Fox News’ Shepard Smith is whiner of the month. Sickening is the word to describe his plaintive whines about where was the help in the first hours after New Orleans flooded. Where was the information, where were the people to pick up one body on the bridge he camped out on during the New Orleans Flood? Close behind are every other television so-called journalist that rushed into Hurricane Katrina’s aftermath.

The New Orleans Mayor flunked his greatest test of leadership and accomplishment but reporters missed his failures early on. The total failure of the Louisiana Governor Kathleen Blanco demonstrates why no Louisiana politician should ever be allowed to lead anything but a New Orleans funeral procession; nonetheless, it took two weeks for reporters to find that out. Whether or not the 2500 FEMA employees could have done much without state and local resources and leadership, is besides the point, as the media that is criticizing the federal response to Katrina flunks the greatest test of all—responsibility guided by experience and intelligence.

Example: Governor Blanco did not, I repeat did not, sign waivers allowing out-of-state doctors to provide medical care. To practice medicine in Governor Blanco’s state one must have a license from her medical license bureau. The media didn’t discover this for three weeks.

Specifically, the facts that so few working journalists are Black or Hispanic and so few editorial and media management are as well, reveal the truth of the situation. Seldom are any of these working media types actual people from the populations they try to cover.

Every national convention of editors and publishers announces a new campaign to attract minority journalists and reporters and every year the campaign fizzles for lack of follow-through.

The fact that most media organizations resort to recruiting and hiring journalism school graduates with degrees in journalism, not real academic subjects, belies the sincerity of the effort to recruit minority type reporters. Minority college students tend to major in business or liberal arts courses like political science, history, or economics, not "journalism" or "communications."

Why aren’t media outlets scouring the community and state colleges for minority reporter trainees? If they did, those reporters would not have been shocked to find out that two thirds of New Orleans was Black and over a quarter of them living in dire poverty.

Example: The New York Times. If the Times had recruited and hired right, it would not show-case Black columnist Bob Herbert, or hired former Timesman and affirmative action hire Jason Blair, or keep paying psuedo-economist Paul Krueger and airhead columnist Maureen Dowd. Outside the Times, they would be laughed out of the working media for their fraudulent reporting and dishonest views about what happens in New Orleans or anywhere else.

Like Columbia School of Journalism Masters degree holder Pat Buchanan, these alleged journalists haven’t a clue about big city Black populations and poverty. Buchanan, of course, grew up calling his family’s Black maid out of the house and dousing her with water hoses. He also used to throw rocks at city buses segregated by race. He didn’t throw rocks at Whites-only buses, just Black-only buses. Nonetheless, the Columbia School of Journalism awarded him a degree.

All of the television journalists unleashed on New Orleans suffered from the same diseases of empty and air-headedness and an industry-wide laziness. How many of them came from poverty neighborhoods like those in New Orleans? How many came from backgrounds of moving people and materiel around, say as military people? How many could even speak the lingo of the hoods and barrios?

A young White Anglo Saxon "journalist" lady from a San Diego weekly once interviewed this writer, then discarded the expressed views with: "None of my progressive Chicano friends speak like you." True, but a responsible journalist would have included my remarks and views with those of her "progressive" friends in the same article allowing the reader to judge the validity of views.

The problem is that she had no idea that her "progressive" Chicano friends are but a tiny minority of Hispanic thought. She, like the public that reads her uninformed reports and views cannot see the truth for the simple reason her views and reports are uninformed, politically bigoted against the majority of Hispanics.

Surveys by academics and organizations like the Pew Hispanic Center and the University of Southern California conducted in recent decades generally conclude: That, the "progressive Chicano" school of Hispanic thought numbers less than 15 percentage points in any surveys of Hispanic thought; that less than 25 percent of Hispanics live in poverty and that most poverty is in the recent immigrant community; that immigrant Hispanic poverty levels fall drastically as they integrate into the economy; that more than 75 percent of Hispanics are middle or upper income; that the number and percentage of Hispanic high school graduates increases every year resulting in more, not less, Hispanic college students and graduates; that almost 50 percent of recent immigrant-citizens voted Republican in 2004 versus only 35 percent or so of native born Hispanics, pointing to future larger and larger Republican vote percentages among the growing Hispanic community.

The reporterette is not equipped to understand these facts, more importantly she does not want to. She is representative of the White media establishment. She is lazy and ignorant of the very people she claims to report on. When questioned on that declaration by me, she replied:  "Do you think a reporter needs to be a Hispanic to report on Hispanics?"  Answer: It helps.

Contreras’s newest book—THE ILLEGAL ALIEN: A DAGGER INTO THE HEART OF AMERICA published by Floricanto Press is available and reviewed at www.amazon.com and www.barnesandnoble.com