By Robert Jensen

Alter­Net

http://www.alternet.org/story/145435/

CNN’s star anchor Ander­son Cooper nar­rates a chaotic street scene in Port-au-Prince. A boy is struck in the head by a rock thrown by a looter from a roof. Cooper helps him to the side of the road, and then real­izes the boy is dis­ori­ented and unable to get away. Lay­ing down his dig­i­tal cam­era (but still being filmed by another CNN cam­era), Cooper picks up the boy and lifts him over a bar­ri­cade to safety, we hope.

“We don’t know what hap­pened to that lit­tle boy,” Cooper says in his report. “All we know now is, there’s blood in the streets.” (To view the CNN story, go to http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Unh4v1lFU0.)

This is great tele­vi­sion, but it’s not great jour­nal­ism. In fact, it’s irre­spon­si­ble journalism.

Cooper goes on to point out there is no wide­spread loot­ing in the city and that the vio­lence in the scene that view­ers have just wit­nessed appears to be idio­syn­cratic. The obvi­ous ques­tion: If it’s not rep­re­sen­ta­tive of what’s hap­pen­ing, why did CNN put it on the air? Given that Haitians gen­er­ally have been orga­niz­ing them­selves into neigh­bor­hood com­mit­tees to take care of each other in the absence a func­tion­ing cen­tral gov­ern­ment, isn’t that vio­lent scene an iso­lated inci­dent that dis­torts the larger reality?

Cooper tries to res­cue the piece by point­ing out that while such vio­lence is not com­mon, if it were to become com­mon, well, that would be bad — “it is a fear of what might come.” But peo­ple are more likely to remem­ber the dra­matic images than his fum­bling attempt to put the images in context.

Unfor­tu­nately, CNN and Cooper’s com­bi­na­tion of great TV and bad jour­nal­ism are not idio­syn­cratic; tele­vi­sion news rou­tinely falls into the trap of empha­siz­ing visu­ally com­pelling and dra­matic sto­ries at the expense of impor­tant infor­ma­tion that is cru­cial but more complex.

The absence of cru­cial his­tor­i­cal and polit­i­cal con­text describes the print cov­er­age as well; the facts, analy­sis, and opin­ion that U.S. cit­i­zens need to under­stand these events are rarely pro­vided. For exam­ple, in 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?

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.

Jour­nal­ists have noted that a slave revolt led to the found­ing of an inde­pen­dent Haiti in 1804 and have made pass­ing ref­er­ence to how France’s sub­se­quent demand for “repa­ra­tions” (to com­pen­sate the French for their lost prop­erty, the slaves) crip­pled Haiti eco­nom­i­cally for more than a cen­tury. Some jour­nal­ists have even pointed out that while it was a slave soci­ety, the United States backed France in that cruel pol­icy and didn’t rec­og­nize Hait­ian inde­pen­dence until the Civil War. Occa­sional ref­er­ences also have been made to the 1915 U.S. inva­sion under the “lib­eral” Woodrow Wil­son and an occu­pa­tion that lasted until 1934, and to the sup­port the U.S. gov­ern­ment gave to the two bru­tal Duva­lier dic­ta­tor­ships (the infa­mous “Papa Doc” and “Baby Doc”) that rav­aged the coun­try from 1957–86. But there’s lit­tle dis­cus­sion of how the prob­lems of con­tem­po­rary Haiti can be traced to those policies.

Even more glar­ing is the absence of dis­cus­sion of more recent Haiti-U.S. rela­tions, espe­cially U.S. sup­port for the two coups (1991 and 2004) against a demo­c­ra­t­i­cally elected pres­i­dent. Jean-Bertrand Aris­tide won a stun­ning vic­tory in 1990 by artic­u­lat­ing the aspi­ra­tions of Haiti’s poor­est cit­i­zens, and his pop­ulist eco­nomic pro­gram irri­tated both Hait­ian elites and U.S. policy-makers. The first Bush admin­is­tra­tion nom­i­nally con­demned the 1991 mil­i­tary coup but gave tacit sup­port to the gen­er­als. Pres­i­dent Clin­ton even­tu­ally helped Artis­tide return to power Haiti in 1994, but not until the Hait­ian leader had been forced to capit­u­late to business-friendly eco­nomic poli­cies demanded by the United States. When Aris­tide won another elec­tion in 2000 and con­tin­ued to advo­cate for ordi­nary Haitians, the sec­ond Bush admin­is­tra­tion blocked cru­cial loans to his gov­ern­ment and sup­ported the vio­lent reac­tionary forces attack­ing Aristide’s party. The sad con­clu­sion to that pol­icy came in 2004, when the U.S. mil­i­tary effec­tively kid­napped Aris­tide and flew him out of the coun­try. Aris­tide today lives in South Africa, blocked by the United States from return­ing to his coun­try, where he still has many sup­port­ers and could help with relief efforts.

How many peo­ple watch­ing Cooper’s mass-mediated hero­ism on CNN know that U.S. pol­icy mak­ers have actively under­mined Hait­ian democ­racy and opposed that country’s most suc­cess­ful grass­roots polit­i­cal move­ment? Dur­ing the first days of cov­er­age of the earth­quake, it’s under­stand­able that news orga­ni­za­tions focused on the imme­di­ate cri­sis. But more than a week later, what excuse do jour­nal­ists have?

Shouldn’t TV pun­dits demand that the United States accept respon­si­bil­ity for our con­tri­bu­tion to this state of affairs? As politi­cians express con­cern about Hait­ian poverty and bemoan the lack of a com­pe­tent Hait­ian gov­ern­ment to mobi­lize dur­ing the dis­as­ter, shouldn’t jour­nal­ists ask why they have not sup­ported the Hait­ian peo­ple in the past? When Bill Clin­ton and George W. Bush are appointed to head up the human­i­tar­ian effort, should not jour­nal­ists ask the obvi­ous, if impo­lite, ques­tions about those for­mer pres­i­dents’ con­tri­bu­tions to Hait­ian suffering?

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, as a Wash­ing­ton Post reporter put it. When news reporters explain away Haiti’s prob­lems as a result of some kind of intrin­sic “polit­i­cal dys­func­tion,” as the Post reporter termed it, then read­ers are more likely to accept the overtly reac­tionary argu­ments of op/ed writ­ers who blame Haiti’s prob­lems of its “poverty cul­ture” (Jonah Gold­berg, Los Ange­les Times) or “progress-resistant cul­tural influ­ences” rooted in voodoo (David Brooks, New York Times).

One can learn more by mon­i­tor­ing the inde­pen­dent media in the United States (“Democ­racy Now,” for exam­ple, has done exten­sive report­ing) or read­ing the for­eign press (such as this polit­i­cal analy­sis by Peter Hall­ward in the British daily “The Guardian”). When will jour­nal­ists in the U.S. cor­po­rate com­mer­cial media pro­vide the same kind of hon­est accounting?

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.

Robert Jensen is a jour­nal­ism pro­fes­sor at the Uni­ver­sity of Texas at Austin and board mem­ber of the Third Coast Activist Resource Cen­ter .