Censored 2012 (71 page)

“Music is a character in the show,” said jazz musician Donald Harrison Jr.
²⁵
Harrison, like his father before him, is a Mardi Gras Indian Chief, and the characters of Albert Lambreaux and his son Delmond (played by Rob Brown) are loosely based on them. During Super Sunday, when the Indians parade, New Orleans comes alive
with drumming and chanting men in stunning feathered suits. The tradition, taking place close to St. Joseph’s Night, is an African American homage to Native Americans who in the antebellum era sheltered runaway slaves in the surrounding bayous.

Treme’s
season one finale represents an important moment in the history of the Mardi Gras Indians and references the long tradition of police violence toward them. Two months before the levees breached in the wake of Katrina, “Big Chief Tootie” Montana, a man who “masked Indian” for longer than anyone else in New Orleans, appealed for an end to police violence and gave testimony about the police brutality that Indian tribes had endured over the years. He recounted events of St. Joseph’s Night in 2005, when police blocked the annual Indian celebration because they didn’t have a permit. He died of heart failure on the floor of the council chambers at the age of eighty-two, while testifying about the police violence that erupted in the aftermath.
²⁶

In the
Treme
episode, Lieutenant Colson pulls up in his patrol car and confronts Lambreaux. An impromptu negotiation takes place in the street in front of the well-known bar Pokes, as both characters appeal for calm and respect from each other’s “tribes” in the hopes of avoiding violence between Indians and police. They both acknowledge it is what Chief Tootie would have wanted. The character Big Chief Lambreaux later emerges triumphantly in full regalia on Super Sunday 2006, and encounters Donald Harrison in his actual suit, as Big Chief of Congo Nation. They exchange “respect for respect.” It is a moment of calm and reconciliation, as cops do not arrive to harass the Indians. The scene also references one of the most important events in New Orleans in 2006, when Donald Harrison strolled out of St Augustine’s into Treme in his stunning new Congo Nation Big Chief suit, offering hope to all assembled that the culture of New Orleans would survive.

Between 2006 and 2007, post-Katrina New Orleans reporting was marked by the consistent selection and emphasis on violence by the poor, with the near total exclusion of police violence, corruption, and
culpability. In some cases, a mention was made of the past, the bad old days before the police force “modernized.” But in a long overdue development, the Department of Justice (DOJ) investigated the NOPD and issued a report in March 2011.

Writing in
New Orleans Magazine
, Allen Johnson Jr. reported that police corruption drew the attention of the DOJ in the early 1990s, when they began moving toward a federal consent decree, which would have allowed the federal government to assume control of NOPD. After the events of September 11, 2001, as terrorism became the national priority, the DOJ ended its intense scrutiny of NOPD, accepting the department’s own internal reports on reform. By 2011, the Feds found that NOPD’s own oversight of the use of deadly force had been so perfunctory it could not even locate officer-involved shooting investigation files.
²⁷

The federal investigation uncovered disturbing evidence of “repeated instances” of excessive forces, including deadly force, during which officers “endangered the lives of civilian bystanders.” Officers fired at moving vehicles, “yet no one in the chain of command held officers accountable.” Police harassed and brutalized African Americans in great numbers.
²⁸
The fictional portrayals in the series
Treme
offer a critical but balanced view of police officers through the sympathetic character of Lieutenant Colson, one more comprehensive than those of the news media. As civil rights attorney Mary Howell told
Extra!
, “For years we’ve had accusations, now we have findings, let’s hope we can find solutions.”

