Did police from a neighboring parish use guns and dogs to keep a mostly-black crowd of refugees from leaving the city? The Mayor says so. Two eyewitnesses, both journalists, say so. The story is that the cops had orders not to let people cross the greater New Orleans bridge on the Pontchartrain Expressway. According to the report by Lorrie Beth Slonsky and Larry Bradshaw, the police officers, when asked why citizens could not cross the river, ``responded that the West Bank was not going to become New Orleans, and there would be no Superdomes in their city.''
So we have white police turning guns on a black crowd. But, as the Washington City Paper points out, there is another Us-Them issue: Why wasn't this story widely reported? Jason Cherkis and Eric Wemple report that the likely reason is that the two journalists are lefty activists. They write for the Socialist Worker webzine. ``Mainstream'' journalists don't like following other journalists, and they really don't like saying their information comes from outside the club of big news organizations and official sources. You probably didn't hear the news that on at least one bridge, a mostly white police force (there was one black cop there) made sure that a mostly African-American crowd of refugees could not leave New Orleans even if they wanted to. And the reason you didn't hear it is because journalists tend to trust only people in their club -- middle-class people who are committed to standards of practice, but who don't evince too much conviction or passion or commitment to a cause.
I have mixed feelings about professionalism, because it's a morally neutral standard. When I worked, years ago at the New York Post, I saw consummate professionals do very demanding work. Nonetheless, the end product was a brutish stew of fear and anger, dressed up in tired old clichés. It was all either treacly (help a ``blind hero schnauzer who needs his insulin'') or vicious (as in the pre-verdict Michael Jackson headline ``Sweat, Freak''). It took high professionalism to get it out on time, but it was still crap.
What is the professionalism of the more genteel news organizations? To some extent, it's a commitment to standards of fairness and free inquiry. But in there too is a commitment to acting ``like us'': To sounding and acting like other high-end journalists. That's why your newspaper's star political reporter will write that ``analysts say'' Bush is in trouble, or that ``experts predict'' a Katrina effect on the next election -- rather than writing, more honestly, ``my friends and other journalists'' say so. Your story came from the Detroit Free-Press? OK, that's a place like the one you work at. But the Socialist Workers? The tribal voice inside your head says, no way. They aren't our sort of person, those left-wing wackos.
This is why I cringe when I see journalists fret over the explosion of Web sites, blogs and other outsider sources of information. A lot of training in journalism is training in the ways of a caste, and the preservation of its mystique. You should be glad the doors of this particular temple have been thrown open. That is, for one thing, the reason that this neglected story from New Orleans may yet become the big news it deserves to be.
