed to err in the same direction, portraying these individuals more negatively, more violently, more stereotypically; there were few if any stories that depicted the pre- dominantly Black population in a more positive or generous light than the facts warranted (Britt, 2005; Rosenblatt & Rainey, 2005). These observations suggest that demographic factors such as race contributed to the nature of the inaccurate reporting. As the editor of the Times-Picayune postulated, “If the dome and Con- vention Center had harbored large numbers of middle-class White people, it would not have been a fertile ground for this kind of rumormongering” (Britt, 2005).

Another consideration related to story angle involves whether the media deem an event worthy of news coverage in the first place. In the case of Katrina, coverage was extensive. In fact, many pundits credit the media with goading governmental agencies out of their apparent inaction in the immediate aftermath of the storm, as well as “redeeming” a news institution that had become increasingly defer- ential and preoccupied with melodramatic human interest stories in recent years (Carr, 2005; Kurtz, 2005). But other recent news items suggest that race can play a role in determining whether a story even receives media attention in the first place. Consider, for example, the spate of missing woman cases that have recently captured media and public attention in the United States. The disappearances of Chandra Levy, Laci Peterson, and Natalee Holloway, received extensive cover- age. One characteristic these cases share is that they involve young White women. Similar disappearances of non-White women have not received comparable atten- tion. The disappearance of Tamika Huston, a 24-year-old from South Carolina,

5 Indeed, much of the false information reported appears to have originated from government officials who had not taken the time to confirm the rumors (Pierre & Gerhart, 2005).

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was covered by local television stations, but efforts by her family to draw wider media attention were largely ignored (Mankiewicz, 2005). LaToyia Figueroa was pregnant at the time she went missing in Philadelphia, yet her case received a fraction of the coverage devoted to the disappearance of Laci Peterson (O’Connor, 2005). Such discrepancies are not limited to missing persons stories: the March 2005 school shooting that killed 10 Native American students on a reservation outside Minneapolis received far less attention than similar school shootings with predominantly White victims, such as the 1999 murders at Columbine High School in suburban Denver (Teng, 2005).

When pressed to explain these disparities, journalists and executives often ex- plain that they are simply covering the stories that interest the audience (O’Connor, 2005). This may be the case: Perhaps viewers feel greater empathy toward vic- tims who are similar to them, or toward young White victims in general; perhaps they also experience more fear and threat in response to Black criminals. But regardless of whether media decisions about story angle and newsworthiness in- fluence or merely reflect the attitudes of the public, the conclusion that race can affect these decisions is problematic. To no real surprise, journalists and media executives underestimate the potential role of race in these judgments, as illus- trated by this vehement denial from the former president of NBC News: “Let me make this clear: Race is not a factor in who we cover or how we cover it” (Mankiewicz, 2005). Comparisons of the coverage of stories involving individuals of different races—crude as they may be—converge with psychological theory to suggest otherwise. But the extent to which race influences such decisions, and the circumstances under which this influence is strongest, have yet to be identified empirically.

“New Media” Reporting

Web-based first-person accounts. In the 21st century the term “media” has been expanded to refer to outlets other than newspaper, magazine, radio, and tele- vision. In the 2004 U. S. presidential campaign, for example, weblogs (or “blogs”) were a popular source of news and analysis, and several candidates maintained official blogs (Rice, 2003). As such, it seems appropriate to consider the coverage of Hurricane Katrina in the “new media,” including weblogs, listservs, on-line bulletin boards, and mass e-mails. Evidence of the influence of race in these me- dia would not be surprising; these are typically products of individual writers and it is well documented that contemporary individuals exhibit subtle and explicit racial bias despite norms of egalitarianism. In fact, White supremacists and others espousing overtly racist ideologies responded to Katrina with a barrage of e-mails and postings warning that Black evacuees would start crime sprees across the country, blaming the victims for their fate, and proposing strategies for sending aid that would exclusively target White survivors (“Racists stir,” 2005).

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But one did not have to frequent extremist web sites to find accounts of Katrina tinged by race. In the aftermath of the storm, several mass e-mails began circulating as ostensibly first-person accounts from New Orleans and beyond. Many described survivors in an unflattering as well as stereotypical light. Consider, for example, excerpts from an account of the behavior of evacuees at a Texas rest area:

Last Friday, my dad, who works for TxDOT, answered a call for TxDOT employees to go help with the refugees at this rest stop. These buses from New Orleans start pulling in. . . . As they get off the bus, they are greeted and shown to the restrooms—where they pee all over the walls, floors, mirrors, etc. They did not even flush the toilets. Left the restrooms in a HORRIBLE mess. . . . He and my mom said the people were HORRIBLE. Nasty, filthy mouthed, ungrateful. . . . Why the hell can’t they line up themselves and help unload all these trucks and cars full of FREE stuff? Okay, let them have a day or two of rest but then put those folks to work taking care of themselves. Why the hell should any of them want to get a job when they can lay around all day in free air conditioned stadiums where they don’t have to spend a dime and they have TV, entertainment and education and great food?

(“Rest stop,” 2005)

The Texas Department of Transportation (TxDOT) was unable to confirm these allegations, and the supervisor of the rest stop refuted them, particularly the alleged incidents in the restroom (“Rest stop,” 2005). Again, it is not surprising that there exists an e-mail that describes the survivors of Katrina so negatively, and one such account hardly indicates a general media bias. But it is noteworthy that this account shares some characteristics exhibited by the traditional media coverage reviewed above. The full e-mail consistently refers to survivors as “refugees,” at

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