1. What the disaster is - this always requires a panicked voice conveying the urgency of the matter with language and physical carriage as well. A 7.0 magnitude earth quake just hit Port-au-Prince, Haiti and the city has just been devastated. We don't have a death count right now, but it could be in the hundreds of thousands!
2. Who is involved - To quote Wolf Blitzer of CNN: "They are very poor and very Black."
3. More panic - We have to help. Enter Great White Hope from stage right, the face of wealthy Western nations who will fix the problem, ease their guilt, and burnish their antiracist credentials.
4. Now that signs of life start to appear, the natives start looting - Enter Crazy Black People from stage left. Sane people would never loot when they were hungry! (sarcasm on my part). This is also the point where Pat Robertson always has to blame the natives for their predicament because they angered God (this applies to White people as well - or those who are nothing like him, i.e. Godlike).
5. How to proceed from here - A number of experts on place-of-the-moment from the West (read Great White Hope) appearing on evening news shows to discuss how to fix the problem. Every once in a while we can allow an expert from the place-of-the-moment, but we certainly can't get carried away . . . what do they know anyway and they moved!
6. A series of stories appear discussing the level of corruption in the place-of-the-moment's government (another version of the Crazy Black People narrative).
7. Disaster fades from the press' imagination (except for Anderson Cooper's - not a criticism of Cooper). Exit rear.
Allow me to take my tongue out of my cheek and really say that the challenge the press faces with covering these stories is that they are solely focused in the here and now because, well, news is new, and history is, well, old, and cannot be put into a nice neat soundbite about the present. However, this leads to highly decontextualized coverage that fails to grapple with the long-term structural challenges in these places that compounded the natural disasters long before the disasters occurred.
What does this mean? Michel Martin of NPR, an exception in her coverage of the earthquake, did a lovely segment on her show discussing Pat Robertson's comment. It inserted the history of Haiti. It makes you wonder if most of the press realizes that people of African heritage have histories, unique histories of their own, that very much color how things look in the present. She actually discussed the 1789 Haitian Revolution! Soooo, Haitians did not make a pact with the devil (we all realized that this was absurd). Why was this the case? Because African-heritage people revolted against the institution of slavery. Yes, Haitians were enslaved and got rid not only of that institution, but also broke their colonial shackles, soon after the American Revolution. While the U.S. received diplomatic recognition and economic trading opportunities throughout the Atlantic World while the British nursed their sores, the Haitians were shunned diplomatically and economically and the French (under Bonaparte, his first defeat before Waterloo) demanded repayment for their lost property (slaves). So, a nation that had nothing now had a debt. Wow . . . that might impact how government forms and how a nation builds itself, right? But this is old. Not news.
Haiti isn't my historical specialty. Neither, frankly, is the U.S. in general or New Orleans in particular. But a little bit of old information can shift the weird tinge of the coverage about these events greatly. Just sayin'.
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