finding versus looting

[Joel S. Berson]

But what did A F-P rewrite it to?  I didn't find that in the
article.  And since A F-P asked (ordered?) Yahoo to remove the photo,
we can't find out easily.

At 9/5/2005 06:04 PM, you wrote:
>---------------------- Information from the mail header
>-----------------------
>Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
>Poster:       Hollis Barnhart <hbarnhart at HIGHLANDS.COM>
>Subject:      finding versus looting
>-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
>If you thought refugee, evacuee, insurgent were loaded words --- now
>there's looter and, presumably, finder.
>Photographer Graythen (and Agence France-Presse) have re-written their
>caption, not the AP.
>Hollis Barnhart (David Barnhart's spouse).
>
> From today's New York Times:
>
>http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/05/business/05caption.html
>
>"Who's a Looter? In Storm's Aftermath, Pictures Kick Up a Different Kind
>of Tempest"
>
>By TANIA RALLI
>Published: September 5, 2005
>Two news photographs ricocheted through the Internet last week and set off
>a debate about race and the news media in the aftermath of Hurricane
>Katrina.
>[photo] Information from The A.P. photographer described this young man as
>looting.
>[photo] In a similar visual circumstance, the white couple was described
>by a different agency's photographer as finding food.
>
>The first photo, taken by Dave Martin, an Associated Press photographer in
>New Orleans, shows a young black man wading through water that has risen
>to his chest. He is clutching a case of soda and pulling a floating bag.
>The caption provided by The A.P. says he has just been "looting a grocery
>store."
>The second photo, also from New Orleans, was taken by Chris Graythen for
>and distributed by Agence France-Presse. It shows a white couple up to
>their chests in the same murky water. The woman is holding some bags of
>food. This caption says they are shown "after finding bread and soda from
>a local grocery store."
>Both photos turned up Tuesday on Yahoo News, which posts automatic feeds
>of articles and photos from wire services. Soon after, a user of the
>photo-sharing site Flickr juxtaposed the images and captions on a single
>page, which attracted links from many blogs. The left-leaning blog Daily
>Kos linked to the page with the comment, "It's not looting if you're
>white."
>The contrast of the two photo captions, which to many indicated a double
>standard at work, generated widespread anger toward the news media that
>quickly spread beyond the Web.
>On Friday night, the rapper Kanye West ignored the teleprompter during
>NBC's live broadcast of "A Concert for Hurricane Relief," using the
>opportunity to lambaste President Bush and criticize the press. "I hate
>the way they portray us in the media," he said. "You see a black family,
>it says they're looting. You see a white family, it says they're looking
>for food."
>Many bloggers were quick to point out that the photos came from two
>different agencies, and so could not reflect the prejudice of a single
>media outlet. A writer on the blog BoingBoing wrote: "Perhaps there's more
>factual substantiation behind each copywriter's choice of words than we
>know. But to some, the difference in tone suggests racial bias, implicit
>or otherwise."
>According to the agencies, each photographer captioned his own photograph.
>Jack Stokes, a spokesman for The A.P., said that photographers are told to
>describe what they have seen when they write a caption.
>Mr. Stokes said The A.P. had guidelines in place before Hurricane Katrina
>struck to distinguish between "looting" and "carrying." If a photographer
>sees a person enter a business and emerge with goods, it is described as
>looting. Otherwise The A.P. calls it carrying.
>Mr. Stokes said that Mr. Martin had seen the man in his photograph wade
>into a grocery store and come out with the sodas and bag, so by A.P.'s
>definition, the man had looted.
>The photographer for Getty Images, Mr. Graythen, said in an e-mail message
>that he had also stuck to what he had seen to write his caption, and had
>actually given the wording a great deal of thought. Mr. Graythen described
>seeing the couple near a corner store from an elevated expressway. The
>door to the shop was open, and things had floated out to the street. He
>was not able to talk to the couple, "so I had to draw my own conclusions,"
>he said.
>In the extreme conditions of New Orleans, Mr. Graythen said, taking
>necessities like food and water to survive could not be considered
>stealing. He said that had he seen people coming out of stores with
>computers and DVD players, he would have considered that looting.
>"If you're taking something that runs solely from a wall outlet that
>requires power from the electric company - when we are not going to have
>power for weeks, even months - that's inexcusable," he said.
>Since the photo was published last Tuesday Mr. Graythen has received more
>than 500 e-mail messages, most of them supportive, he said.
>Within three hours of the photo's publication online, editors at Agence
>France-Presse rewrote Mr. Graythen's caption. But the original caption
>remained online as part of a Yahoo News slide show. Under pressure to keep
>up with the news, and lacking the time for a discussion about word choice,
>Olivier Calas, the agency's director of multimedia, asked Yahoo to remove
>the photo last Thursday.
>Now, in its place, when readers seek the picture of the couple, a
>statement from Neil Budde, the general manager of Yahoo News, appears in
>its place. The statement emphasizes that Yahoo News did not write the
>photo captions and that it did not edit the captions, so that the photos
>can be made available as quickly as possible.
>Mr. Calas said Agence France-Presse was bombarded with e-mail messages
>complaining about the caption. He said the caption was unclear and should
>have been reworded earlier. "This was a consequence of a series of
>negligences, not ill intent," he said.
>For Mr. Graythen, whose parents and grandparents lost their homes in the
>disaster, the fate of the survivors was the most important thing. In his
>e-mail message he wrote: "Now is no time to pass judgment on those trying
>to stay alive. Now is no time to argue semantics about finding versus
>looting. Now is no time to argue if this is a white versus black issue."
>.