Phillips: Mainstream media fails on Haiti coverage

However, on the afternoon of February 29, Pacific News Network--with reporters live in Port-au-Prince--claimed that the United States forced Aristide to resign and leave the Presidential Palace with the help of U.S. marines. On Monday morning, Amy Goodman of the "Democracy Now!" news show interviewed Congresswoman Maxine Waters. Rep. Waters said she had received a phone call from Aristide in which Aristide emphatically denied that he had resigned and said that he had been kidnapped by U.S. and French forces. Aristide made calls to others, including TransAfrica founder Randall Robinson, who verified Congresswoman Waters' report.

Mainstream corporate media were faced with a dilemma. Confirmed contradictions to headline reports were being openly revealed to hundreds of thousands of Pacifica listeners nationwide. By Monday afternoon, mainstream corporate media began to respond. Tom Brokaw on that evening's "NBC Nightly News," proclaimed, "Haiti in crisis. Armed rebels sweep into the capital as Aristide claims U.S. troops kidnapped him; forced him out. The U.S. calls that nonsense." Fox News Network with Brit Hume reported Colin Powell's comments: "He was not kidnapped. We did not force him onto the airplane. He went on to the airplane willingly, and that's the truth." Mort Kondracke, executive editor of "Roll Call" said, "Aristide was a thug and a leader of thugs and ran his country into the ground." "The New York Times" in a story buried on page 10 reported that "President Jean-Bertrand Aristide asserted Monday that he had been driven from power in Haiti by the United States in "a coup," an allegation dismissed by the White House as "complete nonsense."

Mainstream news media had a credibility problem. Their original story was openly contradicted. The kidnap story could be ignored or back-paged as was done by many newspapers in the United States. Or it can be framed within the context of a U.S. denial and dismissed. Unfortunately, corporate media seem not at all interested in conducting an investigation, seeking witnesses, or verifying contradictions. Nor are they asking or answering the question of why they fully accepted the State Department's version of the coup in the first place. Corporate media certainly had enough warning to determine that Aristide was not going to willingly leave the country. He had been saying exactly that for the past month. Indeed, he was interviewed on CNN February 26. He explained that the terrorists and criminal drug dealers were former members of the FRAPH, which had led the 1991 coup, killing 5,000 people. Aristide believed that they would kill more people if another coup were allowed to happen. It was also well known in media circles that the U.S. Undersecretary of State for Latin America, Roger Noriega, had been a senior aide to former Senator Jesse Helms, who as chairman of the Senate Foreign Affairs committee was a longtime backer of Haitian dictator Jean Claude Duvalier--and an opponent of Aristide. These facts alone should have been a red flag regarding the State Department's version of events.

As a former priest and liberation theologian, Jean Bertrand Aristide stood for grassroots democracy, alleviation of poverty, and God's love for all human beings. He challenged the neo-liberal globalization efforts of the Haitian upper class and its U.S. partners. For this he was targeted by the Bush administration. That the United States waited until the day after Aristide was gone to send in troops to stabilize the country proves intent to remove him from office.

Mainstream media had every reason to question the State Department's version of the coup in Haiti, but chose instead to report a highly doubtful cover story. We deserve more from our media; they should be more than mere stenographers for the government. Weapons of mass destruction aside, we need media that look for the truth and expose the contradictions in the fabrications of the powerful.

Peter Phillips is a professor of sociology at Sonoma State University and director of Project Censored (http://www.projectcensored.org), a media research organization.

http://www.cjonline.com/stories/031504/opi_phillips.shtml