The Los Angeles Times ran a series of photographs of desperate Haitians coping in the aftermath of a devastating earthquake with captions that kept deploying words like “looting.” Would you enter a collapsed supermarket to take food to starving children and babies? Then you too are a looter. These pictures do convey desperation, says Rebecca Solnit, but they don’t convey crime. She argues that the media tend to be obsessed with property and headlines about assaults on property, and misrepresent events as looting or panic, needlessly inciting hostility and hysteria on the part of local authorities and causing more suffering. When the rest of us contemplate the Haitians’ plight through media reports, we need to remember that:
…what is absolutely accurate, in Haiti right now, and on Earth always, is that human life matters more than property, that the survivors of a catastrophe deserve our compassion and our understanding of their plight, and that we live and die by words and ideas, and it matters desperately that we get them right.
When the media is the disaster: Covering Haiti
The Los Angeles Times ran a series of photographs of desperate Haitians coping in the aftermath of a devastating earthquake with captions that kept deploying words like “looting.” Would you enter a collapsed supermarket to take food to starving children and babies? Then you too are a looter. These pictures do convey desperation, says Rebecca Solnit, but they don’t convey crime. She argues that the media tend to be obsessed with property and headlines about assaults on property, and misrepresent events as looting or panic, needlessly inciting hostility and hysteria on the part of local authorities and causing more suffering. When the rest of us contemplate the Haitians’ plight through media reports, we need to remember that: