I think I’ve remarked before on the media’s ability to give exhaustive, even obsessive, coverage to an issue but still manage to ignore the more interesting aspects of it. Last week’s disaster in Haiti provides another good example.
We’ve had seemingly endless footage of ruined buildings, homeless children, dead and injured Haitians, overloaded aid efforts and the occasional miraculous rescue. But almost nothing on the underlying causes of the country’s problems.
I don’t mean seismology (although that would be interesting too), but bad government. Haitians aren’t destitute because they’re somehow genetically predisposed to it. Sure, their environment is pretty hostile, but they’re not alone in that. Their troubles are fundamentally political.
But the media would rather feed us disaster p*rn than talk about that.
Among those who do care about the politics, there are two competing narratives. On the right, the view is that Haiti’s left-wing governments of Jean-Bertrand Aristide and current president Rene Preval have been corrupt and incompetent, and the international community (and specifically the US) needs to step in and run the place.
On the left, it’s countered that the problems run much deeper than that: that Haiti has been blighted by a legacy of colonialism, and that to run it as a sort of American military protectorate is just going to repeat the mistakes of the past.
Trouble is, they’re both right. Somehow, Haiti needs to find a way to break out of the cycle of dependency and autocracy. It’s a difficult problem – but that’s no excuse for not talking about it.
7 Comments
I just saw this article the other day, which could be quite relevant: Why poor countries are poor.
So true – both sides have been guilty in exploiting the poor for their own gains. But is Haiti going to be another application of the Shock Doctrine (as it has been discussed over at the Blogocrats)?
It is going to be very hard to put back together a country that is so broken (both in the physical and political sense).
I love it! my new phrase to overuse with all my friends, “disaster p..rn”. Well done, and such a perfect description of most media coverage of natural disasters and war.
And on the more serious side, yes I agree, we don’t get enough background information. the one small piece regarding how the US got trade deals done with rice imports that destroyed Haiti’s self suffienceincy in their main staple food, was only seen and heard once by me in all these long days of news coverage. I would really like to know more about what went on to do that piece of trade disaster.
Haiti has been cursed by a weak central government ever since it free itself from France. After independence, the emancipated slaves were each given small plot of unproductive land while the army officers were given the plantations. This created a small number of very rich people who hold the guns, and a large number of very poor people etching out a pitiful existence in the countryside. The population growth and land pressure forces the farmers to chop down trees on the hill sides, and the soil erosion means more trees needs to be chopped down. The country has lost 98% of its forest.
Social disaster follows ecological disaster. Blaming everything on ‘corruption’ is easy, the bigger issue lies with uncontrolled population growth. Foreign Aid had made the situation worse : it created new channel of corruption, and allow the population to grow even larger. Until the population issue is addressed, the situation in Haiti is simply hopeless.
And then there’s the US support of the dictator Papa Doc and the removal of Aristide, the elected leader, at gunpoint by “US uniformed personel”. see World Internet News “History of US Intervention in Haiti” by Nicholas Low (March 4 2004)
http://soc.hfac.uh.edu/artman/publish/article_94.shtml
Nevertheless, this is one time the Haitians may welcome the marines with open arms. The immediate problem is the quake and its aftermath.
Aristide now lives in South Africa but has said he would return to his country if allowed.
13,000 US troops – old habits die hard.
What Haiti needs is a Royal Commission. Into the stumbling, gringo-dominated aid effort (Katrina…), which looks incompetent thus far, and those deeper causes of Haiti’s malaise Richardson alludes to. The Oz media didn’t reveal the shambolic condition of Victorian bushfire bureaucracy and “science”, the Royal Commission did. While the Oz media managed to avoid disaster porn (and are still congratulating themselves), what we got was endless “colour”, human interest, sentimentality etc. There’s been no reluctance here to show dead Haitians and endless intrusions into grief etc. But of course there’s one media law for the South, another for the North.
Once the corpses are buried, media interest in Haiti will vanish.