A rich and complex city it is, New Orleans. I'm sure you (as my friends there) have a nuanced understanding all your own of devastation that affects an entire place...

Here's to the people of Haiti, as to you!

Yeah. These two guys who wrote the competing stories are probably not doing any investigative work-- it is suprising that both "angles" are so opposite, since often the media is an echo chamber.

The media exploits, sensationalizes and often furthers stereotypes with no regard for the way that they are dehumanizing whole cultures.

That said-- in New Orleans no one saw rotting bodies lying in the streets of "white" communities for days or people hunted down and mercenery groups like Blackwater employed by the government with orders from the Governor to shoot and kill looters. So, there was a black/white divide. The same military tactics are at work in Haiti. No aid let through, 'til the situation is "secure." This has caused untold Haitians to die. Doctors without Borders, CARICOM, and others were turned away. Cutters are patrolling the waters to turn away anyone attempting to leave for the US shores. They have removed inmates from an immigration facility in order to make room for Haitian refugees who might filter through the patrols monitoring Haitian shores. http://www.countercurrents.org/lantier180110.htm

In Haiti right now, the media is pushing the "angle" of lack of security and fear of riots and disorder-- this is the echo chamber at its worst. To criminalize, hungry, sick and desperately poor people should be a crime, punishable by stripping the person who commits it of all their possessions and leaving them sick and homeless on the streets.

You raise very good points about distortions and inaccuracies in these reports. As Mary Bivens says, the media is a business, and in that business it's always been a goal of most news organizations to get "the story" to its customers first. Of course, the more compelling the story, the mores customers. Accuracy, altho always striven for, often comes in second place to the "get it first" mindset.

From the examples you give us here, I would guess that the Washington Post report is likely to be the more accurate. I say this only because of the detail that's provided - the people who owned the houses on the hill, their being driven to safety in limos. The NYT report, being more general, sound a little like the kind of term papers written by bright students who didn't study and are faking it. Of course, the Post reporter could be making stuff up out of whole cloth, assuming that in the mass confusion nobody could hold him or her accountable. The reporters on the ground are human, subject to all the shortcomings that come with their species. The editors back home are more apt to take liberties with the facts they receive from the field in order to have maximum impact with the customers.

Tell CNN to stop hyping fears of violence in Haiti. For shame. #haiti

I can't seem to post the link, but a story about this is on Mediahacker dot org

@The Zen Haitian--Uh, there WERE bodies left rotting in relatively wealthy and certainly in white neighborhoods for weeks. The famous picture of a woman's body, hastily buried where it was found by neighbors and covered with a scrap of tarp reading "HERE LIES VERA GOD HELP US" was taken on the corner of Jackson and Magazine Streets--that's a decent neighborhood full of upscale clothing shops, galleries, and antiques markets.

I have also seen pictures of a body tethered to a stop sign on Elysian Fields across from St. Raphael's church on the border of Gentilly and Lakeview--again, a very nice section of town.

St. Bernard Parish, which was completely flooded and almost entirely white, was still pulling bodies out six months after the storm.

The two stories….at least as to the extent you have quoted them….are actually more similar than you might think from a cursory analysis.

Both articles are vague, but the Post article has an important flaw that creates the impression that the two articles are say very different things.

In the Times article, the reporter presents a canard of popular belief, which is that the wealthy live on the hills, away from the epicenter of the earthquake, and then, in the subsequent paragraph in your quote, reports that both large and small homes have been toppled by the quake.

This is quite accurate. There are wealthy enclaves down in the flats as well as up on the hillsides. I’ve never been there, but I know there are resort communities on the coast, as there always are on tropical islands. So, the Times reporter was being vague, but accurate, in his reporting that some wealthy people’s homes were destroyed.

The Post article, however, is more inaccurate than vague. The Post reporter writes that the quake “mostly spared homes and businesses up the mountain in the cool, green suburb of Petionville.”

