DO I have your attention now?
Good.
Then erase and replace with: With friends like these, who needs enemies? The point is the media – and especially the Western kind – are always up for a juicy story.
DO I have your attention now?
Good.
Then erase and replace with: With friends like these, who needs enemies? The point is the media – and especially the Western kind – are always up for a juicy story.
They prefer the floods in China; the hot air balloon set free by fame-chasing parents in Colorado (supposedly with a six-year old boy inside it); the attacks against Togolese footballers in Angola; and of course lately, the earthquake in Haiti.
So while the 12 January earthquake that measured 7.0 on the Richter scale killed between 150 000 and 200 000 people as it destroyed much of the capital Port-au-Prince and surrounding areas, Haiti has been the mangy cousin of the nations of Americas for the longest time. We don’t know much about those things for a
reason.
For the uninitiated, Haiti got its independence in 1804 but most of the subsequent 206 years have been extremely turbulent. Its peoples have been enslaved, brutalised by the French, the Spaniards and the Americans and the poor republic has almost always been the poorest nation in the northern hemisphere.
Oh, and now, South Africa’s sheltersing Jean Bertrand Aristide, a priest-turned politician and former Haitian president who did the un-Christian thing of unleashing death squads to terrorise his people before he
was kicked out.
Anyway, the only reason there’s so much Haiti on the tube now is the spectacular nature of earthquakes.
Collapsing buildings and bridges make for great television, and CNN was quick to dispatch is brightest stars
(Christian Amanpour, Anderson Cooper, Hala Gorani and Jim Clancy among others) to cover the story.
It has actually been quite farcical to see all these usually well-turned out anchors in tshirts and jeans, making inane statements such as “as you can see behind me that building collapsed.”
Their cameras have been eagerly soaking up every person who been pulled alive from the rubble like it was the second coming.
Yet what we’ve seen and read very little of is a context for the Haitian tragedy. We have not heard that
part of the reason there were so many dead is because most of the buildings are so badly constructed they were merely disasters waiting to happen.
That the country has no civilian bureaucracy to speak of and that United Nations troops have maintained law and order for the last few years. This is a small part of Haiti’s dysfunctional socio-economic and political milieu.
There are appeals to donate money for disaster relief (good luck with that!) when farmers in rich nations routinely throw away farm produce because they are paid to do so. Inequalities between rich and poor even in Haiti is so glaring that while it cannot be news every day, it would provide a decent background
to the current tragedy.
Instead, we continue to enjoy the CNN crew for another few days. And then they will be off to chase another Third World tragedy. It’s TV after all.
Sim Kyazze is a lecturer at the Rhodes School of Journalism and Media Studies
