Okay these pictures have been emailed to me fifty times in the last couple days. Blogs all over the place are up in arms about them. They show a white couple with some bread and the caption says they found it. Another picture shows a black guy with a bag of something in tow. He’s called a looter.

Assuming all of the assumptions people make about them are true, it does strike me as a good example of racial bias in the press.

But I’m not sure all the assumptions are true. First of all, they appear to be from two different news agencies, AFP and the AP. Last night some fellow on O’Reilly said they were both from the AP and hence were proof of racism on the part of AP. It would be bad if a single news agency had this discrepancy. But considering that AFP and AP might have different rules, you can’t immediately assert that it’s a racial thing. They both seem to be from Yahoo news, so perhaps Yahoo wrote the captions? I just don’t know. There also might be different facts involved. I don’t know what’s in the giant bag the black guy is tugging along behind him. Perhaps he really did loot the grocery store for more than mere essentials? The white couple found the bread and soda “from” a local grocery store. Did they go in it?

Anyway, I don’t really have a dog in this fight. It probably is an example of racial bias. But, people keep sending me the picture as if it’s a sweeping indictment of the entire country and — oddly — the Bush administration (like that guy on O’Reilly last night) and I got fed up.

Update: Snopes got there first and better. Check it out if your interested in this. Conclusion: the racism case is hard to make.