Haiti - What the Press Coverage Tells US

The Horror of Haiti




Dissident Voice
January 22nd, 2010

by John Chuckman


It is relentless, the pictures of terror-stricken people, broken limbs, and bloated dead, and many of us cannot stand to see or hear more.

One has to ask: what are we to do with such information?

Create pressure on governments to keep the assistance flowing? Perhaps, but there is no shortage of assistance being sent to Haiti. There is however a huge problem in Haiti’s limited ability to absorb the assistance.

Whether it’s small and inefficient sea ports, one small and inefficient airport, a lack of decent roads, and a lack of government direction – all aspects of any place as poor as Haiti – it takes time for outsiders to come in, unload their cargoes, and organize a distribution network from scratch.

Certainly the disturbing reports and pictures are useless from the point of view of prevention. It was a natural disaster, not to be predicted, not to be prevented. One could argue that post-disaster investments could ameliorate events the next time there is an earthquake. But the kinds of images and reports being broadcast will be long forgotten if and when the world’s governments get around to re-building.

So the question for me remains, what are we to do with such information?

I am reminded of another disaster, one that happened in the last few years. It was not a “natural” disaster but the deliberate work of the immensely powerful.

In this other disaster, roughly a million people died, about five times the current estimate of death in Haiti. I don’t know how many were crippled, but it must have been a great number. This other disaster created more than two million refugees fleeing for their lives. Most of them fled to poor but generous countries, not being welcome by the rich and powerful, and especially not by the country responsible for the mayhem.

As far as pictures and reports, most of them seen in North America were sanitized. Many if not most of the reports were dishonest, clearly not informing people of the magnitude of the horror as it happened. There was a brave group of reporters who produced images every bit as terrible as those we see from Haiti, including scores of hideously mangled children.

But those pictures were not broadcast in North America, were not published in The New York Times or other newspapers “of record.” Indeed, the reporters taking these images and writing tough reports actually became targets of the forces causing all the horror.

I’m referring, of course, to the invasion of Iraq, an event whose toll of killing and damage easily compared to the dropping of a thermonuclear bomb on a good-size city.

Of course, the great and bitter irony is that that disaster was both preventable and could even have been stopped once it had started. One could almost guarantee that publication and broadcast of pictures and reports comparable to what’s now coming from Haiti would have stopped that demonic brutality. Here indeed gruesome, truthful press coverage could have made a difference, but not in Haiti.

And there was another, smaller disaster recently, smaller but still terrible, and it was completely preventable. In this one about 1,400 people died, including 400 children, and a great deal of the infrastructure of a relatively poor people was destroyed. The damage cannot even be repaired because those responsible for the horror maintain a siege on the victims, allowing no material assistance to be delivered.

Here too you likely will not have seen the kind of pictures or read the kind of stories coming out of Haiti. Some were available – I recall one of poor people trying to avoid stepping in a stream of blood flowing down a narrow street – again the work of amazingly brave reporters, but their work could only be found at not-widely known sites on the Internet. None were published or broadcast by the establishment press in North America. These events occurred in a place called Gaza.

If you think the press is objective, if you think the press does not slavishly serve the interests of the powerful, you just might want to think again.
------
See also the excellent article by Mirah Riben on adoptions from Haiti in the wake of the earthquake.

Lancet accuses aid groups of 'jostling' for publicity in Haiti

Haiti earthquake

Aid organisations, governments and the United Nations have been accused of failing Haiti by competing for publicity instead of getting on with the job of disaster relief.


By Bruno Waterfield
The Telegraph 22 Jan 2010

The Lancet medical journal accused the different groups of putting self-interest, a scramble for camera opportunities and rivalry before getting post-earthquake disaster relief properly organised.

"International organisations, national governments and non-governmental organisations are rightly mobilising, but also jostling for position, each claiming that they are doing the best for earthquake survivors," the journal said in an editorial.

"Some agencies even claim that they are 'spearheading' the relief effort. In fact, as we only too clearly see, the situation in Haiti is chaotic, devastating, and anything but co-ordinated."

The respected journal, which has been publishing since 1823, did not name any individual offenders but called for more scrutiny of an of the aid sector.

"Large aid agencies can be obsessed with raising money through their own appeal efforts," said the journal. "Media coverage as an end in itself is too often an aim of their activities. Marketing and branding have too high a profile."

But Brendan Gormley, the chief executive of the Disasters Emergency Committee, hit back saying there had been co-operation.

"Rather than "jostling" for position, 13 major UK aid agencies have come together under our banner," he said. "The media are essential to our efforts and our analysis shows that televised appeals have driven fund-raising for the Haiti Earthquake Appeal."

Elisabeth Byrs, a spokesman for the UN Organisation for the Co-ordination of Humanitarian Affairs, also rejected the criticism.

"I think no one failed on this and the UN, the humanitarian community in general, and the Haitian people did their best to save as many lives as possible," she said.

The Lancet criticism came as the UN switched its focus from search and rescue operations to humanitarian aid for homeless refugees.

Yesterday "exhausted" aid workers started to leave the country ten days after the earthquake hit. Search teams increasingly began pulling bodies rather than survivors from the wreckage of Haiti's cities and towns.

Aid workers will now step up moves to rehouse 500,000 homeless Haitians living rough in and around the destroyed capital of Port-au-Prince to prevent a looming refugee crisis or a second disaster caused by disease and hunger.

Tens of thousands of Haitians have gathered at the capital's harbour, which partially reopened on Friday, hoping to flee the earthquake's aftermath and continuing aftershocks by sea.

US Coast Guard officials said that, while there were currently no signs of a mass migration, a refugee crisis was to be expected, with Haiti's northern coast a likely point of departure.

"Everything points to it, but it's not happening now," said Lieutenant Commander Mike Pierno of the US Coast Guard.