Get a load of Robert Jensen’s article, posted today, “Great Television Makes Bad Journalism: Media Failures in Haiti Coverage;”
“[I]n the past week we’ve heard journalists repeat endlessly the observation that Haiti is the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere. Did it ever occur to editors to assign reporters to ask why? […]Â The immediate suffering in Haiti is the result of a natural disaster, but that suffering is compounded by political disasters of the past two centuries, and considerable responsibility for those disasters lies not only with Haitian elites but also with U.S. policymakers. […]Â But there’s little discussion of how the problems of contemporary Haiti can be traced to those policies. […]Â When mainstream journalists dare to mention this political history, they tend to scrub clean the uglier aspects of U.S. policy, absolving U.S. policymakers of responsibility in “the star-crossed relationship” between the two nations […]Â The news media, of course, have a right to make their own choices about what to cover. But we citizens have a right to expect more.”
I’ve spent the past week, say, casually reading Paul Farmers concisely detailed book, The Uses Of Haiti. And what I’ve read, thus far, from Farmer’s book, Jensen has “duplicated” Â here. Probably the best, briefest bunch of words I’ve happened to read, personally, concerning Haiti’s tragic history, Western influences on that history, and the media’s failure to accurately inform us, the ignorant masses, on the relevancy of those facts. Not to mention the truth, in general.
I recommend reading it…