In this case, the word “mostly” creates the inaccurate impression that the writer has counted the number of homes in Petionville that were damaged by the earthquake, because “mostly” is a definitive word. Anything over 51% of the total number of items in a group can be described as “most.”

The correct word is “some”, a word that suggests there are an unknown number of units in a group and therefore would have been a more accurate depiction of the situation. Some is more than a few, which is defined as three or less, but less than 100% of a given quantity.

One of the problems with journalism today is that there are too few reporters with too many beats to cover, so that no one actually becomes an expert about anything.

Neither of these stories were well-written, or well-edited. They are what we used to call “puff pieces” written on the fly to fill space when something is needed on a given topic and there’s no hard news to fill the hole. Factual information is non-existent because there are no facts – only impressions.

There’s a misconception in reporting that the camera never lies. In point of fact, cameras often create stories. I guarantee you that there were groups of people following the cameras around in the streets of Port-au-Prince, and that they started to act out more urgently when the cameras were on them. If you want closely, you can actually see this happening in the clips that are getting on the air.

This is an example of Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle at work. The observer changes the event, each and every time.

There’s another myth called the myth of objective reporting.
A man holds up a convenience store. Ten minutes after the event, ten eye witnesses will give ten different accounts about what happened.

Reporters are no different. As a reporter, I often covered storie and, when I read the competition’s coverage of the same event, I would scratch my head and wonder if we were at the same place at the same time. When I was the subject of news coverage, I was amazed at how differently different news operations reported the same event in which I was involved, and even more amazed when none of them could get it right.

It’s time to disabuse ourselves of the notion that there’s some objective thing out there called “the truth.” All we have to work with are opinions, and opinions about opinions.

Excellent post with many good points. Although you were quite gracious rather than critical, as a journalist, I am apalled at what passes for good reporting and this is one of the best examples of the sorry state of journalism in America. MB is correct about the motivation: "The love of money is the root of all evil" and much of what is written in newspapers nowadays, giving false and misleading information is just plain evil because it distorts truth perpetuates lies.

For what it's worth, Vera Smith (the woman buried underneath the tarp in that famous photo) was a Mexican immigrant. By the time she was buried (five days after being killed by a hit-and-run driver in the aftermath of the storm), she had decomposed so badly it was hard to tell if she was black, white, man, or woman.

Her neighbors in the Irish Channel (which did not flood) were all different races and of different income levels. Billy Sothern is right about New Orleans geography--it is far more racially and economically mixed than most American cities. The French Quarter sits two blocks from the Iberville Housing Projects. The mansions of St. Charles are two blocks from the urban wasteland of Central City. It's like this over almost the entire city.

When I lived in Haiti in the 80s, the managers (as opposed to us volunteers, I was a Peace Corps volunteer, but there were other sorts) of aid agencies like CARE lived in Petionville. Staying with friends who were house-sitting, my experience of these houses was that they were solidly built, cement houses. Like a middle-class house in, say Florida, but with less style. All the houses had high fences and often bars on the first floor windows.

In the gutters, water ran. Some poor people scooped it up, washed clothes in it, or bathed. The water to the houses was prone to interruptions and might go for months only being on part of the day. The P'ville houses had cisterns, so the showers would run, the toilets flush, dishes and clothes could be washed, but too free use of water (as in filling the buckets of anyone who showed up at your front gate) was very likely to lead to the house running out. So, no one ordered the gardener to fill the buckets of the people bathing in the gutters outside the fence. There would be more buckets than could be filled and some danger from a disappointed mob.

The elite of Cap Haitian, the second largest city, lived in nice enough houses. I toured the house where Duvalier (then president) stayed on his visit to Cap Haitian. Presumably it was the nicest house. The family managed to get a phone line installed only because the president was going to be a guest. The house was a nice old gingerbread. It would be at home on Martha's vineyard, but it was nothing like a palace. I will add that Port-au-Prince was the hopping place and Cap Haitian, the second largest city, was a backwater.

