More from the undercovered beat

Katrina's race-class divide has shades of brown: Latino immigrants were stranded in Louisiana by the thousands in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, but their plight wasn't featured in either the news stories or the public policy discussions of the last few weeks, Marissa Kantor reports in The Revealer.

Ironically, I came across the Revealer piece just after using this data-deficient op-ed piece in my Computer Assisted Reporting class as an example of faulty reasoning. In the op-ed, writer Tim Chavez asserts that African Americans stuck in New Orleans were the victims of the Great Society programs of the 1960s, because, he said, they had not learned to be sufficiently independent to buy cars. By contrast, he maintained, Latino immigrants who had not even mastered the language were advancing economically, and securing their own transportation. I pointed out to my students that at the very least the writer should have consulted the US Census to find out whether his assertion had merit.

As this scholar found out when he queried the Census database, black folk in New Orleans are not so easy to categorize. To start with, only 3 percent said they were on public assistance in 2004.

There's only one thing worse than under-covering a story, and that's not doing the work to get it right.

International protest: This item from the H-Afro-Am list reports on a September 16 demonstration at the US Embassy in Paris condemning the treatment of people of color during the Katrina crisis. It says the event was not picked up by the US news media, and I certainly couldn't find any mention of it. However, as this New York Times article notes, African-descended people in France are increasingly vocal about the racism they say they are experiencing.

Mortgage miseries: ACORN, the grass-roots community advocacy group, says that the mortgage lenders most frequently used by black and Hispanic homeowners are only offering relief to Hurricane Katrina victims when explicitly asked. Subprime mortgages, a frequent source of home-buying funds for borrowers of color and low-income borrowers, have long been suspected of predatory lending practices. According to an article in Consumer Affairs, consumers in the areas hit by by Katrina (and targetted by Rita} are more likely to refinance their homes with subprime mortgages than borrowers in other parts of the country. ACORN is demanding that subprime lenders be compelled to make mortgage relief readily available to hurricane victims, just as prime lenders are doing.

Finally: Read Bill. 'Nuff said.