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?

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 a 1955 law sends to the youth of the suburbs a message of astonishing brutality: that after 50 years France intends to treat them exactly as it did their grandparents."

But again, much of the coverage was fear-driven, leaving the impression that the turmoil had engulfed the nation and could likely spread to any (Western) nation that had a large immigrant population or "underclass culture." Disparate groups of working-class youth--African, Arab, West Indian, even French--were conflated with Islamists, i.e., potential terrorists. The cause of the unrest was not attributed to police brutality or racism, but unchecked immigration and failed multiculturalism. One New York Times piece about the burgeoning French underclass juxtaposed images of a burning Paris suburb with the L.A. riots. Again, the subtext was the perceived threat to the mainstream and what can be done about them--the poor, the urban, the immigrant, the minority, the dangerous. (This article and others suggested that the U.S. had superior race relations in part because of American affirmative action programs, not mentioning the fact that "ghettoization" and high unemployment among communities of color is just as common here as in France.) Readers could easily forger that two teenagers died and that most of the suburb residents, including adults and Muslim leaders who called for calm, did not participate in any disturbance--just as most of the New Orleans citizens who the suffered twin traumas of Katrina and the botched rescue efforts were innocent of any wrongdoing.

In both countries, the initial event spawned broader reports about poverty and racism. Yet many of those stories smacked of paternalism and reinforced the image of the poor as foreigners in our midst, as objectified subjects of a National Geographic photo essay. An Oprah episode that purported to be about poverty in America relied entirely on privileged journalists as experts on a topic they rarely cover. In one scene, CNN's Anderson Cooper--who has been lauded and promoted for his reportage during Katrina--pressed a homeless Black girl about how she felt different from her friends who had a place to live. Under Cooper's cruel microscope, she burst into tears. (Was she supposed to explain poverty to him?) During another exchange, Cooper and Oprah discussed the often-asked question: would the official response to Katrina have been different had the victims been white, or, as Cooper put it, soccer moms? They concluded that it was a question worth asking, but neither attempted to answer it or even explain that a "soccer mom" would most likely have had the SUV and gas money to leave on her own.

A Newsweek cover story ("Poverty, Race and Katrina: Lessons of a National Shame," 9/19/05) offered more thoughtful reporting and analysis. It included one of the few articles on the subject to note that some Blacks who chose to not evacuate New Orleans did so because they "were reluctant to abandon their entire net worth"--to quite literally lose everything. The article also examined issues such as the media's blindspot when it comes to poverty, the roots of poverty, persistent segregation, the politics of disaster response and naked racism in Katrina's aftermath. Yet the same piece used images of mostly downtrodden-looking Blacks to illustrate its title, "The Other America." It begs the question: without the emotionalism, will Newsweek continue to explore these issues or allow tough subjects like poverty to once again fade from public view?

This superficial and short-lived media focus on race and class masks a depressing reality: despite the temporarily heightened awareness and official promises of change, policies of exclusion and repression continue. Firms owned by people of color will not get the chance to help rebuild New Orleans as more politically connected firms complete their no-bid contracts and affirmative action rules are suspended. Immigrant youth in France convicted of rioting may be deported, and many of those left behind will remain unemployed. Mean-while, members of the mainstream media will win awards for their compassionate work and go back to the separate and unequal world that they help perpetuate.

Ziba Kashef writes frequently about health, race and women's issues.