- Share This Post
- submit
- 3
-
Sparkle (0)
How do we know the truth of what is happening in Haiti - especially those of us who are in the global north and west, our perceptions shaped by a tragic history, largely unknown, in which our governments have often been complicit? As the immediate rescue effort becomes a sustained task of recovery how do we know when ideology and naked self-interest warp news accounts and recovery efforts?
I'm not a Haiti expert, but I have studied the Caribbean over the years, including some attention to the ways in which US news coverage is sometimes unduly influenced by Washington's priorities and preconceptions. As I watch the emerging coverage, I'm seeing dueling narratives emerge over the effectiveness and implicit assumptions behind the aid efforts. These points are offered in an effort to help us be smarter news consumers.
1. The disaster news cycle can miss the long-term story
The Project for Excellence in Journalism reports that news coverage of Haiti remained intense last week, at least on CNN, but bloggers seemed to have moved on. However, the public radio show On the Media reports that many news organizations have already moved their crews out of Haiti, following the pattern of previous disasters. Indeed, OTM said that to veteran journalists, the overarching narratives coming out of Haiti have been pretty much on cue: the first shocking, horrific images, the dramatic initial rescue, the inspiring tales of survivors found in the rubble days after hope of finding survivors had been lost. It's the stories that require prior and a long-term commitment to the country that often get lost,as AP Haiti correspondent Jonathan Katz explains in this interview.
2. The colonial legacy
Why has Haiti had so much political instability over the last 200 years? Why is the country almost completely deforested? Why is there so much colorism and class bias. Some of the answers to these questions go back to the island's colonial legacy. For example, French colonial practices set Haiti's pattern of environmental degradation in motion, as Marc Levy, deputy director of the Center for International Earth Science Information Network at Columbia University explained to an interviewer for PRI's Living on Earth program last week:
"The initial colonial history was one in which a very large number of slaves were brought in by the French, so that from the very start the population density in Haiti was much larger than in the Dominican Republic.
"And they engaged in cultivation practices that resulted in significant and fast deforestation, lots of trees exported back to Europe, and then when the French were thrown out, the Haitians were left with a very large population with a very weak resource base from which any group of people would find it very hard to recover."
To compound its troubles, Haiti wound up being forced to pay reparations to France after achieving nominal independence in 1804 - an obligation that took more than 100 years to pay off. That's one reason that many observers, such as Foreign Policy's Annie Lowery, say that the United States and others should cancel Haiti's debt to give them a fighting chance at economic recovery.
Unfortunately, some participants in the policy debate still stuck in a colonizer's mindset. Think Progress highlighted one one anti-immigration policy analyst's guess that Haiti's biggest problem is that it "wasn't colonized long enough" to benefit from the civilizing influences of superior French culture. (Mind you, the French cultural practices to which Haitians were exposed during colonization reportedly included pouring gunpowder into a slave's rectum and lighting a match - very civilized, indeed.)
3. The cold war media lens
During the Cold War, US government policy was directed at containing communism in the region. This effort sometimes led to unsavory partnerships, such as backing the murderous "Papa Doc" and "Baby Doc" Duvalier regimes in Haiti, while having "extensive involvement" with plotters in the neighboring Dominican Republic who assassinated that country's dictator, Rafael Trujillo. In his 2002 study, Media Definition of Cold War Reality, Walter Soderlund found that the news coverage of the region generally followed the US government narrative, with some exceptions. (My contemporaneous review of the book is here).One drawback of this approach is that the coverage often misses the role that internal and intra-regional dynamics play in countries' policies. That's particularly important when considering relations between Haiti and the DR.
4. Regional tensions and racial dynamics in the story coverage
Speaking of the Dominican Republic, they've had a
