De Commerciele Massamedia 239

Van: noreply@medialens.org

Onderwerp: Haiti - The Broken Wing

Datum: 3 februari 2010 23:19:19 GMT+01:00

Aan: stan10@planet.nl

MEDIA LENS: Correcting for the distorted vision of the corporate media

February 3, 2010

MEDIA ALERT: HAITI - THE BROKEN WING

It matters that the media have lavished so much attention on the aftermath of Haiti’s January 12 earthquake. The coverage has helped inspire people around the world to give of their time, energy and money in responding to the disaster. On the Democracy Now! website last week, filmmaker Michael Moore described how almost 12,000 members of the US National Nurses Union had signed up to leave for Haiti immediately. Moore explained:

“... the executive director of the National Nurses Union. She contacted the [Obama] administration. She got put off. She had no response. Then they sent her to some low-level person that had no authority to do anything.

“And then, finally, she’s contacting me. And she says, ‘Do you know any way to get a hold of President Obama?’ And I’m going, ‘Well, this is pretty pathetic if you’re having to call me. I mean, you are the largest nurses union... I don’t know what I can do for you. I mean, I’ll put my call in, too.' But as we sit here today, not a whole heck of a lot has happened. And it’s distressing.”

(http://www.democracynow.org/2010/1/26/michael_moore_on_haiti_the_supreme)

The courage and compassion of thousands of people willing to enter a chaotic disaster zone threatened with aftershocks are very real. Compassion arises out of a recognition that ‘their’ suffering is no different to ‘my’ suffering. The heart trembles and softens in response to this awareness. Such a subtle resonance and yet it has the power to relieve much of the world's despair. It is the only counter force to the brutality and greed of human egotism willing to sacrifice everyone and everything for ‘me’.

But if compassion is to make a real difference, it must be allied to rational analysis. In the absence of this analysis, compassion is like a bird with a broken wing flapping in futile circles, never leaving the ground.

Joining compassion with reason means asking why over 80 per cent of Haiti’s population of 10 million people live in abject poverty. Why less than 45 per cent of all Haitians have access to potable water. Why the life expectancy rate in Haiti is only 53 years. Why seventy-six per cent of Haiti's children under the age of five are underweight, or suffer from stunted growth, with 63 per cent of Haitians undernourished. Why 1 in every 10,000 Haitians has access to a doctor. (http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/world/haiti/intro.htm)

In September 2008, Dan Beeton of the US-based Center for Economic and Policy Research told us:

“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.” (Email to Media Lens, September 9, 2008)

John Pilger has witnessed the reality on the ground that explains Western interest in the country:

“When I was last in Haiti, I watched very young girls stooped in front of whirring, hissing, binding machines at the Port-au-Prince Superior Baseball Plant. Many had swollen eyes and lacerated arms. I produced a camera and was thrown out. Haiti is where America makes the equipment for its hallowed national game, for next to nothing. Haiti is where Walt Disney contractors make Mickey Mouse pyjamas, for next to nothing. The US controls Haiti's sugar, bauxite and sisal. Rice-growing was replaced by imported American rice, driving people into the cities and towns and jerry-built housing. Years after year, Haiti was invaded by US marines, infamous for atrocities that have been their specialty from the Philippines to Afghanistan.” (Pilger, ‘The kidnapping of Haiti,‘ http://www.zcommunications.org/zspace/commentaries/4123)

Peter Hallward examined recent US policy in Haiti in the Guardian:

“Ever since the US invaded and occupied the country in 1915, every serious political attempt to allow Haiti's people to move (in former president Jean-Bertrand Aristide's phrase) ‘from absolute misery to a dignified poverty’ has been violently and deliberately blocked by the US government and some of its allies.” (Hallward, ‘Our role in Haiti's plight,’ The Guardian, January 13, 2010; http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/jan/13/our-role-in-haitis-plight)

The US Double Game

Aristide took office in February 1991 and was briefly the first democratically elected President in Haiti's history before being overthrown by a US-backed military coup on September 30, 1991. The Washington-based Council on Hemispheric Affairs observed after the coup:

“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.” His 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, Chomsky, Year 501 - The Conquest Continues, Verso, 1993, p.209)

Aristide's balancing of the budget and “trimming of a bloated bureaucracy” led to a “stunning success” that made White House planners “extremely uncomfortable”. The view of a US official “with extensive experience of Haiti” summed up the reality beneath US rhetoric. Aristide, slum priest, grass-roots activist, exponent of Liberation Theology, “represents everything that CIA, DOD and FBI think they have been trying to protect this country against for the past 50 years”. (Quoted, Paul Quinn-Judge, ‘US reported to intercept Aristide calls,’ Boston Globe, September 8, 1994)