It was not uncommon for Haitians with an in to the elite to chose to be, say, taxi drivers in New York City over the life of an elite in Haiti. People who'd spent time in NY said at the parties that the Duvaliers attended, envelopes of cash were handed out. Sometimes the taxi drivers quietly left, even in the US not willing to sneer openly.

My experience of the elite, such that I met was varied. Anyone who was educated and had a lifestyle of an average middle class American had to deal with facing the endless poverty in the country. Deciding to fill the buckets and live without flushing toilets and make regular visits to the outhouse in the end of the yard (every house had one, the water was not dependable) or not fill the buckets and have a flushing toilet.

We volunteers who tried to rescue people -- mine two attempts were a woman miscarrying at 6 months along a dirt road hours from her home and a pre-term, baby born with a blob on its head -- eventually learned that it is almost impossible to stop a tragedy. All the middle class (Elite?) knew that. They'd built that shell that let them drive right by. They'd seen a million tragedies. They had the people bathing in the gutter outside their houses.

Some were people who fiercely loved their country and worked hard for the betterment of their fellow citizens. Of those, many didn't think the average illiterate peasant could be trusted to know what was right. Some were people who hoped for the best, but tried to live their lives without harming others, but not sacrificing themselves. Some were like the nurse who was supposed to care for the baby I tried to rescue -- too concerned about the state of her manicure and the spotlessness of her uniform to actually touch a patient, not to mention change a bedpan (and the national hospital had a very faint odor of unchanged bedpans and unchanged bandages. Barely noticeable at first, but it drove this non-smoker to regular smoking breaks to get the smell out of my nose).

The elite coffee exporters in Cap Haitian had seen a slow erosion of their income. Their parents had all gone (where? who knows, they were in their 20s, tending the business). Where once a new truck cost 60 sacks of coffee, now it would be 600. Facing falling incomes, they had little extra to spare the farmers, who tended to pick their beans underripe to prevent theft of the ripe coffee beans.

One was a believer in Marx and he was sure the peasants would rise up and revolt against his ilk in a communist revolution. Philosophically, he though this was what the country needed, but carried a gun (very rare in those days) to keep himself alive after the revolution.

This is all from the mid 80s.

I was a relief worker in New Orleans about 6 weeks after Katrina, when civilian relief agencies like mine and residents were allowed into the city.

A few days after I arrived, news organizations showed up to report on "New Orleans coming back to life". I remember especially that Anderson Cooper was set up on Bourbon St. to show that the French Quarter was bustling with people again.

I talked to people back home who saw the reports and thought that the city was back to normal, based on the activity they were seeing. What they couldn't see, but what I knew, was that the only people on Bourbon St. were relief workers who had to be up early the next day to work so mainly we walked around and stuck our heads into the bars looking to see if we recognized anyone from another agency to network with (communications were spotty at best so we tried to network face to face when we could). The only people who were drinking were those who were still searching through the devastation for bodies, and no one was in the mood for partying when the dead were still scattered all around. After 10 PM we all went home so we'd be ready to work in the morning.

Meanwhile, the residents who had made it back to New Orleans typically had used all their immediate cash to return, and with their homes ruined, left the city at night because of the curfew and the fact that there was no place to stay. They weren't hanging out in the French Quarter, most of which was either closed until they could get staff and the permit to open, or was barely open with limited staff and service.

It really gave me a first hand look at how distorted information can become, either intentionally or not by what is shown or not shown, said or not said. The complexity of what was going on, as well as the bleakness, probably wouldn't have made for good stories and so viewers were left with a completely different understanding of what was happening than the people who were actually there.

I assume similar things are happening in Haiti with reality vs. reporting.

But, especially for those of us who have seen a complicated and nuanced place reduced to generalities by someone without sufficient grasp of the place to begin with, it should be a reminder that, from this distance and in the midst of a crisis, it is hard to get any real read of the texture a place as complex as Haiti.

Could anything be truer? Thank you.