In the wake of the Iowa floods Dick Francis passed along a few pertinent questions:
- Where was the hysterical 24/7 media coverage, complete with reports of cannibalism?
- Where was the media asking the tough questions about why the federal government hadn't solved the problem and where the FEMA trucks (and trailers) were?
- Why wasn't the Federal Government relocating Iowa people to free hotels in Chicago?
- When will Spike Lee say that the Federal Government blew up the levees that failed in Des Moines?
- Where were Sean Penn and the Dixie Chicks?
- Where were all the looters stealing high-end tennis shoes and big screen television sets?
- When will we hear Governor Chet Culver say that he wants to rebuild a 'vanilla' Iowa, because that's the way God wants it?
- Where are the people declaring that George Bush hates white, rural people?
- How come 2 weeks afterwards you never heard anything more about the Iowa flood disaster?
Well, why was the media response to Iowa so much different than the response to Katrina, and why was the reaction of the victims of the Iowa floods so much different than the reaction of the victims of Katrina?
Perhaps we have fostered a culture of dependency among urban blacks that has all but extinguished in many of them the qualities of self-reliance and initiative that were so much in evidence in the people along the upper Mississippi. Could it be that the media sees members of the black underclass as fundamentally incapable of taking care of themselves and considers it unfair to expect them to be able to react to crisis with the same moxie as white middle class Americans? Do poor blacks feel that way about themselves?
It would be interesting if the media and others engaged in a little self-examination of the racial assumptions at play in the way these two natural disasters were covered and responded to.
RLC