29171: Esser (news) Shoot the Messenger - The Lancet and the Critics (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

From: Dominique Esser <torx@joimail.com>



ZNet
<http://tinyurl.com/jwm6o>


David Peterson: Shoot the Messenger

September 12, 2006

The important study "Human rights abuse and other criminal violations
in Port-au-Prince, Haiti: a random survey of
households," <http://tinyurl.com/nnnfj> by Athena Kolbe and Royce
Hutson of Wayne State University in Detroit, was initially posted to
The Lancet’s website on Thursday, August 31, two days prior to its
release in print as a feature article in the September 2 issue of the
journal (Vol. 368, No. 9538).

Today happens to be Tuesday, September 12.  This means that the Kolbe
- Hutson study has been in circulation online for 13 days, and in
print for 11.  During this period, I've been able to find three
reports about the substance of the study bylined by Jeff Heinrich and
circulated via the CanWest News Service in Canada (which has meant
that multiple Canadian print dailies have published these reports
beginning with the first of them on September 1); one report by
Andrew Buncombe for the September 4 Independent (also republished
that same day in the Belfast Telegraph); one commentary by Ira
Kurzban in the September 7 Miami Herald; a single 175-word news blurb
placed into circulation by Associated Press over September 7 and 8;
one report by Marina Jiménez for the September 7 Toronto Globe and
Mail; one report by Duncan Campbell for the September 8 Guardian;
and, finally, one editorial in the September 11 Montreal Gazette.
(Note that during these 13 days, the Montreal Gazette published three
reports by Jeff Heinrich.)

Now.  It is always possible that something else appeared some place
else, and I simply didn’t find it.  But from what I have in fact
found, a perfectly reasonable inference follows.  Namely, that within
the English-language news media, there has been very little interest
overall in the Kolbe – Hutson study.

As our friends over at the U.K.-based Media Lens group put it in
their September 11 Media Alert (“Haiti – The Traditional Predators”
<http://tinyurl.com/pmese>):


In 2004, with the US, UK and French governments eager to see Aristide
demonised and removed from power, the British and US media published
hundreds of articles about the human rights situation in Haiti.

Dozens of journalists lined up to vilify a democratically elected
Haitian government that, in reality, had temporarily thrown off the
"traditional predators" promoting Western interests.

Just two years on, a peer-reviewed report published in a prestigious
scientific journal showing that Western policy has again unleashed
mass killing on Haiti has simply been ignored. The US and UK
governments have of course responded with silence. As though
functioning as a fully-fledged state-run propaganda system, the
watchdogs of our 'free press' have followed suit.

You see, it all depends on whom is doing the killing.  And, more
precisely, on whether or not the killing and the suffering can be
blamed on an officially-designated demon.  As a rule, when killing
and suffering can be blamed on an officially-designated demon--and my
absolute favorite example over the past 15 years has been Slobodan
Milosevic or the Bosnian Serbs or simply ethnic Serbs per se during
the contests over the fate of the former Socialist Federal Republic
of Yugoslavia, ca. 1991 through the present--though I should add that
the case of the light-skinned Arabs of Khartoum ranks pretty high,
too, as does "Islamic Fascism" more generally--then the professionals
who work for the news media will zero-right-in on the blameworthy,
leaving no stone unturned, no corpse uncounted, no missing person
uncommemorated.  And this practice occurs regardless of whether the
blame is fair and balanced or an out-and-out fabrication.


But what is most striking about the last four items that I catalogued
at the outset (i.e., by AP, the Toronto Globe and Mail, The Guardian,
and the Montreal Gazette) is that each one of them takes an interest
in the Kolbe – Hutson study only because, and only insofar as, other
parties have sought to discredit it.

Thus during its very short public life (i.e., the study is not quite
two-weeks-old yet), the Kolbe- Hutson study has gone from being
almost completely ignored (except in Canada) to being trashed, all
without ever passing through a period when its findings were so much
as reported.—Can you imagine a report published in a highly
respected, peer-reviewed, scientific journal making comparably
startling claims about the levels of violence--including sexual
violence--in theaters of conflict such as Bosnia and Herzegovina,
Kosovo, or The Sudan receiving the same kind of ignore-it or bash-it
treatment?

