Critics Say Times-Picayune Website Amplifies Discourse of Violence and Hate

New Orleans-based writer and attorney Billy Sothern started a blog last month called NO Comment that highlights the often offensive comments found on nola.com, the online home of the Times-Picayune. NO Comment's mission says,

This is a blog to highlight and discuss offensive, irresponsible, and inappropriate comments on NOLA.com's Times Picayune website. The blog is not an exhaustive daily monitor of offensive content on NOLA.com but instead the few comments posted and discussed here are exemplary of thousands of similar comments posted on the website.

For anyone who has ever read the Picayune online, much of this will come as nothing new. But Sothern makes some important points, asking why comments on the society page seem to be forbidden, while also pointing out the more aggressive moderation policies of other websites. He also points out that - unlike many sites - nola.com comments are given equal weight with the news articles.

One of my concerns with the lack of moderation of NOLA.com's comments is that I know, from personal experience, that the people involved in news stories, including crime victims, read the comments, which appear immediately after the story and get almost equal footing with the journalist's work.

As Sothern points out on his blog, he's not the first person to raise this issue. Sothern quotes a piece from blogger Deborah Cotton, which lays out the problem in detail:

Discriminatory practices exist that demonstrate a racial bias at the Times. The monitoring of the comments section is a prime example. The TP’s website nola.com has a notorious reputation for allowing racially charged comments that malign Black residents to fester without restraint, as in the case of the two college students who were kidnapped in ’09 and later found murdered. On the day that these kidnappings hit the press, a colleague of mine and I spent the better part of the day emailing and calling the nola.com office, pleading with them to either monitor the escalating hate speech or close the comment section altogether out of respect for the devastated families of the missing students. They all but ignored our requests - you can read the story and comments for yourself here. Meanwhile, Nell Nolan’s society column which chronicles high brow fetes of the White elite in New Orleans doesn’t endure such hostile defamation of its subjects because the comments section in the column are, as a rule, always closed (see here). This double standard creates an environment where the paper de facto condones readers attacking Blacks but goes great lengths to protect the wealthy White community from the same loathsome violations.

Kevin Allman at the Gambit has also written powerful commentary on the subject.

You've got to feel sorry for the T-P writers and editors who bust their asses to produce good work, only to see it undermined, hour after hour, day after day, by blithering racist knuckledraggers who can only see anything through the prism of race (even when it doesn't have any application to the story involved) and who, in a righteous world, would be tossed off the most insane, fringe moonbat radio call-in shows. Or maybe it's all a clever plan designed to staunch the bleeding in the print media, a way to get eyeballs off the Internet and back on the printed page. Whatever it is, it's bull, I'm tired of it, I've given up wondering if nola.com will ever take an interest in getting a handle on it, and I'm embarrassed to send out-of-town friends to the online Times-Picayune to read a story for fear they'll think we're an entire city of troglodytes.

Sothern's blog also quotes coverage of an exchange at a panel on the media sponsored by the Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities, where Louisiana Justice Institute co-directors Tracie Washington and Jacques Morial offered criticism of the nola.com comments. Jacques Morial is quoted as asking, “Has there ever been a discussion about the ethics of profiteering off racial strife and bigotry, especially given that the Times-Picayune does promote the most commented story, so that people click through, and it rings their cash register?”

In the same discussion, former Picayune city editor Jed Horne adds to the critique.

“The commentary that trails news articles, in many ways is deeply repugnant, much of it racist in pretty overt ways,” Horne said. “I’m left to wonder if it hasn’t besmirched the whole enterprise.”

Sothern does quote a nola.com staffer who says (via twitter) that they have gotten better at deleting offensive comment. However, since Sothern continues to find racist and offensive comments - including several posted in the past 24-hours - the remedy clearly hasn't worked. Even when the comments are removed, Sothern calls it an "insufficient remedy," saying,

Removing offensive content may limit the number of people exposed to it but it does little for people who read it - like family members of victims of crime or tragedy - before it was taken down.

Somehow countless other news sites have managed to solve this problem, whether through allowing commentators on their site less anonymity, taking commenting privileges away from those who are consistently offensive, or through moderating comments before they appear. Times-Picayune readers - and journalists on staff, who are forced to have this hate-speech attached to their work - have a right to ask why nola.com does not to the same.

Haitians Seek Shelter and Survival

A recent article in the New York Times reports that the approaching rainy season in Haiti is, "The hard deadline against which Haiti’s government and relief agencies in Port-au-Prince are racing as they try to solve a paralyzing riddle: how to shelter more than a million displaced people in a densely crowded country that has no good place to put them."

According to the Lawrence Downes, writing in the Times, Haiti has three choices:

1. Let people stay in filthy, fragile settlements where no one wants to live, and pray when the hurricanes hit.
2. Build sturdy transitional housing in places like Jérémie, in the southwest, that can absorb the capital’s overflow.
3. Encourage people to return to neighborhoods that are clogged with rubble and will be for years, where the smell of death persists...

In Downes' calculation, the first choice is the worst possible option, and the second is not possible (or at least years away), leaving only the third, which he refers to as "merely absurd."

Into this ongoing disaster, profiteers continue to seek ways to exploit this devastated country. As Bill Quigley has noted, Miami is hosting a conference this week where "private military and security companies [will] showcase their services to governments and non-governmental organizations working in the earthquake devastated country."

