More Phony Outrage

Here's another example of stupid liberal outrage and eagerness to brand America as racist. In the top photo, taken by photographer Chris Graythen for AFP/Getty Images, a white man and a light-skinned woman are shown wading through chest-deep water with goods including bread and soda taken from a local grocery store. The caption said: "Two residents wade through chest-deep water after finding bread and soda from a local grocery store...” The second image, shot by photographer Dave Martin for the Associated Press, shows a young black man wading through chest-deep waters. The young man appears to have a case of Pepsi under one arm and a full garbage bag in tow. The caption was: “A young man walks through chest deep flood water after looting a grocery store in New Orleans...” The images were both published on Tuesday by Yahoo News. And immediately the phrase "Black men loot, white people find" began making the rounds of the liberal blogs. OK, we have two totally different photos taken by two totally different reporters working for two totally different news agencies. How can putting the two together and inferring racism in the media be anything but intellectually dishonest? Even when liberals are up to their eyeballs in controversy, they'll still try to manufacture more. UPDATE: Mark, over at 4 Rows Back in the Bleacher Seats, informed me of this article on the less than conservative Salon site. A Salon article on the photographs by Aaron Kinney suggests the captions were a result of a combination of contexual and stylistic differences:

Jack Stokes, AP's director of media relations, confirmed today that [photographer Dave] 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." Regarding the AFP/Getty "finding" photo by [photographer Chris] Graythen, Getty spokeswoman Bridget Russel said, "This is obviously a big tragedy down there, so we're being careful with how we credit these photos." Russel said that Graythen had discussed the image in question with his editor and that if Graythen didn't witness the two people in the image in the act of looting, then he couldn't say they were looting.

The photographer who took the Getty/AFP picture, Chris Graythen, also posted the reasons behind his caption:

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.

This earns Mark a blogroll. Don't wait for apologies from any leftie bloggers.