Still more precisely yet, it isn’t so much the Kolbe – Hutson
findings of large-scale violence in post-Aristide Haiti that have
come under criticism and attack.  Quite the contrary.  It is the
integrity of the researchers themselves that is under fire.  And one
researcher in particular—Athena Kolbe.

Thus each of the three reports by AP, the Globe and Mail, and The
Guardian, as well as the editorial in the Montreal Gazette, have
focused on what they or the people they are quoting descry as a
alleged “conflict of interest” in Athena Kolbe’s background.
According to AP (“Haiti: UK medical journal investigating author of
study,” Sept. 7 - 8):


British medical journal The Lancet said Thursday it is investigating
an alleged conflict of interest by an author of a report in the
current issue that claims 8,000 people were slain under Haiti's
interim government.

A critic of the study accused one of the report's authors of being a
supporter of former President Jean-Bertrand Aristide, whose ouster
following a violent uprising led to the installation of the
U.S.-backed interim government that ran the country from 2004 to 2006.

Astrid James, a deputy editor of The Lancet, said the journal is
investigating the allegations, but stands by the report, which also
said up to 35,000 women were sexually abused while the interim
government ruled the troubled Caribbean nation.

The journal took the action after learning that Athena Kolbe, one of
two U.S. authors of the report, had volunteered in 1995 at an
orphanage founded by Aristide and has written articles in various
newspapers in support of Aristide while he was president and after.

Kolbe, a researcher at Wayne State University in Detroit, Michigan,
denied any conflict.


As the Globe and Mail described it (“Author of Lancet article on
Haiti investigated,” Sept. 7 <http://tinyurl.com/f7nvr>), “Ms. Kolbe
herself is now the subject of controversy after revelations that the
30-year-old master's degree student at Wayne State University's
school of social work in Detroit used to be an advocacy journalist
who wrote under the name Lyn Duff and worked at a Haitian orphanage
founded by Mr. Aristide.”

Then in the very next two paragraphs, excerpts from a “letter of
complaint to The Lancet” drafted by one Charles Arthur of the
U.K.-based Haiti Support Group were reproduced.  These two paragraphs
read as follows:


> "How can Kolbe/Duff's research into the issues of human-rights
violations be regarded as objective when she herself states that for
3.5 years she worked with the Lafanmi Selavi centre for street
children, where she befriended Aristide himself and presumably some
of the boys who later left the centre . . . [who] then acted as armed
enforcers?" Charles Arthur, co-ordinator of the British-based Haiti
Support Group, wrote this week in a letter of complaint to The Lancet.

"There is a concerted international campaign to distort news and
manipulate information about Haiti with the apparent aim of repairing
the reputation of Aristide. I am concerned The Lancet has unwittingly
been used as part of the pro-Aristide propaganda campaign."<


What is important to notice here, I believe, is that the Charles
Arthur letter has not been published by The Lancet—and if it ever is
published, one day, it won’t be published by The Lancet for several
weeks.


(Quick aside: See if you can find a copy of Charles Arthur's letter,
either at The Lancet's website or the website of this Haiti Support
Group.  I know I for one haven't found it yet.)


My hunch is that this Charles Arthur letter entered circulation as a
P.R. - type news release on behalf of the Haiti Support Group (and
whomever supports it), and that the newspapers that have chosen to
cite it have decided that it possesses a great deal of credibility,
as opposed to the Kolbe – Hutson study itself.  I honestly don’t know
much of anything about Charles Arthur or the Haiti Support Group. But
for AP, the Toronto Globe and Mail, The Guardian, and the Montreal
Gazette to have given greater weight to an as-yet unpublished letter
to the editor of The Lancet than they did to The Lancet’s decision to
publish a peer-reviewed study of violence in post-Aristide Haiti is a
pretty remarkable fact, I think.  And a pretty revealing fact, too.

