It Bleeds, But It Doesn't Lead

Hurricane Jeanne took the lives of over 2,000 people in Haiti and virtually destroyed the island nation’s third largest city. The loss of life has been so great and sudden that bulldozers have been employed to create mass-graves. However, if one’s source of information was solely the American media, one would have little idea that any of this had happened.

The scant attention the mainstream American press devotes to any hurricane’s path through the impoverished islands of the Caribbean is certainly frustrating. But because of the grievous destruction in both human and material terms, Jeanne seems a particularly outrageous case—almost all attention was focused on far less deadly damage to southern Florida. After all, it’s a swing state.

So little was said about its devastating track through Jamaica, Haiti, and the rest of the Caribbean on many network newscasts, it seemed as if Jeanne magically appeared off the U.S. coast to batter Florida. Then, in the aftermath, far too much of the Jeanne coverage has been sensationalist—for several days one of the main stories was about a zoo missing one of its alligators—and far too little of it serious and focused on the true human cost of a storm as powerful as Jeanne.

American news organizations should, obviously, cover the hurricane’s progress through one of our largest and most populous states, but a disaster as serious as that which befell Haiti warrants more than a few lines at the end of an AP wire. The misery now engulfing Gonaives is as serious as any natural disaster America has encountered over the past decade. The city’s sewage system was ripped apart, people are being evacuated because of fears of disease and food is so scarce that survivors have rioted.

For those Americans curious enough to seek out a reliably complete source for hurricane coverage—or reporting on a host of international events little-known in the United States—the BBC and other foreign news sources are often the only options. Many foreign news agencies regularly report on stories, from Haiti to Palestine and Iraq, that the American media either ignores or only mentions in brief summaries or at the end of stories. Indeed, the American media are constantly preoccupied with the status of Americans at the expense of all others; it seems that American lives are valued as far more important than those of foreigners.

The same unfortunate disregard for the suffering and death of foreigners in Haiti is also, regrettably, seen in American coverage of Iraq. The American media immediately and in great detail cover the deaths of American soldiers and constantly replay stories relating to the deaths of American civilian contractors. However, the same news organizations that seem so overly concerned with American lives make scant mention of far larger numbers of Iraqi dead, side-noting casualties that sometimes get into the dozens in just a single day.

As long as the American press keeps American citizens in the dark, the ultimate arbiters of United States policy—the voters—will be frustratingly uninformed. And until American voters realize the significance of events abroad and their interconnection to life at home, the free world will not get the leadership it deserves.