Things that make me angry about the media coverage of the earthquake in Haiti

[lapsedmodernist]

That there are already reports of how people are "looting" for food. That's right, black people loot. White people "survive under difficult circumstances." It's really like Katrina all over again, except on a much grander, more terrible scale. The global scale of just how far the divide between the rich and the poor is.

That people tearfully ask "how could this happen to people who have suffered so much?" Smart people ask this--and the question ignores the structural injustices that underlie both the damage from the earthquake and the other forms of suffering that somehow make it cosmically unfair that there is an earthquake ON TOP of all that. These things are all related. The dire poverty and the lack of infrastructure are a legacy of colonialism and a consequence of global neocolonialism; so is the fact that the city was built to accommodate 50,000 people, before there was adequate knowledge about how to build cities in seismographically vulnerable zones--and then the same global economic processes that have created megacities and megaslums turned Port-au-Prince into an impoverished city of over a million people. And no one cares if infrastructure is inadequate in poor black cities. Not the building codes in Haiti, not the levees in New Orleans. (And this is not even talking about the millions of global impoverished who have to trade off land security for things like health and basic minimum environmental standards, and live on toxic dumps, in the paths of landslides, and on volcano slopes--because everywhere else they would be priced out or just kicked out). Pat Robertson is so retarded it doesn't even make me angry--I mean it's Pat fucking Robertson, what do you expect? He is a moron. What is more upsetting to me is how people close their eyes to the very real structural, historical and contemporary reasons for why it is the world's poor that pay the heaviest price for "acts of God."

That there is so much focus in American media on the handful of American students who are missing there, and on the handful of babies who were in the process of adoption and how will they get to the States now, or on the American missionaries and how they are having a hard time helping people? I understand that to some extent the focus will be on a nation's citizens, and I hope all the students are found, and the babies are airlifted, but Jesus Christ, this is not an American tragedy--the faces of these Lynn University students are all over the news, there are private rescue teams looking for them--how is it that they are singled out as victims for the spotlight, and as they are found, their rescue to the DR on helicopters is publicized--when there are no helicopters, no food, no water, nothing except cohabiation on the streets with decomposing corpses for thousands of people whom no one will ever help? Yes of course there are stories about the general state of things but as far as putting the faces on the tragedy--how are most of the faces white or somehow American-affiliated?

If you are still looking for a place to donate, I recommend Paul Farmer's organization, Partners In Health.


http://www.standwithhaiti.org/haiti

Comments

[grashupfer.livejournal.com]

Those American students must be sighing with relief for all of their privilege... you know, underneath the rubble of their hotel.

[lapsedmodernist.livejournal.com]

way to miss my point.

[grashupfer.livejournal.com]

I'm gathering the story about the American students is what is behind your outrage about this. If I'm wrong, please correct me. But one person's intellectual outrage at a distance strikes somebody sitting here now past worry and thinking about a funeral for a missing American as callous and side-taking in an incomprehensible way.

[lapsedmodernist.livejournal.com]

all right then, still missing my point, I see. Which is that I think it's outrageous (although sadly not suprising) how disproportionate the media focus is on the handful of Americans who tragically (and I mean that unironically) perished, despite being in a position where private resources were deployed to look specifically for them, and how in the American media they have more or less become the recognizable faces of the tragedy that has made the most impoverished nation outside of Sub-Saharan Africa into absolute hell with no hope for hundreds of thousands, who, even if they get found, aren't going to be airlifted anywhere. And like it or not, it's very telling that a group of people in Haiti were in a position to have private rescue companies looking just for them. That is really telling. Was it wrong of the parents and the school to take advantage of that resource that they had? No, that's just the (extremely unfair) way things are. But I can't really stomach seeing those faces as "the faces of the catastrophe."

[grashupfer.livejournal.com]

I understand on your point. But Cooper and Gupta on CNN have been going up and down the streets of the city for 3+ days now. Who do you see (on the ground there) establishing some other face? Not anybody on the ground in the city, right? The other media are not worth the attention. I think the students from Lynn U. are getting special contracted rescue because the school is rightly afraid it will be sued beyond its capacity to pay.

[lapsedmodernist.livejournal.com]

why aren't you as upset thinking about the thousands of Haitians who won't even have funerals, whose bodies are just going to decompose under the rubble or in the middle of the street?

why isn't the media talking about them as humans, aside from the CNN death porn? maybe because there is no suspense, no possible happy ending about bringing them "home" or tragic interviews with the grieving family. They have no home, and their family is probably as dead as they are. No good angle for CNN.

[bluemoonspot.livejournal.com]

British media coverage is more or less the same, they interviewed a British woman just after she was rescued, went on about children who "are too young to comprehend the horror" (as if you can comprehend such horror at any age). It has made me angry also, and our Government is pussy footing around about sending people to help, they donated £6m and think they are fantastic but the public here do not think that is good enough as there are not enough of our soldiers and aid workers over there. Though the 2004 Tsunami was bigger the British had people there within 24 hours to help.

[monkeypunk.livejournal.com]

Our local news has been a little better I think, oddly enough. We haven't heard much about the American students, and the majority of the interview type segments have been with people in the Haitian community here in Los Angeles, concluding with information on efforts set up to get survivors in touch with family.

What bothers me more than the news coverage, which I've pretty much come to expect at this point, are Americans who make comments to the effect that we've got a recession on, so they can't understand why we're sending aid at all. Yes, because having to skip a night out is exactly the same thing as watching your child slowly bleed to death under the rubble of what once was your home.

[anthrokeight.livejournal.com]

Yes. To all of this, yes. YES.

Have you gotten to witness the horrorshow that was Pat Robertson blaming the catastrophe on the pact the Haitians made with the devil back during the anti-colonial slave uprising? Oh yes. I was speechless.

And Rush Limbaugh, who Newt Gingriched and claimed that the Obama Administration was going to gain a political advantage with black and white Americans for sending relief aid to Haiti? As if the only reason you would do something like send aid is for political gain. And implicitly explains that not doing a decent job of aiding New Orleans was resisting politicizing catastrophe for the Shrub administration.

I was not only appalled at the sentiments, I was also appalled that, somehow, these supremely selfish and self-centered people managed to make Haiti's earthquake ALL ABOUT THEM AND THEIR AGENDA.

[anthrokeight.livejournal.com]

And I am not even able to articulate my feelings on my students' response to my suggestion they donate to Partners in Health or Doctors Without Borders. It was...

[lapsedmodernist.livejournal.com]

what was it???

[anthrokeight.livejournal.com]

They just looked at me. It was blank. Maybe they don't feel expressive or don't like me enough to express anything, or something, but that lack of engagement was shocking.

And we happen to be having a section on rights and human rights and such right now. Later in the day, I was talking about why the UN UDHR came about in 1948. In all that discussion, I mentioned the Armenian genocide after WWI, and while I was talking about that and the exchange of populations between Turkey and Greece, and the death and badness, because none of them knew what that was. And I saw two young women playing effing tic-tac-toe and hangman the whole time.

Okay, so I know doodling or whatever helps some people focus, and these days students have the ability to multi-task. But I really believe some things deserve our full attention and focus. When I am feeling spiritual, I even say some things are actually sacred. And really? Genocide is one of them.

I swear, I felt myself check out on them and anything they care about right then.

[lapsedmodernist.livejournal.com]

ugh I totally know what you mean and that would have made me furious. I have to say, European students are much better than American students in that sense in my (limited) experience.

[iamtinybones.livejournal.com]

I wholeheartedly agree and read your entry to my mother as well. She absolutely loved it. She was talking about how the government just drops off boxes of supplies, and leave the people to run for the supplies like animals. Horrific planning on all efforts. The whole situation just devestates us beyond words as well as enrages us (in terms of the media and white people).

Thank-you for sharing this. So much.
Brilliance. You should now send this in somewhere to be heard.

[boobirdsfly.livejournal.com]

Thank you, thank you, thank you~

[isolt.livejournal.com]

THANK YOU for doing a fantastic job of articulating so many things I feel about this.

[alicetiara.livejournal.com]

Totally agreed. I've been relying on NPR for coverage, which in NYC is mostly doing a good job (interviewing lots of people in the local Haitian community, talking to Haitian scholars, people who are actually there, etc.) but even they use the term looting. Which I still can't believe. It is Katrina all over again.

[http://users.livejournal.com/_swallow/]

thank you for posting this.