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E-mailby Media Lens
In September, the press began warning that “the storm of the century” was about to hit New Orleans as Hurricane Gustav “bore down nearly three years to the day after Hurricane Katrina devastated the city”. (‘It’s the storm of the century,‘ Daily Mirror, September 1, 2008)
A comparable storm of media coverage was to follow, with continuous live broadcasts from the city. New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin heightened the sense of drama:
"For everyone thinking they can ride this storm out, I have news for you - that will be one of the biggest mistakes you can make in your life." (Paul Thompson, ‘Storm of the century,’ Daily Mail, September 1, 2008)
But Nagin‘s worst fears were not realised. In fact weather forecasters had warned at the time that it was “too early to know whether New Orleans will take another direct hit”. (Daily Mirror, op.cit)
By September 3, the reality was apparent. Hurricane Gustav had swept through Louisiana, causing eight deaths and widespread damage, but “had not produced any significant flooding,” the Independent reported. US officials “faced charges of over-reacting” as they were “forced to defend the decision to evacuate more than two million people”. (Guy Adams, ‘Officials deny threat of Gustav was exaggerated,’ The Independent, September 3, 2008)
Saturation media coverage had been devoted to a disaster that had simply not happened.
The following day, a senior BBC journalist leaked an email from his editor to media analyst David Miller at Strathclyde University. The whistleblower’s editor had listed several stories which he described as “not that interesting”, followed by the comment: “Dull stories - every one of them, don't you think?” These were the stories:
“The leading anti-drugs judge in Afghanistan has been assassinated.
“There's been an angry reaction in France following the magazine publication of photos of Taleban fighters displaying trophies they'd stripped from French soldiers killed in an ambush.
“The authorities in Haiti say the number of those killed in the wake of Tropical Storm Hanna has risen to more than sixty.
“A United Nations report says the world's wealthiest countries are failing to deliver on their promises to boost development aid.”
The anonymous BBC journalist expressed his feelings:
“I'm sure once that Hurricane gets to Florida we'll have live coverage of the telephone polls falling over, but sixty dead people in Haiti. Not that interesting.”
Hell In Haiti
Indeed, initial
early estimates that more than 500 people had died in Haiti’s floods
received barely half a dozen mentions in British newspapers. It is now
thought that as many as 1,000 people have died so far, with one million
made homeless out of a population of 8.7 million
(http://www.democracynow.org/2008/9/10/haiti_struggles_with_humanitarian_disaster_in).
Rescue groups were last week reported to be unable to reach many
villages across the southern region or to Gonaives, Haiti’s
third-largest city, which was cut off with 300,000 homeless residents.
The city’s population has been stranded for days without food or
drinking water.
Dr. Paul Farmer, co-founder of Partners in Health, a group that provides free medical care in central Haiti, wrote:
“After
25 years spent working in Haiti and having grown up in Florida, I can
honestly say that I have never seen anything as painful as what I just
witnessed in Gonaives.”
Hedi Annabi, a United Nations envoy, touring Gonaives commented:
"What I saw in this city today is close to hell on earth.”
The New York Times reported how crowds of children had chased UN food
trucks shouting "Hungry, hungry" while families climbed on to rooftops
and floating cars to escape floodwaters.
The figure of 1,000 dead in Haiti compares with eight dead reported for
Louisiana. And yet a media database search (September 15) showed that
the words ‘New Orleans’ and ‘hurricane’ appeared in 265 UK newspaper
articles over the last three weeks. Over the same period, the words
‘Haiti’ and ‘hurricane’ appeared in 113 articles. There were 67
mentions of Haiti’s ‘floods’.
But the devil is in the detail. Many references to Haiti were limited
to one or two sentences. On September 9, the Daily Mail reported
merely: “Hurricane Hanna killed hundreds of people and caused
widespread destruction when it struck the island of Haiti last week.”
(Helen Bruce, ‘Here comes a hurricane to soak us again,’ Daily Mail,
September 9, 2008)
On the same day, the Mirror wrote: “Hanna, which caused widespread
destruction and killed more than 500 people when it hit Haiti, is now
on its way across the Atlantic towards Ireland.” (Maeve Quigley, ‘Hit
by Hanna,’ Mirror, September 9, 2003)
The most substantial report was a 530-word section in an article in the
Guardian on September 7. The Times devoted 150 words to the story on
September 8. The Independent has this month devoted a total of 153
words to Haiti‘s crisis. By contrast, a single Independent article on
the threat to New Orleans on September 1 took up 1,269 words.
The irony is striking. Earlier this month, an Independent leader noted
the “stark contrast” between the massive attention given to the plight
of New Orleans while “the catastrophic floods in the Indian state of
Bihar have barely registered on the international radar”. The editors
added:
“What makes the discrepancy even starker is that the Bihar disaster has
so far been considerably more destructive, killing hundreds and leaving
more than a million people in this desperately poor region homeless.”
(http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/leading-articles/leading-article-a-flood-of-sympathy-sometimes-915628.html)
There were practical reasons for the difference, we were told - it was
harder for journalists to travel to Bihar than to New Orleans. But
there was more:
“[I]t would be dishonest to ignore some of the darker reasons for the
discrepancy in the media coverage of these two disasters. One is a
failure of empathy in the West. People can envisage themselves stranded
in New Orleans, but not a village in Bihar. And then there is the sad
reality that, even in our globalised age, lives lost in the developing
world are regarded as less newsworthy than lives lost in the rich
world. Even when subject to the undiscriminating violence of nature, it
would appear that all men and women are nothing like equal.”
At time of writing, the Independent has not mentioned Haiti since
September 5. But the paper has at least helped explain its own
prejudice.