It certainly makes me wonder whether there might be a concerted
international campaign to distort news and manipulate information
about Haiti, with the apparent aim of preserving the reputation of
the powers that overthrew the democratically-elected government of
Jean-Bertrand Aristide over the course of February, 2004, and that
subsequently undertook the management of the country’s political and
economic institutions, both via the United Nations and more direct
methods.  Needless to say, it also makes me concerned about the
possibility that that AP, the Toronto Globe and Mail, The Guardian,
and the Montreal Gazette have quite wittingly permitted themselves to
become accomplices in an anti-Aristide, pro-military-interventionary
propaganda campaign.—What do you think?

To date, the Montreal Gazette has turned out to be most harsh of all
toward the Kolbe – Hutson study.  According to its September 11
editorial (“Haiti study deserved to be trashed”), “Kolbe's
authorship, coupled with her involvement with an orphanage founded
and run by Aristide, constitutes an obvious conflict of interest.”

Involvement with an orphanage founded and run by the
Lavalas-founding, table-overturning,
preferential-option-for-the-poor-spewing demon himself—now there is
an obvious reason to discredit the study’s findings, based on the
obvious biases of one of its co-authors.

To reproduce this monstrous Montreal Gazette editorial in full):


> A recent study by the respected British medical journal, the Lancet,
contains explosive allegations about violence in Haiti. Its most
shocking finding is that in a 22-month period following the ouster of
former president Jean-Bertrand Aristide, 8,000 people were murdered
and 35,000 women raped or sexually assaulted. Half of the victims
were children.

The study was innovative, using satellite-based global-positioning
technology to select a representative sample of addresses that the
principal author of the study, Athena Kolbe, could then visit to ask
questions. And great efforts were apparently made to ensure the
accuracy and reliability of the information from respondents.

The survey's conclusions heavily imply that violence and chaos in
Haiti increased after Aristide's forced flight into exile to Africa
in February 2004.

Small problem, though: Kolbe neglected to mention she is an advocacy
journalist who wrote under a pseudonym, knew Aristide personally, and
had worked more or less directly for him for 31/2 years.

In her defence, she told the Globe and Mail that the Lancet knew of
her pseudonym and that she was not a political supporter of
Aristide's Lavalas party, although she conceded to having "warm
feelings toward" the man. Her study was dumped into trash cans around
the world.

Skewed, alarmist reporting can sometimes achieve precisely the
opposite of its intended effect - it can desensitize and alienate
people who would otherwise be receptive and valued allies in
combating the ills the research purports to chronicle.

Why did the Lancet not see fit to disclose to its readers the
information it apparently had about Kolbe? In fact, the last page of
the study includes this unequivocal statement: "We declare that we
have no conflict of interest." But Kolbe's authorship, coupled with
her involvement with an orphanage founded and run by Aristide,
constitutes an obvious conflict of interest.

The study makes no mention of Canadian police or Canadian
peacekeepers who were then deployed in Haiti. Yet in an interview
with The Gazette, Kolbe alleged drunken off-duty Canadian and U.S.
troops were among the worst in making unwanted sexual advances to
Haitian women and girls. Why make such a claim only verbally?

Since no similar survey was done under Aristide or pre-Aristide, no
conclusion can be drawn about violent-crime trends in Haiti.

Plainly, deposing Aristide has done nothing to alleviate Haiti's
extreme poverty, crime and wanton brutality. But in this tale of
misdirected enthusiasm and lack of academic rigour there is an
important lesson for academics, for respected journals, for the
media, and for media consumers.<



In other words: To hell with methodology—coordinate sampling, GPS,
demographics, and the like.  Just shoot the messenger.  And wash your
hands of the matter.  The same way it's been handled for centuries.

