a931: (a898) News reporting: Chamberlain replies to Wharram objection (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

From: Greg Chamberlain <GregChamberlain@compuserve.com>

Mr Wharram:


You (and everyone else) have a perfect right, indeed a _duty_, to monitor
and criticise how Haiti is reported.  I am sorry you were offended by my
reaction to your criticism when I said:  "Mr Wharram, please stay out of
the news business."  But you must understand the frustration and even anger
among journalists when such criticisms are themselves careless and
inaccurate.

I pointed out a number of assertions you made that were simply not borne
out by a second read of the passages contested.  Is silence the answer to
such (all too common) misdirected criticism?  Journalists are the target of
far more inaccurate that accurate criticism, so they mostly just do not
bother to reply.  The public rightly demands that they be accurate in their
work, yet the critics seem to feel no such need where they themselves are
concerned.  This insouciance is frequently compounded by lack of interest
in (or even wilful refusal) to consider how the media has to go about its
work.

Errors are made by the media and they must be pointed out, especially in a
country such as Haiti where, as we know, media reporting (foreign or
domestic) can do more damage than in more solidly-structured countries
(though less than critics claim).  That healthy and important democratic
impulse to criticise is cancelled out when carelessness and partisanship
invade the criticisms offered.  Since this list was founded eight years
ago, I have many times answered such critics because they have sometimes
seemed to be out to "get" the press by any means (and recently we have even
seen this stated here in so many words).  This is dangerous and worrying.

For all its faults, the media in Haiti is perhaps the only essential civic
institution that has grown successfully since the fall of the Duvaliers.
Its constant  reporting of abuses has been an important counter-balance to
the familiar authoritarian tendencies of the state and its agents that have
been such a tragic part of Haiti's history.  Yet we have people on this
list vilifying these makeshift guardians of freedom and jeering at foreign
NGOs who come to Haiti to support them.  That is as truly saddening (and
disgraceful) as the steady descent of a once-idealistic movement  towards
the time-serving opportunism that we are now witnessing.  A steady descent
that little to do with the opposition or foreign countries.  All Haitians
(or any other people) ask of their government is that there be concrete
results.  If the media report that there are few results, that isn't the
"fault" of the media.


        Greg Chamberlain