It has also been widely reported that the makers of the famous "poison trailers" that caused such harm on the Gulf Coast after Katrina are seeking to send their trailers to Haiti. "Trailer manufacturers see Haiti's disaster as an opportunity to unload used FEMA trailers that threaten to create a glut of cheap, used trailers on the US market," reports a recent editorial in the Times-Picayune, which adds that the trailers are "not deemed an acceptable health risk for US citizens, and it's offensive to suggest that the health of Haitians matters less."

Activists in New Orleans witnessed not only the effects of the toxic trailers but also the pattern of attempts to profit disguised as aid. "Why on earth would we want to export something that we know wont work?" asks Louisiana Justice Institute co-director Tracie Washington.

Housing will certainly be a continuing need in Haiti and this situation needs real answers, not more Shock Doctrine. It was exactly for these reasons that Louisiana Justice Institute and others started the Louisiana/Haiti Sustainable Village Project.

This coalition of more than 40 disaster recovery and urban infrastructure professionals - co-convened by LJI's Jacques Morial - is working to build an emergency village in Haiti that will provide housing, infrastructure and other services that constitute communities rather than camps. With major involvement of New Orleans residents, supporters and rebuilders, the Louisiana/Haiti Sustainable Village Project is laying the foundation for a model for recovery. We have learned the lessons of Katrina, and we seek to work for the accountable reconstruction that New Orleans never had. This effort seeks to support the Haitians in leading their own recovery.

The Project has already sent 100,000 cubic tons of donated medical supplies, tents, household goods, and food to the port of Jacmel. Previous to that, they airlifted more than six tons of medical supplies to medical teams in Jacmel and La Vallee de Jacmel in Haiti and they are preparing to send a second barge and more recovery experts.

New Orleans Coalition Sends Second Shipment of Aid to Haiti

Early this morning, a group of New Orleanians left for Haiti, bringing relief. As journalist Katy Reckdahl reported in today's Times-Picayune,

This morning, an eight-person team of New Orleanians is scheduled to fly to southeast Haiti, where they plan to set up a base camp and begin assessments of infrastructure and buildings. If all goes as planned, the Haiti Emergency Village Project, a coalition of 40 New Orleans organizations, will work with Haitians to quickly build villages for survivors of the Jan. 12 earthquake, using skills learned after the 2005 flooding of New Orleans. Their efforts are facilitated by the Louisiana Disaster Recovery Foundation and financed by private donors.

We first reported on this local coalition, convened by Louisiana Justice Institute's Co-Director Jacques Morial and Charles Allen III, Director of the Center for Sustainable Engagement and Development, last week on this blog. This is the second trip of aid, sent from New Orleans, arranged by this coalition.

New Orleans Recovery Organizations Combine Efforts for Haiti Relief

The people of New Orleans continue to strive for ways to support the people of Haiti.

Today a group of more than 40 individuals representing almost as many organizations held an all-day strategy meeting to marshal critical relief resources, recovery experience and reconstruction capacity to help the people of Haiti recover from what will likely become the most deadly natural disaster the Western Hemisphere has seen in more than a century.

The gathering was convened by Louisiana Justice Institute's Co-Director Jacques Morial and Charles Allen III, Director of the Center for Sustainable Engagement and Development and chairman of the Holy Cross Neighborhood Association and hosted by the Make It Right Foundation at their downtown offices. Dr. Austin Allen, a landscape architecture professor who has worked on recovery and empowerment initiative in the Lower Ninth Ward and Tim Duggan of the Make It Right Foundation conceived the initiative along with Jacques Morial and Charles Allen III.

The goal of this convening was to develop a plan on how to best apply the capacities, experience, understanding and resources of those assembled, to help Haiti on a range of issues, including emergency and replacement housing, water, wastewater and sewage treatment, power, telecommunications, and healthcare.

“While we can’t imagine the epic scale of devastation and death, we’ve learned some painful lessons in our own struggle to recover from the floods that followed Katrina, and it’s our spiritual responsibility and moral obligation to offer the benefit of our experience, understanding and capacity to help the Haitian people in any way they find useful and appropriate,” said Jacques Morial.

The assembled group included recovery and reconstruction leaders, nonprofit providers of emergency housing, architects, engineers, scholars, technical experts, human rights lawyers, arts and cultural organizations, and grassroots efforts like Common Ground Relief Collective.

"People are dying and we need to take action," said Common Ground founder Malik Rahim. "We can't waste time."

The assembled organizations are moving forward together on many fronts from direct emergency relief to long term rebuilding, and are in direct contact with Haitian organizations and individuals as well as Haitian government officials to make sure that their plan is guided by those most affected.

New Orleans and Haiti are connected by geography, history, architecture, and family. In 1809, half of the population of New Orleans was from Haiti, and their influence is still felt in our city. Their revolution has inspired us, and shaped US history.

The US would not have been able to purchase the massive amount of land that included Louisiana from France if not for the losses France faced from the efforts of Haitians to free themselves. We owe the people of Haiti a massive debt. But instead of supporting Haiti, the US has given Haiti two centuries of military oppression and economic colonialism.

We hope that Haiti is not just rebuilt, but that it receives the reparations it is owed.

For more information on this recovery project or to get involved, contact the organizing committee of the Haiti Emergency Village Project at 866.728.3522.

Photo: Jim Belfon / Gulf South Photography Project.

The Battle for Health Care Justice Continues

Louisiana Justice Institute Co-Director Jacques Morial was recently interviewed about the state of health care in the city by journalist Robert Corsini, who produced this video clip:



Jacques also joined Mayoral candidate James Perry on the Pacifica radio network show Flashpoints, discussing Obama's recent visit and the state of recovery in New Orleans.