Haiti: Was the coverage ‘disaster porn’?

Make no mistake, said James Martin in AmericaMagazine.org, the global news media did humanity “an enormous service” by bringing the horrors of the Haitian earthquake to the world’s attention. But it was hard not to wonder, watching hour after lurid hour of carnage and agony, “when does coverage become exploitation?” TV cameras tagged along as one distraught family buried their daughter in a crowded cemetery. Survivors pulled from collapsed buildings after days of terror and hunger were accosted by reporters asking “that old chestnut, ‘How do you feel?’” CNN’s Anderson Cooper, at one point, even stuck his microphone into the rubble to catch the “terrified screams and choked sobs” of a trapped victim. Newspapers were no less guilty, providing breathless, purple-prose descriptions of stacks of sheet-covered corpses and “dead children with stiff limbs and bulging eyes,” said Brendan O’Neill in TheFirstPost.co.uk. This wasn’t journalism. It was “tawdry disaster porn.”

I hate to break it to you, said Howard Kurtz in The Washington Post, but individual human suffering is what gets people’s attention. The reporters in Haiti over the past few weeks handled the tragedy “the same way journalism always has when faced with mass disaster: by trying to humanize it.” And they did it well—so well in this case that the world was moved to donate tens of millions of dollars to the Haitian aid effort. The reporters were more than ghoulish spectators, said Joanne Ostrow in DenverPost.com. They “were able to relay specific needs, pinpoint geographic bottlenecks,” and in the case of CNN’s Dr. Sanjay Gupta, actually perform surgery on injured victims. I wonder if any of those patients, alive because CNN sent Gupta into the quake zone, is feeling “exploited.”

Maybe not, said Guy Trebay in The New York Times, but there was still something unseemly about the sight of CNN’s gym-buffed disaster correspondents, “in form-fitting charcoal T-shirts,” strutting around amid Haiti’s misery. CNN’s Cooper and Jason Carroll were so buff and nattily attired that they looked as if they were headed to a Manhattan nightclub. Overall, the quality of the reporting was equally superficial, said Robert Jensen in OpEdNews.com. Cooper and his photogenic colleagues pursued the “visually compelling and dramatic” angles of the story, while glossing over the two centuries of “political disasters” that left Haiti so vulnerable to the natural disaster. It may have made great television, “but it’s not great journalism.”

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