#2031: CBS Reporter's Tape Stolen in Haiti (fwd)

[Robert Corbett <bcorbett@netcom.com>]

From:nozier@tradewind.net

Wednesday January 26 8:10 PM ET ____ CBS Reporter's Tape Stolen in Haiti
 By DAVID BAUDER AP Television Writer 

 NEW YORK (AP) - A man with a gun stole two tapes from a CBS News crew
filming in Haiti. It was the second time in 15 months that a U.S.
television crew has been threatened while reporting on the island.
 No one was hurt, and the tapes were never recovered. In October 1998,
``Dateline NBC'' correspondent Lea Thompson was robbed at gunpoint by
men who stole some of her tapes and notes. Correspondent Rita Braver was
reporting last week about a doctor who works in a poor section of
Port-au-Prince when she noticed a man approach a crew member, Mario
DeCarvalho. She couldn't hear them, but it appeared the man wanted their
tapes and DeCarvalho gave away two. When she tried to follow the man to
retrieve the tapes, DeCarvalho told her the man had a gun. ``I think
they didn't like it that we were in their neighborhood,'' Braver said.
``They might have thought we were doing something unfavorable to someone
there.'' They were in Haiti for a story that airs Sunday about the end
of U.S. military involvement there. When DeCarvalho and some others went
back to the neighborhood later to try to get the tapes, one was empty
and the other had only scenes of the Port-au-Prince neighborhood that
weren't crucial to the story, she said. The U.S. military pulled out of
Haiti this month, ending a mission that began with the 1994 U.S.-led
invasion that restored elected government in this Caribbean nation.
Braver was doing a story for CBS's ``Sunday Morning.'' ``People had so
much hope when Americans came there five years ago,'' she said. ``They
thought life would get better and, in fact, life hasn't gotten better. I
think there's just a level of frustration there.''