Page 7 - mia_09-21-2017

| RIPTIDE |
▼ SOUTH FLORIDA
MEDIA MISDEMEANOR
LOCAL TV GOES WILD OVERHYPING POST-HURRICANE LOOTING.
IBY JERRY IANNELLI f you steal three pairs of shoes from Foot Locker, a worldwide retail chain that made a $664 million profit in 2016, Florida’s
news stations will broadcast images of you stealing things on TV, Fox News will call you a menace to society, and people will tweet about how you ought to be shot to death.
If you run a company that steals billions in Medicaid funds from sick, defenseless people, Florida will elect you governor.
As Hurricane Irma’s outer bands lashed South Florida, a few small groups of locals were videotaped breaking into sneaker stores
WHERE ARE THE TV REPORTS SHAMING THE DELTA EXECS WHO ILLEGALLY PROFITED FROM IRMA?
and carrying out boxes of shoes. Profession- als filmed some of the clips: WPLG shot footage of a group of thieves in Fort Lauder- dale, which led to the arrests of a few sus- pects. Local authorities said 37 people — total, in a county of 2.7 mil- lion — had been ar- rested for “looting” in
doing the exact same things and claimed they were “looking for supplies.” In the 12 years since the storm, local news crews have not found an ounce of empathy for poor people stuck in hurricanes: TV news takes have not evolved past “look at these black people unable to control themselves when society breaks down even for a minute.”
Again: Looting is a crime. It’s bad. Don’t steal.
But local media never take a second to pause and ask why someone would feel compelled to steal a pair of sneakers to wear or perhaps sell online for a few bucks. There is never an hourlong followup about the fact that most “looters” live in bleak poverty and are trapped on the wrong end of an economic system that has created
the least equal society in American his- tory. Effect is completely divorced from cause, symptom separated from sickness.
That kind of reporting is also an exer- cise in selective outrage: The same level of
media-driven anger has not been hurled at the airline industry, which has goosed fed- eral law into making it legal to price-gouge for airline tickets during a natural disaster. Until they got caught, airlines were brazenly charging anywhere from $1,000 to $3,000 for short flights from Miami to Atlanta to flee the hurricane’s wrath. Price-gouging
is a far more insidious form of theft — it represents the rich stealing from the poor, not vice versa. Where are the TV reports shaming the execs or middle managers at Delta who illegally profited from Irma?
Instead, the Orlando Sentinel’s op-ed page last week published an unconscionable col- umn about how great price-gouging is, written by an author from the same group of bozos at a Tally think tank who got caught last year admitting Florida’s public utilities were try- ing to trick voters into giving up their rights to solar panels with a misleading amendment.
In fact, Attorney General Pam Bondi’s office said it had received more than 8,000
How about none of the above?
Photo by Zachary Fagenson
price-gouging complaints by Saturday night. That number has certainly climbed since the weekend, which means the looter-to-price- gouger ratio in Florida likely favors the latter by a gulf the size of the hurricane’s wind field.
Because the images WPLG unearthed depict black thieves, the clips made it onto Fox News, which laundered images of Miami looters into racist meme fodder for alt-right neo-Nazis and white supremacists online. Overhyped reports of looting feed a hungry right-wing machine that just finished creat- ing a completely false narrative about “wide- spread looting” during Hurricane Harvey.
The issue is not whether it ought to be legal to steal things from stores — it shouldn’t be. The problem is that the world would be better off without constant images of these kinds of ultimately inconsequential crimes without any context about why they con- tinue happening. Foot Locker’s insurance can cover a broken window and a few stolen pairs of Nike Flyknits in the meantime.
Miami post-Irma as of last Wednesday morn- ing. WSVN also filmed thieves breaking into a different shoe store in Miami, which City of Miami Police then used to arrest suspects.
These are crimes, yes, and it should go without saying that you shouldn’t smash windows and steal Jordans from Foot Locker.
But in the grand scheme of things, these are minor crimes. Yet local TV sta- tions and Fox News have teamed up to blow the alleged Hurricane Irma “loot- ing” epidemic out of proportion.
In fact, it appears news stations such as WPLG have learned absolutely nothing in the decade since images of black so-called looters were blasted all over TV during the horror show that was Hurricane Katrina, while news crews showed white people
GET MORE NEWS & COMMENTARY AT MIAMINEWTIMES.COM/NEWS
▼ AMERICA
ON THE ROAD FOR IRMA
NEW TIMES SPREADS FAR AND WIDE TO COVER THE ’CANE. WBY CHUCK STROUSE
hat does it take to publish a feature story when there’s no electricity or internet, and writ-
ers are pinned down by 100 mph winds? The answer is ingenuity, luck, and com-
munication over more than 6,000 miles. New Times doesn’t have fancy generators or a bomb-shelter-protected press onsite, so
covering nasty Hurricane Irma and her aftermath was more complicated for us than other media outlets. Yet we nailed every minute of the storm, from its first winds to the continuing recovery.
Writers and photographers fanned out across South Florida — from Kendall to Plan- tation — before the hurricane hit. An editor boarded a Royal Caribbean ship that took cruise line employees and some passengers to safety by traveling around the storm to the western edge of Cuba, about 500 miles from Miami.
By Saturday afternoon, power, internet, and phone service had gone out in the news- paper office in Wynwood, and cell-phone
service and power were spotty through- out the region. By Sunday morning, power was all but gone around South Florida.
That’s where luck came in. New Times managing editor Tim Elfrink had been called to Saint Louis before the storm, so he was able to take feeds from report- ers who somehow found phone lines or data service throughout Irma’s attack.
After the storm cleared Sunday and Monday, the staff combed the county look- ing for stories of Miami’s recovery.
Elfrink eventually compiled all of the re- ports into a narrative feature about Irma and
sent the piece back to Miami for editing. With much of the staff sidelined, backups in Daytona Beach and Los Angeles took over
from there to do the copyediting and layout. Finally, it was all sent to Stuart, 100 miles north of here, where it was printed, assembled, and trucked to Miami before being delivered to hundreds of stands and businesses.
The paper was delivered on time to those who needed the information and still didn’t have power. And that is what a newspaper is supposed to do.
Editorial@MiamiNewTimes.com
7
7
miaminewtimes.com|browardpalmbeach.com | Contents | Letters | news | night+Day | CuLture | FiLm | CaFe | musiC | NewTimes September21-September27,2017 miaminewtimes.com | CONTENTS | LETTERS | RIPTIDE | METRO | NIGHT+DAY | STAGE | ART | FILM | CAFE | MUSIC | MIAMINEWTIMES MONTHXX–MONTHXX,2008