Is Adam Nossiter a Tool?
As a member of the first generation of Sesame Street viewers, I ask: Which one of these kids is doin’ his own thing? It’s time to play our game.
- NPR: The march is being seen as a symbol of two distinct communities coming together to oppose Mayor Ray Nagin’s assertion that the recent crime wave is mostly “black on black” attacks between drug dealers and therefore not a direct threat to the city’s larger community.
- The Associated Press: Residents young and old, black and white, marched in the thousands on City Hall _ unified in their anger and demanding action be taken to stem violent crime that has claimed nine lives this year and left many contemplating their future in this hurricane-ravaged city.
- The Los Angeles Times: The racially mixed processions started in various neighborhoods in the city. The biggest group congregated at the foot of Canal Street, a main thoroughfare, and marched just over a mile to City Hall, escorted by mounted police and other officers riding motorcycles.
- The New York Times: Thousands of residents here, mostly whites, marched through downtown on Thursday in a show of anger over recent killings and local officials’ ineffective response…Yet it also showed the community’s deep division. Nearly all the demonstrators were white…The monochrome crowd was a surprise to many, and an unpromising augury for any possible resolution of the city’s crime crisis…one of Thursday’s few black demonstrators, Isadell Icastle, said: “I was totally shocked when I came here, that they didn’t have more black people out here.”
Let’s see. The first three kids wrote a story about accountability. The last kid wrote a story about race. If you said The New York Times. You were correct. The New York Times reduced an outpouring of anguish and frustration to a white crowd marching on a black mayor, and did so alone. How does this happen?
It would be wonderfully easy to dismiss a call for accountability if the march was “monochrome”, but it wasn’t. Was it?
The odd thing about Nossiter’s article is that he missed the moment with Bart Everson said, “And so today I want to say shame on you shame on you, Mayor Nagin, Superintendent Riley, District Attorney Jordan, you have really let us down”.
How could he have missed this? An NOPD officer’s police horn squawked to punctuate the sentiment.
How can someone report this story, without saying something of the failure of our criminal justice system, like noting that the conviction rate for felonies is 7%, as Bart Everson did?
How can someone report this story as racially divisive, without noting that we were spurred by the murders of two beloved members of our community, one of whom he conveniently declined to name?
How loathsome.
The march was about accountability. Yet, he ends his piece with this quote.
One woman spoke of a sense of shame at the killing wave. “We all let the violence in our city get out of hand,” the woman, Janet Barnwell, said. “We’re only as strong as our weakest link.”
Nossiter took the theme of accountability and shame, and twisted it, so that, like Mayor Nagin, he blames us, the citizens for this recent violence.
Tool or merely a lazy, incompetent writer pandering to a New York audience?
Update: The Noss-watch continues with the latest Noss-job: New Orleans of Future May Stay Half Its Old Size.
Read the coments below to see if we are closer to determining if Adam Nossiter is a tool.
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Maybe we ought to petition the New York Times to send another person to cover this beat. They should be embarrassed that, at every turn, all the other major national dailies get our story right while Nossiter goes off on an anti-Orleanian tangent, continuing his personal crusade to accentuate the negative, eliminate the positive, and not even give a break to Mr. In-Between.
The editors probably thought Nossiter would have been a good choice because of his local background, but he’s been terrible. Maybe he feels a need to overcompensate for the sympathy he can’t help but feeling, and believes that by casting our city in the most unfavorable possible light at every opportunity, he’s putting a personal bias aside in an effort to be “objective.”
There’s probably a bit of white liberal guilt involved here, too, or perhaps more precisely, overprivileged white uptowner guilt. “I’m a lowly sinful racist, so my beloved hometown city must be racist as well.”
I would gladly volunteer to take over. I have no doubt that I could do a better job, and make better use of that nice fat paycheck, too.