Newsflash: race and class matter; For a hot moment, race and poverty became a major story in the coverage of Katrina and the civil unrest in France. Did this lead to any change?(to the point)

It took two national catastrophes--Hurricane Katrina in the United States and the civil unrest in France--to focus the mainstream news media's attention on the ever-present problems of race and class in Western society. For a moment, it seemed that there might be an opening for genuine debate and even real social change. But that opportunity quickly faded. While the spotlight on these crises provoked some meaningful discussions about persistent poverty and racial discrimination, it also triggered a kind of backlash against the communities under scrutiny and exposed biases among members of the media. The result has been a lot of sensational and shallow coverage that served to reinforce the status quo rather than truly shake it up.

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Take Katrina. In the first few days after the powerful hurricane and subsequent flooding laid waste to most of New Orleans and surrounding parishes, mainstream newscasters and opinion writers reported on the devastation and ineffective official response with sincere outrage and condemnation. Urgent reports about decaying corpses amidst stranded and starving survivors grew more heated as questions emerged about the role of residents' race and class. Not long after a Slate column posed the provocative question, "Why no mention of race or class in TV's Katrina coverage?", a CNN anchor also made reference to the "elephant in the living room" that the media had thus far ignored. Those reports spurred a spate of others. Soon, the same media that had almost completely ignored a Census Bureau's report on growing poverty in the U.S. released that August was suddenly embroiled in the topic, positioning themselves, as Slate's Jack Shafer wrote, as "public advocates for the poor, the displaced, the starving, the dying and the dead."

Yet as these critical conversations about race, class and equity unfolded, they were simultaneously undermined by charges of looting, exaggerations of crime and bizarre characterizations of the largely Black population of New Orleans as refugees wandering through an American Third World. Even though more responsible reports by the New Orleans Times-Picayune, L.A. Times and the U.K. Guardian later negated the overblown accounts of chaos and anarchy in the Big Easy, damage had been done. Images of (primarily) Blacks toting merchandise or guns were seared into the minds of mainstream audiences. Widespread and repeated depictions of Blacks as troublemakers over-shadowed the larger truth and changed the story. As columnist Earl Ofari Hutchinson wrote, "... wild tales of rape, murder and mayhem edged dangerously close to demonizing the thousands of Blacks that were forced to flee for their lives and endure indescribable, inhumane conditions." Because of thoughtless and hasty coverage, New Orleans survivors were largely portrayed as depraved criminals, drug addicts and welfare cheats instead of ordinary people twice devastated by natural and man-made disasters.

The debate about race was further stymied by an effort by some journalists to downplay race while playing up poverty--a slightly more palatable topic. Less than two weeks into the coverage, CNN's Lou Dobbs made a point of indicting New Orleans Black mayor, Ray Nagin, and the city's "Black power structure." Blame-shifting not only went from federal to local officials but from whites to Blacks. Others analyzed the class angle as if it could be entirely separated from race, rendering discussions about discrimination moot.

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Fast forward from the end of August to October, when protests exploded in Paris suburbs after two teens from working-class neighborhoods were accidentally electrocuted while allegedly avoiding police. To their credit, many mainstream reports here and abroad examined underlying causes of the unrest: police conduct in immigrant communities, widespread unemployment, and ethnic and religious discrimination. Similar to Katrina coverage, news about the marginalization of minorities--and the draconian response of French officials--catalyzed debate, analysis and action. The criticism from media was harsh. The country's major paper, Le Monde, criticized the government-imposed curfew, comparing it to the oppression of the Algerian war: "Exhuming ...