A good criticism of NYTimes and Wash Post Haiti coverage:

[AP]

http://www.berkeleydailyplanet.com/text/article.cfm?issue=03-05-04&storyID=18410

UnderCurrents: Bush And Media Mark Up Blank Haitian Slate
J. DOUGLAS ALLEN-TAYLOR (03-05-04)

Like most Americans, I find that I know very little about Haiti.

..

“He made the decision to give up power on Saturday evening,” Christopher Marquis wrote in the New York Times, “hours after the White House in a statement questioned his fitness to rule.” Haiti’s crisis, the Bush administ ration wrote in a statement, “is largely of Mr. Aristide’s making.”

But there was a curiousness to the write-up’s in both the Times and the Washington Post of those last hours of the Aristide government. Lydia Polgreen and Tim Weiner of the Times report ed March 1 that Aristide had “resigned” and “fled” the country, and both the Times and Post articles of that day paraphrased the questions the Haitian President was supposed to have asked in order to facilitate his exile. But even though both papers exten sively quoted individuals who spoke with Aristide in those hours, not a single one quoted Aristide as simply saying, “I wish to resign.” In fact, there were no direct quotations from Aristide at all.

And the choice of words used by Times and Post reporters to describe those conversations—at second hand—were also interesting. Aristide “meekly” asked American ambassador if his resignation might help, Mr. Marquis wrote. The Times reported those questions as “poignant,” the Post as “plaintive.” Peter Slevin and Mike Allen of the Post wrote that Aristide “ran out of bluster,” with Marquis of the Times gave an editorial opinion that the Haitian President was “signaling disconnection from the violence engulfing his country.”

[AP]

1. Some more from the article:

Do you think that these “embe dded” characterizations had no bearing on Americans’ rapidly-forming opinion about Aristide? Read them again, and think about the image they conjure. A pitiful little man, weak and terrified, unable to understand this sudden turn of events in his fortune, turns, at the very end, for help from the benevolent older brother—the U.S.—for whom he has so long held such scorn. How sad.

This is all the more important when you come to realize that misters Marquis and Slevin and Allen neither heard these Aristide conversations themselves, nor spoke with anyone from Aristide’s side who might have characterized them in another way.

..

Meanwhile, on the day after Aristide’s ouster—however he went—the Times was not finished with him. In describing Aristide’s presidency, Tim Weiner of the Times wrote “Aristide rose from his priesthood in Haiti’s slums to his presidency by preaching democracy. But once in power, he dashed the hopes of many who had hailed him as a champion of the oppressed… In the end, the disillusioned say, he could not practice what he had preached.”

It would be nice if Mr. Weiner had followed this up with some opinion directly from those Haitian oppressed. Instead, he quotes only U.S. sources. “As a politician, reverted to the same authoritarianism he had condemned for so long,” Mr. Weiner quotes former U.S. diplomat Robert E. White as saying. “I don’t believe Aristide had a democratic bone in his body.”

[The Magistrate]

2. There Is A Sense, My Friend

In which Mr. Weiner is correct. Fr. Aristide did not quite perform what he had promised; he did not sufficient break the established elite of the place, and replace them thoroughly enough with his followers. By local standards, he played an awfully gentle game, and has fallen in consequence.

The statement of Mr. White is eggregious blather. Were Fr. Aristede a genuine authoritarian, even a left authoritarian, he would still be in power.

"LET'S GO GET THOSE BUSH BASTARDS!"

[rman]

4. I think no game Aristide can play is a match

for the games played by agents of the corporate powers that be.

Except to get the whole thing out in the open.
But that's kinda hard to do with the media establishment being one of the agents.

[AP]

3. kick for a decent criticism of the media.