Can anybody tell me the last time you read objections such as these
raised about a study published in a venue such as The Lancet?  We all
recall how the study by Les Roberts et al. of mortality rates inside
Iraq both before and after the American war there was treated, for
one stellar example.  But I don’t recall Roberts or his colleagues
ever being accused of anything as gross as Athena Kolbe has been.
Nor as quickly: For almost as quickly as the Kolbe – Hutson study was
published, Kolbe’s person was being trashed.


"Human rights abuse and other criminal violations in Port-au-Prince,
Haiti: a random survey of households," <http://tinyurl.com/nnnfj>
Athena R. Kolbe and Royce A. Hutson, The Lancet, Vol. 368, No. 9538,
September 2, 2006

"UN peacekeepers in Haiti," <http://tinyurl.com/s5u44> Editorial, The
Lancet, Vol. 368, No. 9538, September 2, 2006

“Mortality before and after the 2003 invasion of Iraq: cluster sample
survey,” <http://tinyurl.com/r62t7 > Les Roberts et al., The Lancet,
Vol. 364, No. 9448, November 20, 2004

"Open season on Haiti's poor, study finds: UN soldiers often
identified as perpetrators," <http://tinyurl.com/rrwy> Jeff Heinrich,
Montreal Gazette, September 1, 2006

"Canadian troops in Haiti accused of making death, rape threats,"
<http://tinyurl.com/mz8ym> Jeff Heinrich, Montreal Gazette, September
2, 2006

"Police and political groups linked to Haiti sex attacks,"
<http://tinyurl.com/qzlo2> Andrew Buncombe, The Independent,
September 4, 2006.  (Republished in the Sept. 4 Belfast Telegraph.)

"Latortue's disturbing legacy," <http://tinyurl.com/orxe6> Ira
Kurzban, Miami Herald, September 7, 2006

“Haiti: UK medical journal investigating author of study,” Associated
Press, September 7 – 8, 2006

"Military police probe claims troops threatened Haitians," Jeff
Heinrich, Montreal Gazette, September 7, 2006

“Author of Lancet article on Haiti investigated,”
<http://tinyurl.com/f7nvr> Marina Jimenez, Toronto Globe and Mail,
September 7, 2006

“Lancet caught up in row over Haiti
murders," <http://tinyurl.com/lrhnf > Duncan Campbell, The Guardian,
September 8, 2006

"Haiti study deserved to be trashed," Editorial, Montreal Gazette,
September 11, 2006

“U.S. – Haiti,” <http://tinyurl.com/myre7> Noam Chomsky, ZNet, March 9, 2004

“The Illegal Coup in Haiti,” <http://tinyurl.com/rxyhq> Marjorie
Cohn, CounterPunch, March 31, 2004

“Who Removed Aristide?” <http://tinyurl.com/qb5ch> Paul Farmer,
London Review of Books, April 15, 2004 (as posted to ZNet)

“Option Zero in Haiti,” <http://tinyurl.com/rwspn> Peter Hallward,
New Left Review, July 1, 2004 (as posted to ZNet)

"Invisible Violence: Ignoring murder in post-coup Haiti,"
<http://tinyurl.com/pgqme> Jeb Sprague, Extra!, July/August, 2006

For more on Haiti, also see the material archived by the
U.S.-based Council On Hemispheric Affairs
<http://www.coha.org/category/haiti/>

“Haiti – The Traditional Predators,” <http://tinyurl.com/pmese> Media
Lens, September 11, 2006

"'You Are a Dog. You Should Die!' -- Death Threats Against Lancet's
Haiti Human Rights Investigator," <http://tinyurl.com/qp9pz> Jeb
Sprague and Joe Emesberger, CounterPunch, September 11, 2006

"The Lancet on Haiti -- Whom Are Its Critics?"
<http://tinyurl.com/pat34 > Media Lens Forum, September 13, 2006

"Terror in Haiti," <http://tinyurl.com/eaoov> ZNet, September 2, 2006

"Shoot the Messenger," <http://blogs.zmag.org/node/2744> ZNet,
September 12, 2006