Following the fall of Aristide, also with US support, at least 1,000 people were killed in the first two weeks of the coup and hundreds more by December. The paramilitary forces were led by former CIA employees Emmanuel Constant and Raoul Cedras. Aristide was forced into exile from 1991-94. Noam Chomsky summarised the situation:

“Well, as this was going on, the Haitian generals in effect were being told [by Washington]: ‘Look, murder the leaders of the popular organisations, intimidate the whole population, destroy anyone who looks like they might get in the way after you're gone.’... And that's exactly what Cedras and those guys did, that's precisely what happened - and of course they were given total amnesty when they finally did agree to step down.” (Chomsky, Understanding Power, The New Press, 2002, p.157)

In 1994, the US returned Aristide in the company of 20,000 troops. This was presented as a noble defence of democracy, but in fact the US was playing a double game. As Chomsky noted, Aristide was allowed to return only after the coup leaders had slaughtered much of the popular movement that had brought him to power. His return was also conditional on acceptance of both the US military occupation and Washington's harsh neoliberal agenda. The plans for the economy were set out in a document submitted to the Paris Club of international donors at the World Bank in August 1994. The Haiti desk officer of the World Bank, Axel Peuker, described the plan as beneficial to the “more open, enlightened, business class” and foreign investors. (Quoted Noam Chomsky, 'Democracy Restored,' Z Magazine, November 1994)

In 2004, the US engineered a further coup by cutting off almost all international aid over the previous four years, making the government’s collapse inevitable. Aristide was forced to leave Haiti by US military forces. US Congresswoman, Barbara Lee, challenged the US government:

“It appears that the US is aiding and abetting the attempt to violently topple the Aristide government. With all due respect, this looks like ‘regime change’.” (Quoted Anthony Fenton, 'Media vs. reality in Haiti,' February 13, 2004; http://zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=11&ItemID=4977)

In our search of the Lexis Nexis media database (February 3) we checked for articles containing the word ‘Haiti’ over the last month. This gave 2,256 results (some online press articles are not captured by Lexis Nexis). Our search for articles containing ‘Aristide’ gave 47 results. The words ‘Haiti’ and ‘Voodoo’ gave 53 results. The words ‘Haiti’ and ‘looting’ gave 136 results.

These numbers give an idea of how the broken wing of media analysis keeps public compassion grounded in an endless circling that is powerless to end the suffering of the people of Haiti.

Media Performance

The 47 mentions of Aristide in 2,256 articles discussing Haiti contained around nine articles that discussed US responsibility for his overthrow. We found several more online articles - notably two excellent pieces by Mark Weisbrot and one by Hugh O’Shaugnessey in the Guardian - that were not picked up by Lexis Nexis.

Hallward made a brief reference in his Guardian article, cited above. Seumas Milne wrote in the Guardian that Aristide’s challenge to Haiti's oligarchy and its international sponsors “led to two foreign-backed coups and US invasions, a suspension of aid and loans, and eventual exile in 2004” (http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2010/jan/20/haiti-suffering-earthquake-punitive-relationship)

Isabel Hilton wrote in the Independent:

“President Clinton negotiated his [Aristide’s] return in 1994, reportedly on condition that he accept a US blueprint for Haiti's economic development. When Aristide won a second election in 2001, he was again deposed, in 2004, this time forcibly flown by George W Bush's administration to exile in Africa, where he remains.” (http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/isabel-hilton-dont-blame-the-haitians-for-doubting-us-promises-1870940.html)

Mark Steel, Patrick Cockburn and Andrew Buncombe made similar comments in the Independent. To his credit, Buncombe published two pieces mentioning the US role in Aristide’s overthrow. This handful of brief references to the US role in destroying Aristide, restricted to two national newspapers - the Guardian and the Independent - represents most of the honest commentary on this issue available to the public. Meanwhile, a flood of mainstream broadcast and print coverage has depicted the US as the high-tech saviour of Haiti.

Even more shocking, not one of the above national media journalists made any mention of the role of the +media+ in suppressing the truth of the US role in Haiti. Journalists apparently do not find this silence problematic.

If it is important for journalists to hold governments to account, then why not their own industry? Public awareness and outrage +do+ have the power to obstruct government criminality. But the public cannot know enough to be outraged, to resist, if the media does not tell them what is happening and why.

Lees verder: http://www.medialens.org/alerts/