Testifying before Congress on the crisis of newspapers,
Treme
co-creator and former
Baltimore Sun
journalist David Simon explained that when he was in journalism school in the 1970s, he learned that the challenge of journalism was “to explain an increasingly complex world in ways that made us essential to an increasingly educated readership. The scope of coverage would have to go deeper, address more of the world, not less. Those were our ambitions. Those were my ambitions.” He goes on to say that newspapers were not betrayed by the internet. “We had trashed them on our own, years before.
Incredibly, we did it for naked, short-term profits.… And now, having made ourselves less essential, less comprehensive, and less able to offer a product that people might purchase online, we pretend to an undeserved martyrdom at the hands of new technology.”
²⁹
The stilted, simplistic myths of journalism are not only being replaced by the internet, but now also seemingly by fictional forms more willing to present a complex world to viewers.

The narratives that emerge from events set in motion by the storm of August 2005 will continue to influence our ability to respond humanely to natural and human-influenced disasters alike, both nationally and globally. Reconstructing this story through the eyes of people on the ground, instead of the people behind the guns, affects our ability as a country to conceptualize and plan for future disasters in ways that protect people and their communities. Rejecting the stereotypes of poverty and race, and other forms of rhetorical demonization that lead to further suffering and human destruction, may be one of the most important messages of
Treme
.

ROBIN ANDERSEN, PHD
, is a professor of Communication and Media Studies at Fordham University, where she also directs Graduate Studies in Public Communications and the Peace and Justice Studies Program. She is the author of four books and dozens of chapters and journal articles, and writes media criticism for a variety of publications. Her book
A Century of Media, A Century of War
won the Alpha Sigma Nu Book Award in 2007. Her research interests include the ways in which media influence public opinion and social policy, including the links among advertising persuasions, consumer culture, and environmental issues and policies. She has written about the implications of merging news and information with entertainment fictions depicting war and conflict. She co-edited the two-volume reference book
Battleground: The Media in
2008. Her other books include
Consumer Culture and TV Programming
and the edited anthology
Critical Studies in Media Commercialism
by Oxford University Press. She often serves as a consultant for nonprofit groups, and helped develop curriculum for Fordham University’s MA in Humanitarian Action, covering strategic communication design for humanitarian organizations. She is featured in numerous educational documentaries. Her website is
http://faculty.fordham.edu/andersen/
.

1
. Rebecca Solnit, “Reconstructing the Story of the Storm: Hurricane Katrina at Five,”
Nation
, August 26, 2010,
http://www.thenation.com/article/154168/reconstructing-story-storm-hurricane-katrina-five
.

2
. Neil deMause, “Katrina’s Vanishing Victims: Media Forget the ‘Rediscovered’ Poor,”
Extra!
July/August 2006,
http://www.fair.org/index.php?page=2933
.

3
.
“Erasing Katrina: Four Years On, Media Mostly Neglect an Ongoing Disaster,” Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting, September 2, 2009,
http://www.fair.org/index.php?page=3891
.

4
. Lolis Eric Elie, interview by author, March 15, 2011.

5
. For more information, see Tom Piazza,
Why New Orleans Matters
(New York: Harper, 2005).

6
. Eric Overmyer, interview by author, April 21, 2011.

7
. Julie Hollar, “Brian Williams Rehashes Katrina Violence Myth,” Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting, August 25, 2010,
http://www.fair.org/blog/2010/08/25/dateline-rehashs-katrina-violence-myth/
.

8
. Gugliotta and Whoriskey, quoted in Kathleen Tierney, Christine Bevc, and Erica Kuligowski, “Metaphors Matter: Disaster Myths, Media Frames, and Their Consequences in Hurricane Katrina,”
Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science
604, no. 1 (March 2006): 57–81, doi: 1
0.1177/0002716205285589
.

9
. Maureen Dowd, “United States of Shame,”
New York Times
, September 3, 2005,
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/03/opinion/03dowd.html
.

10
. Kathleen Tierney, Christine Bevc, and Erica Kuligowski, “Metaphors Matter.”

11
. Rebecca Solnit, “Reconstructing the Story of the Storm.”

12
. Ibid.

13
. See Spike Lee, dir.,
If God Is Willing and Da Creek Don’t Rise
, 40 Acres and a Mule Filmworks, 2010.

