Observations on the media and Haiti

Danny Schechter, the director of MediaChannel.org, titled his 1997 book The More You Watch, The Less You Know. The inspiration was research conducted by the University of Massachusetts, which found that during the 1991 Gulf war, people who relied most on US television coverage for their news knew least about the war and its origins.

In 2002, the Glasgow University Media Group reported the effects of TV coverage on public understanding of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Of 3,536 transcribed lines of BBC1 and ITN text broadcast in September and October 2000, it found, just 17 explained the history of the conflict. Many people interviewed did not know who was occupying the occupied territories and had no idea that Palestinians were subject to a military occupation.

So it is no surprise that most recent reporting on Haiti has done little more than describe the movements of people: "The rebels are advancing"; "President Aristide has left the country"; "US marines have arrived". From this, it has been all but impossible to understand what is happening.

Pearls of propaganda are dropped into the void to guide a bewildered public in the "right" direction. Thus the Daily Mail's Ross Benson describes the rebel leader Louis Jodel Chamblain as "not . . . the kind of man that any American administration would wish to deal with". Why? Chamblain led the death squads that originally ousted Aristide in 1991 and is "held to be responsible for the deaths of 5,000 men, women and children".

Yet Chamblain did his killing alongside Emmanuel "Toto" Constant, who had been trained with other paramilitary leaders in Ecuador by US special forces in 1991-94. Constant subsequently told a US journalist that he was advised by Washington to work with CIA operatives in Haiti to "balance the Aristide movement". Thousands of Aristide's supporters were killed in the ensuing bloodbath. One call from Washington would have stopped it, Howard French noted in the New York Times, but the army was deemed "a vital counterweight" to Aristide, who "threatened or antagonised traditional power centres at home and abroad".

Yet the Guardian still writes of how "The US [was] at one time a staunch ally" of Aristide, who claims he was kidnapped and forced into exile by US forces last month. For the Independent's Adrian Hamilton, the west's worst crime is inaction: "It is quite wrong to wash our hands of Haiti's future as we are now doing."

In the Guardian, Sibylla Brodzinsky and Gary Younge reflect on the prospects for democracy in Haiti: "With the US so overextended in Afghanistan and Iraq, it is unclear how much of a commitment it and the rest of the world will make to this small, impoverished country."

Overextended or not, the US commitment to democracy has been frustrated at almost every turn in Latin America - largely thanks to the dictators it has armed and funded. This is described as "ironic" by the press.

In reality, the US is Haiti's main commercial "partner". Along with the manufacture of baseballs, textiles, cheap electronics and toys, Haiti's sugar, bauxite and sisal are all controlled by American corporations. The US Network for Global Economic Justice reports: "Decades of public investments and policy manipulation by the World Bank, the IMF and the US government have deliberately created an environment where the exploitation of workers is hailed as an incentive to invest in Haiti."

In 1994, an anonymous US official explained to the Boston Globe that Aristide - slum priest, grass-roots activist and 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". By "this country", you can be sure he meant the 1 per cent who own 50 per cent of Haiti's wealth - the same people who keep the profits flowing back to Uncle Sam.

David Edwards is co-editor of MediaLens (www.medialens.org)

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