a1008: Re: a931: (a898) News reporting: Chamberlain replies toWharram objection (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

[Please note:  the discussion is moving a bit far from Haiti.  I will
limit futher discussion more specifically to Haiti.  Bob Corbett]

From: kevin pina <kpinbox@hotmail.com>

"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".


I wonder how the Republicans would react if the majority of the press in the
United States referred to him as the "contested" President of the United
States of America due to the events in Florida? While everyone admits, up to
this point, that at most only 7 Senatorial seats were effected by the
counting methods used on May 21, 2000, and while those Senators have
resigned as an offer of compromise to the solution, the Haitian press
continues to refer to the remaining Senators and Deputies as "conteste" or
contested.  I have never once heard them refer to the Convergence, clearly
an opposition whose greatest constituency resides in Washington and not
Haiti, as an "opposition conteste" or contested opposition. This seems to
clearly display an obvious bias in their coverage which tends to focus on
the negative at the expense of anything positive. And yes, believe or not,
there are positive things going on as well. There are exceptions but they
are few and far between these days.

A second reference that has become popular among the Haitian press is to
refer to Lavalas and the Aristide government as a "regime" rather than a
government. The term "regime" is highly value laden as it has traditionally
been associated with anti-democratic governments bereft of popular support.

Does the Haitian press have the freedom and right to place their reporting
of events in Haiti within such a biased context? I would say absolutely, but
to pretend that they are playing the role of "makeshift guardians of
freedom" is an appeal to romanticism that is simply not supported by reality
on the ground.

Although the following excerpt was written about Iraq, it clearly has
resonance in the current situation facing tiny Haiti. I don’t mean to imply
that this has been a wholly orchestrated strategy but I do believe it is
important to see events here in their global context as well.

Excerpted from:

He Has Saddam in His Sights
The Bush agenda is nothing less than the re-assertion of American power in
the world, and Iraq is the next target

By Evan Thomas
NEWSWEEK

March 4 issue


After a long period of self-doubt and decline, the CIA is now urgently
gearing up to run covert actions—shades of the agency’s plots to overthrow
the governments of Iran (1953) and Guatemala(1954).

“Psychological warfare,” all the rage in the early years of the cold war,
when capitalism and communism were competing around the globe for “hearts
and minds,” is making a comeback.


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