Inconvenient News
Recent performance fits as part of a consistent bias in media
reporting. In the latest NACLA Report on the Americas, Dan Beeton of
the US-based Center for Economic and Policy Research interviewed
several US journalists who have reported from Haiti. Speaking on
condition of anonymity, one described a common view among editors:
“Everyone knows the place [Haiti] is a mess, so what are you going to
tell me that’s new? What goes on there does not affect people in the
US.” (Beeton, ‘Bad News From Haiti: U.S. Press Misses the Story,’
September/October 2008, NACLA. See the full article here)
This indifference has led to an appalling level of non-reporting, not
just of the latest floods, but also of the killing of unarmed civilians
by United Nations forces (Minustah), the Haitian National Police, and
death squads.
On July 6, 2005, the UN’s Minustah force launched an assault into
Haiti’s Cité Soleil. According to declassified messages sent that day
from the US Embassy in the Haitian capital to the State Department, UN
troops fired 22,000 shots in seven hours in a neighbourhood where most
people live in flimsy metal structures. As many as 30 people were
killed, including a number of children.
Although a freelance journalist was on hand to document the shootings
and take video statements from victims’ relatives, only a few US
newspapers mentioned the incident. These mostly portrayed the incident
as a successful UN attempt to eliminate gang members - reports of
civilian deaths were ignored.
The US press has given similar treatment to atrocities committed by the
Haitian National Police. By contrast, at the time of President
Aristide’s second term in power (2001-2004), there were numerous
articles, editorials, and opinion pieces in US and British papers
denouncing violence. The Times, for example, did not grieve Aristide’s
overthrow by armed thugs in 2004, but instead denounced his “despotic
and erratic rule”. (Leader, ‘Au revoir Aristide,‘ The Times, March 1,
2004)
The Independent’s Andrew Gumbel wrote a piece titled, “The little
priest [Aristide] who became a bloody dictator like the one he once
despised.” (Gumbel, The Independent, February 21, 2004)
And yet, Beeton reports:
“Reasonable estimates put the number of political killings — by the police or groups supporting his government — during Aristide’s two terms in office at between 10 and 30. This contrasts with the more than 3,000 political killings that took place under the 2004–06 interim government (and the estimated 50,000 under the Duvalier dictatorships).”
So why has so little attention been paid to Haiti after Aristide, when there has been far more political turmoil and violence? One reporter told Beeton:
“If the United States has spent millions of dollars funding the training of police officers, who then terrorize people or become drug traffickers, the U.S. would not be eager to have this information broadcast to American taxpayers.”
Another reporter described how his editor had turned down an
investigative piece on Rudolph Boulos, one of the wealthiest men in
Haiti and a board member of the Haiti Democracy Project, a
Washington-based lobby group. The editor explained: “Boulos is a very
well-known figure in Washington.”
The deeper reasons were
indicated by The Washington-based Council on Hemispheric Affairs, which
observed after the initial, US-backed coup to overthrow Aristide in
September 1991:
“Under Aristide, for the first time in the republic's tortured history,
Haiti seemed to be on the verge of tearing free from the fabric of
despotism and tyranny which had smothered all previous attempts at
democratic expression and self-determination.” Aristide’s victory
“represented more than a decade of civic engagement and education on
his part,” in “a textbook example of participatory, ‘bottom-up’ and
democratic political development”. (Quoted, Noam Chomsky, Year 501,
Verso, 1993, p.209)
Howard French wrote in the New York Times in 1992:
“Despite much blood on the army's hands, United States diplomats
consider it a vital counterweight to Father Aristide, whose
class-struggle rhetoric... threatened or antagonized traditional power
centres at home and abroad.” (French, ‘Aristide seeks more than moral
support,’ New York Times, September 27, 1992)
We asked Beeton what he thought of media coverage of the latest
flooding. He explained that the crisis is made far worse by the fact
that so many of Haiti’s trees have been cut down by desperate people
for sale or use:
“Media coverage of floods and other natural disasters in Haiti
consistently overlooks the human-made contribution to those disasters.
In Haiti's case, this is the endemic poverty, the lack of
infrastructure, lack of adequate health care, and lack of social
spending that has resulted in so many people living in shacks and
make-shift housing, and most of the population in poverty. But Haiti's
poverty is a legacy of impoverishment, a result of centuries of
economic looting of the country by France, the U.S., and of odious debt
owed to creditors like the Inter-American Development Bank and World
Bank. Haiti has never been allowed to pursue an economic development
strategy of its own choosing, and recent decades of IMF-mandated
policies have left the country more impoverished than ever.
“This is why the country is denuded of trees, after desperate Haitians
cut them down to make charcoal to use or sell. Without vegetation, the
country is more prone to flooding.
“Until Haiti is able to develop, free of foreign interference and the
dictates of foreign creditors, it's impoverishment is likely to
continue and even to worsen.
“The international community can help mitigate future disasters by
canceling Haiti's debt - much of it accrued under the Duvalier
dictatorships - and giving Haiti the policy space it needs to promote
real, sustainable, development.” (Email to Media Lens, September 9,
2008)
This honest analysis of the root causes of Haitian misery, like the
misery itself, is unlikely to trouble the pages of our newspapers any
time soon.
SUGGESTED ACTION
The goal of Media Lens is to promote rationality, compassion and respect for others. If you do write to journalists, we strongly urge you to maintain a polite, non-aggressive and non-abusive tone.
Ask the Independent why it has had so little to say about the crisis in Haiti.
Write to the Independent’s foreign news editor, Katherine Butler Email: This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it
Write to Roger Alton, editor of the Independent Email: This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it
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Sunday, 05 October 2008
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