Meg's Musings

The Upside of Being Up

My neighbors are ripping apart some part of their property. The banging and crashing started at eight directly outside my bedroom window. So much for sleeping past nine. I suppose that may be a lazy habit anyway.

So yesterday I wrote about media bias in New Orleans. Interestingly, this morning when I turned on the Today show what should be happening but Lester Holt (the Black man on the the Today show team) was interviewing the Rev. Jesse Jackson. Rev. Jackson was pointing out that the majority of the people who have not been evacuated are the urban poor who happen to be minorities. He noted that this subgroup of the American population didn't have the means to get out of town early in the crisis and are being handled as refugees with few rights rather than American citizens who have the freedom to go to their families elsewhere and simply need temporary help to get themselves there.

I taught a media class for a few years. One of the questions I always asked my students to ask was who was controlling the story and what perspective they were presenting. As I've followed the story it's disturbed me how clearly the perspective has been skewed.

Yesterday I was surfing looking at the pics of looting. Black people taking things from stores were captioned as looters. White folk doing the same thing were labeled as scavenging or finding supplies. When Today was interviewing, the majority of the people they interviewed who sounded put together were white, the chanting, frenzied people were minorities. They did end up finding more articulate people as time progressed, but wow. And to make further craziness, I was talking to a friend here who just quietly observed he thought that might just be the usual representative cross section of white/black in the area. No. That's stereotyping and racism. Poise in front of a camera might be a learned thing, but it is not linked to race or intelligence.

Interestingly as I continue to watch TV, Holt is running the show today. I wonder if he's the usual weekend anchor or if others are noting the same thing I am and NBC is responding.

On other issues, Amanda came over last night and we walked from my house down to Frandor via the river trail (a very long walk) for dinner at Aladdin's. They had bellydancing done by rather old and rather pudgy white women. Egyptians would have been horrified. I highly recommend their food, but avoid Friday nights to avoid the rather frightening bellydancers.

Video to Go is right next to the restaurant so we wandered over and dithered between a three disc set of the Sweet Valley High TV series or The Upside of Anger.
We ended up with Upside but it was a crappy movie. Joan Allen never gives a bad performance, but this was close. It's the story of a family with four girls and what happens when the father figure disappears. There's not much plot--it's supposed to be character-driven but the mother is so bitter and the daughters so one-dimensional that it's hard to have any empathy for them or even stay awake as the mother binge drinks and screams her way through the movie.

The worst part of it all is that the box promises wit and humor, of which there are none. Here's the spoiler: the father hasn't run off with his Swedish secretary, he's been dead in a hole on the back of their property for who-knows-how-long (the director fails to give much sense of time to the movie, as well as skips some much needed transitional scenes) and they've all been bitter and angry for no reason. I could have been satisfied if they'd done this 30 minutes into the movie. Wasted a movie rental, but at least I got time to bond with Amanda:)

posted by Me @ 09:11