 | Media presents skewed image of Haiti rescue effortsaletho | January 23, 2010 at 1:15 pm | Categories: Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Supremacism, Social Darwinism | URL: http://wp.me/ |
Why do we see Haitians begging for help but doing absolutely NOTHING to help themselves?!
Why do they idly sit waiting for help to come (and I'm talking about the ones who were not injured, of course) or ... "blocking the roads" instead of HELPING to clear them, HELPING to unload cargo ships and/or to clear port infrastructure from the debris.
BBC showed healthy men running around the collapsed house and doing absolutely NOTHING to save a living person under it who was lucky that the UN soldiers were nearby and just started … DIGGING! Nothing sophisticated but simply digging… I don't understand..
Global Nomad responds:
I've been doing a lot of media interviews over the past five days and I can tell you that the media are not reporting facts per se - they are telling a story, and one they hope will catch their viewers' attention. Many news outlets do some research, pick a couple of angles that grab attention, and then develop these angles specifically. So, in the Haiti context for example, the bulk of the media is really picking up on the violence/food-
The question to ask is, why is the media showing pictures of foreign search and rescue teams, and not Haitian rescuers? Well, on a simple level, the media is playing to US/British/Australi
Here's some facts from earlier today on foreign search and rescue teams. As of about 10pm Haiti time on Saturday, there were 1,200 foreign search and rescue personnel in Haiti, and about 100 sniffer dogs. Collectively over the days since the earthquake, they had pulled 83 people alive out of the rubble. That's about on par for foreign SAR teams- a pretty normal figure following a major disaster.
I don't know how much it costs to run a SAR team. I can assure you it's expensive. The bill for 1,200 SAR personnel, complete with dogs, specialised equipment, transportation, lodging etc. will run into the hundreds of thousands of dollars per day.
Every life is precious. Every life saved is worth an investment. I'm not interested in making a judgement call about what dollar value you place on the life of a Haitian child pulled from the rubble after 8 hours of digging by one rescue team, as one was this afternoon. That life is a cause for celebration. Absolutely and unequivocably. Note however that a single team can spend hours and hours recovering a single person- or body. It's no wonder the total number of lives saved is relatively small. Remember too that most of these teams don't reach ground zero until 48 hours after the earthquake. Most urban burial situations have a window of 72 hours during which people trapped alive in rubble can be rescued. After that, most will be dead. And it's an arithmetic curve- meaning, for every hour past the point of burial, a disproportionately small number of people will continue surviving.
Here's the flip-side of the coin.
There are between three and five million Haitians living in the quake affected area. Somewhere between 50 and 150 thousand appear to have died. Uncounted tens of thousands were injured. Many of those injured- I would imagine also in the tens of thousands- would have been partially or completely buried at some point in the earthquake- hence receiving injuries. Those thousands of people had to be dug out by somebody.
As mentioned in my post, experience shows that the people who do the saving of lives are those people who in the first minutes and hours after a quake rush to their homes and their neighbours homes, and pull out friends and loved ones. They are the best to respond a) because they get there first before people die and b) because they know who to look for, and where. In the Bam earthquake in Iran in 2003, the buildings were made of mud-brick which crumbled to dust without leaving air-spaces. Anybody who wasn't pulled from the rubble in the first few minutes suffocated. Locals saved thousands of lives, compared to the few dozen saved by international rescue teams.
I am in daily contact with several personal friends in Port-au-Prince in the course of my job. Yesterday they drove past a flattened school where dozens of Haitians were digging through the rubble with whatever they had available. Colleagues from our office in Port-au-Prince, within minutes of the quake hitting, were frantically trying to get home so they could rescue their loved ones. Haitians throughout the city have been working tirelessly since the quake hit to free people from the rubble. Their efforts will be credited with saving many thousands of lives.
Remember as well, four days on from the quake, that most rubble that can be dug through by hand will have been dug through - the rest requiring specialised equipment that local Haitians will not have access to. Most people who will survive the quake have already been pulled out; almost everybody else buried right now is either dead, or will shortly be dead. If people knew where their loved ones were buried at the time of the quake, they will have dug through those locations by now. So there is a lot less for local Haitians to do, while the small number of search and rescue personnel (for whom, I hasten to add, I do have a great deal of respect, and who risk their lives to save every life they recover) with their specialised equipment and training can tackle more complicated burial sites.
So my question really would be, why does our media chose to show pictures of Haitians sitting around and focus on foreigners digging through the rubble, when in fact this is an incredible distortion of the reality of what is happening, as you rightly alude to at the beginning of your comment?
I don't doubt that there are some groups of men sitting around doing nothing, I hasten to add, or that there aren't gangs making trouble for selfish gain, or that there aren't some lazy people out there. But seeing a few shots of a few men sitting around is not indicative of what has generally been happening in Port-au-Prince since the quake, nor can we surmise that therefore a significant majority of Haitians are sitting around while their countryfolk are dying.
You're absolutely right- there is a huge difference between victims and survivors. In any calamity there are both, and the media loves to show victims because it attracts attention, because humans have a warped tendancy to want to keep watching suffering. Survivors don't get the same attention on our news media. However I can attest that there are vast numbers of survivors in Port-au-Prince right now based on the eye-witness accounts that I am getting across my desk regularly, and simply by looking at the magnitude of what has happened and the part that local Haitians have played in it versus the part that outsiders played. The majority of Haitians are working to pick up the pieces of their lives amidst the shock and violence of what they have just been through as best they can.
I close with an observation that the news cameras weren't rolling in Port-au-Prince until 48 hours after the earthquake, but that the largest portion of the rescue and recovery efforts- carried out by local Haitians themselves- would have been completed during this time- indeed, during the first 12 hours. So we don't see those pictures. Their contribution and the incredible bravery, sacrifice and drama of those moments, never made it into our living room. But this is the reality of what happened in Port-au-Prince, and not these 15-second snippets we see broken down for drama's sake on our evening news bulletin."
--
NOW AN AMAZON KINDLE BOOK ON YOUR PC, iPHONE OR KINDLE DEVICE
Debating the Holocaust: A New Look at Both Sides By Thomas Dalton
In this remarkable, balanced book, the author skillfully reviews and compares "traditional" and "revisionist" views on the "The Holocaust."
On one side is the traditional, orthodox view -- six million Jewish casualties, gas chambers, cremation ovens, mass graves, and thousands of witnesses. On the other is the view of a small band of skeptical writers and researchers, often unfairly labeled "deniers," who contend that the public has been gravely misled about this emotion-laden chapter of history.
The author establishes that the arguments and findings of revisionist scholars are substantive, and deserve serious consideration. He points out, for example, that even the eminent Jewish Holocaust scholar Raul Hilberg acknowledged that there was no budget, plan or order by Hitler for a World War II program to exterminate Europe's Jews.
This book is especially relevant right now, as "Holocaust deniers" are routinely and harshly punished for their "blasphemy," and as growing numbers of people regard the standard, Hollywoodized "Holocaust" narrative with mounting suspicion and distrust.
The author of this book, who writes under the pen name of "Thomas Dalton," is an American scholar who holds a doctoral degree from a major US university.
This is no peripheral debate between arcane views of some obscure aspect of twentieth century history. Instead, this is a clash with profound social-political implications regarding freedom of speech and press, the manipulation of public opinion, how our cultural life is shaped, and how power is wielded in our society.
http://www.amazon.
Peace.
Michael Santomauro
Editorial Director
Call anytime: 917-974-6367
ReporterNotebook@
No comments:
Post a Comment