14
. Thomas Jennings, dir.,
Law & Disorder
, documentary (Public Broadcasting Service, 2010),
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/law-disorder/
.

15
. A. C. Thompson, “Katrina’s Hidden Race War,”
Nation
, December 17, 2008,
http://www.thenation.com/article/katrinas-hidden-race-war
.

16
. Christopher Drew, “Police Struggles in New Orleans Raise Old Fears,”
New York Times
, June 13, 2006,
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/13/us/13orleans.html
.

17
. Adam Nossiter, “Storm Left New Orleans Ripe for Violence,”
New York Times
, January 11, 2007,
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/11/us/11orleans.html
.

18
. Mary Howell, interview by author, May 4, 2011.

19
. Adam Nossiter, “In Downtown New Orleans, Thousand March Against Killings,”
New York Times
, January 12, 2007,
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/12/us/12orleans.html
.

20
. Ibid.

21
. Christopher Drew and Nossiter, “In New Orleans, Dysfunction Fuels Cycle of Killing,”
New York Times
, February 5, 2007,
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/05/us/05crime.html
.

22
. Spike Lee, dir.,
If God Is Willing
.

23
. Lewis Wallace, “First Came Katrina, Then Came HUD,”
In These Times
, January 16, 2008,
http://www.inthesetimes.com/main/article/3504/
.

24
. Katy Reckdahl, “Culture, Change Collide in Treme,”
A Katrina Reader
, October 2, 2007,
http://katrinareader.org/culture-change-collide-treme
.

25
. Donald Harrison Jr., interview by author, April 21, 2011.

26
. For more information, see Lisa Katzman, prod. and dir.,
Tootie’s Last
Suit, DVD, 92 min. (2007).

27
. Allen Johnson Jr., “What the Studies Said,”
New Orleans Magazine
, May 2011,
http://www.myneworleans.com/New-Orleans-Magazine/May-2011/WHAT-THE-STUDIES-SAID/
.

28
. Ibid.

29
.
David Simon, “David Simon’s Testimony at the Future of Journalism Hearing,” Real Clear Politics, May 9, 2009,
http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2009/05/09/david_simon_testimony_at_the_future_of_journalism_hearing_96415.html
.

by Margaret Flowers

In late 2008, with the election of President Barack Obama, single-payer health system proponents expected that there would follow an honest discussion of the fundamental causes of the health care crisis and an opportunity to debate the merits of single payer during the national health reform process. Instead efforts were made—with the cooperation of the White House, Congress, and the United States corporate media—to exclude single-payer advocates, and to portray single payer mainly in a negative light. Through these institutions, industries that profited from the status quo were able to shape the public discourse in a way that distracted from the real health crisis and instead focused on perceived crises, or attempted to discredit single-payer systems such as Medicare and those in other industrialized nations. In comparison, the international media was more balanced in their coverage of health reform in the United States with inclusion of single-payer experts and single-payer activism.

Despite decades of intentional misinformation about single payer systems in the corporate media, the majority of people in the United States have demonstrated consistent support for national single-payer health insurance in both citizen juries and independent polls since the early 1990s. Support in polls conducted by groups such as ABC, NBC, AP-Yahoo and the Kaiser Family Foundation ranges from a low of 50 percent to a high of 69 percent for the general population.
¹
Data shows that the more information is provided describing a single-payer health system, the higher the support.
²
And if polling results are assessed by political affiliation, we see that support among Democrats is even higher than the general public, with 81 percent of Democrats in 2008 believing that the government has a responsibility to make sure that everyone has adequate health care.
³
In fact, 70 percent of Democrats polled said that our country would be better off with
“socialized medicine.”
⁴
And physicians, once opponents of health care reform, are showing increasing support for single payer. National polls of physicians across most practice specialties found a 10 percent increase in support from 49 percent in 2002 to 59 percent support in 2007, with higher levels in the fields of primary care and psychiatry.
⁵