13916: 13907: Higbie: but seriously... (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

From: Janet Higbie <jhigbie@nytimes.com>

A couple more points, now that we've all had a good laugh....

My point in my accidentally-posted message was that reporters are indeed at
the beck and call of editors, though not in the sense that Kevin Pina had
suggested.

Foreign correspondents, in Haiti and elsewhere,  for American and European
newspapers and wire services are deluged day and night with questions from
editors back home.   Is it Konfederasyon or Konvansyon?   How many gourdes
to the dollar?   How many people at the big demonstration, and why is your
number different from your competitor?    Does Dieudonne have an
accent?   How far is La Gonave from Gonaives?   What did Aristide mean when
he said Haitians are turning into bananas?   When are you going to file,
and why didn't you file five minutes ago?   Why so many misspellings -- did
you type this with your feet?

I would guess that most American journalists find this kind of becking and
calling much more prevalent than any kind of pressure to hew to any
political philosophy.   True,  there are institutional and personal biases
in the media as anywhere else, but they play out in ways that are
enormously complicated, subtle and deep-seated,  very far from the kind of
open dictat that has often been suggested here.  In my opinion, disinterest
is a bigger problem than bias:  the top media owners and managers don't
care enough about Haiti to form or push an agenda.

But however rough the lot of foreign correspondents in Haiti, let's not
forget the far greater challenges faced by Haitian journalists, past and
present, from Jean Dominique on down:   daily risk to life and
limb,  trying to scrape money together to survive and REAL political
pressure, to name a few.

This was what I was getting at in my original flippant message.   No
offense to Kevin Pina or anyone else was intended (after all I didn't
intend for anyone else to see it!)    I hope no offense was taken.


Janet Higbie
**  I DO NOT SPEAK FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES **