Haiti in the Media

For my media blog I picked Egypt because I thought that a country in the Middle East would offer an extremely interesting and contrasting point of view to the American media. As for the specific media outlet, I chose to follow the Al-Ahram Weekly, a weekly English language version of the Al-Ahram newspaper. I thought that this paper would be one of the most interesting to follow because it is the most widely circulated Egyptian paper and is also mostly owned by the Egyptian government who appoints its editors. Although this might potentially bias some of the reporting, it also offers views that could never be found in a more “western” paper.

The first article I found about Haiti was a scathing critique of U.S. military intervention in Haiti titled “Making the most of disaster”. The article sets the tone quickly with the first line reading, “The militarisation of emergency relief by the Western powers, and in particular the United States of America, is scandalous, disgraceful and unscrupulous.” The accusations were similar to those made by others in the foreign press but this article took it much further. In only the fourth paragraph the writer claims, “Haitians had hopes in redemption by an African-American president in the venerable tradition of their own legendary Toussaint Louverture. He has failed them.” The article continues on to list the U.S.'s history of neocolonialism in Haiti and blame us for Haiti's current economic state. It then criticizes America's economic bailout as well as the administrations of Obama, Bush, and Clinton.

Another article I found by the same author was a strange, brief recap of the situation in Haiti. Titled “Horror in Haiti”, the article gives a very quick summary of the recent events as well as several unfortunate incidents Haiti has suffered in the last few years. Then the article poses a rather odd question, “Could this misfortune be because Haiti in April 2003 declared Voodoo the official religion of the country on par with other recognised faiths?” Although the writer does not seem to be suggesting this to be the case, he does go on to explain why this is unsettling to the Christian population, as well as a brief history of voodoo in Haiti, at which point the article abruptly ends.

The articles from Al-Ahram were drastically different from stories about Haiti from CNN and the New York Times. The articles from Al-Ahram completely downplayed the relief efforts of the American people; an outpouring of support that I see as deeply moving and generous. The two news sources represented both ends of a spectrum to me; from what I read the American media never mentioned the concerns of foreign nations toward American imperialism, while the Al-Ahram never mentioned the tremendous efforts of American aid. The other glaring difference I saw was that the Al-Ahram seemed to make no effort to present the news objectively. The first article in particular was filled with terribly weighted words and opinions that could not be substantiated. It was extremely surprising to read a report from a newspaper written in this way, as it is a far cry from the tenets of American journalism and will take some getting used to.