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Mainstream media fails itself on Haiti
coverage
By Peter Phillips
Mar. 4 — On Feb. 29, Richard Boucher from the US State
Department released a press release claiming that Jean Bertrand Aristide
had resigned as president of Haiti and that the United States facilitated
his safe departure. Within hours the major broadcast news stations including
CNN, Fox, ABC, NBC, CBS, and NPR were reporting that Aristide had fled
Haiti. An Associated Press release that evening said “Aristide
resigns, flees into exile.” The next day headlines in the major
newspapers across the country, including the Washington Post, USA Today,
New York Times, and Atlanta Journal Constitution, all announced “Aristide
Flees Haiti.” The Baltimore Sun reported, “Haiti’s first
democratically-elected president was forced to flee his country yesterday
like despots before him.”
However, on Sunday afternoon Feb. 29, Pacific News network with reporters
live in Port-au-Prince Haiti were claiming that Aristide was forced
to resign by the US and taken out of the Presidential Palace by armed
US marines. On Monday morning Amy Goodman with Democracy Now! news show
interviewed Congresswoman Maxine Waters. Waters said she had received
a phone call from Aristide at 9am EST March 1 in which Aristide emphatically
denied that he had resigned and said that he had been kidnapped by US
and French forces. Aristide made calls to others including TransAfrica
founder Randall Robinson, who verified congresswomen Waters’ report.
Mainstream corporate media was faced with a dilemma. Confirmed contradictions
to headlines reports were being openly revealed to hundreds of thousands
of Pacifica listeners nationwide. By Monday afternoon mainstream corporate
media began to respond to the charges. Tom Brokaw on NBC Nightly News,
6:30pm voiced, “Haiti in crisis. Armed rebels sweep into the capital
as Aristide claims US troops kidnapped him; forced him out. The US calls
that nonsense.”
Fox News Network with Brit Hume reported Colin Powell’s comments,
“He was not kidnapped. We did not force him on to the airplane.
He went on to the airplane willingly, and that’s the truth. Mort
Kondracke, executive editor of Roll Call added, “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 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 US. Or it can be framed within
the context of a US denial and dismissed. Unfortunately, the corporate
media seems not at all interested in conducting an investigation into
the charges, seeking witnesses, or verifying contradictions. Nor is
the mainstream media asking or answering the question of why they fully
accept the State Department’s version of the coup in the first
place.
Corporate media certainly had enough pre-warning to determine that Aristide
was not going to willingly leave the country. Aristide had been saying
exactly that for the past month during the armed attacks in the north
of Haiti. Aristide was interviewed on CNN February 26. He explained
that the terrorists, and criminal drug dealers were former members of
the Front for the Advancement and Progress of Haiti (FRAPH), which had
led the coup in 1991 killing 5,000 people. Aristide believed that they
would kill more people if a coup was allowed to happen. It was also
well known in media circles that the US Undersecretary of State for
Latin America Roger Noriega was 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.
As a former priest and liberation theologist, 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 their US partners. For this he
was targeted by the Bush administration. That the US 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 than their being stenographers
for the government. Weapons of mass destruction aside, we need a media
that looks for the truth and exposes the contradictions in the fabrications
of the powerful.
Stern feels Bush-whacked, end is near
Mar. 3 — Howard Stern says the end of his career is closer
than the two years left on his contract. “I know that it’s
over for me,” Stern said Wednesday morning. “I have been really
good at predicting my career and I know when I’m outmatched. It’s
over for me as a broadcaster. I’m checkmated. All they gotta do
is fine us and then we’re gone. And there’s nothing we can
do about it.”
But even with comments like that, Stern is not going down without a
fight. For the past two days the syndicated morning man has been attacking
those he feels are his oppressors -- Clear Channel, the FCC and the
Bush Administration. On March 2, he was pondering the idea of a Million
Moron March on Washington with a legion of his faithful fans. “Can
you imagine CNN having to cover this and putting the Million Moron March
up on the screen?” he joked when the idea was hatched.
Stern has also started to question ties between Clear Channel and the
Bush Administration and now suggests his change in heart about his support
for President Bush is the real reason for him being suspended by Clear
Channel. “If you don’ t think me going after Bush got me thrown
off those stations, you got another thing coming,” said Stern.
“This has nothing to do with anything I said.”
Stern laughed and was miffed at the perception by the mainstream media
that he wasn’t on Clear Channel stations because of indecent content
on his show. Discussing a clip from The Sharon Osbourne Show where she
said “Apparently the talk got very raunchy when Paris Hilton’s
boyfriend was on,” Stern stammered: “Wrong! It wasn’t
that raunchy. I mean, I asked some questions. I said, ‘Did you
ever have anal sex?’ But that’s nothing out of the ordinary.”
“Nothing that hasn’t happened here every day for the last
ten years,” added Robin Quivers.
“My days here are numbered because I dared to speak out against
the Bush administration and say that the religious agenda of George
W. Bush concerning stem cell research and gay marriage is wrong,”
Stern continued. “And that what he is doing with the FCC is pushing
this religious agenda. And also the fact that the guy takes more vacation
than any President ever. It’s time for him to leave. Having said
that pushed me off the air in six markets.”
Stern says the end game of him being thrown off the air is already set,
predicting “The FCC in a matter of weeks will come out with a trumped
up list of things I said that they find offensive that Infinity will
have to fire me.” Later in the show Stern said he was “tempted
to shut my mouth about all of it, because it will go away.” He
then added “I don’t think we can stop it, short of me calling
up President Bush and saying ‘Look man, I’m going to support
you, so don’t do this.’ ”
Supporting President Bush’s Democratic opponent isn’t attractive
to Stern either. “Unfortunately, when they asked [John Kerry] about
it, he completely skirted the issue, so it leaves me little recourse
in terms of going to him.”
As for celebrity and media support of his free speech rights, Stern
doesn’t expect it. “Most of Hollywood and most of the media
will be happy to see me gone. They will not fight for my First Amendment
rights, because they don’t like me. I make fun of them. I goof
on them. I’m dangerous to them. Everyone wants me to go down. They’ve
been praying for this for 20 years.”
Stern lit into Clear Channel on a couple of occasions. For two days
now he has been questioning why he was suspended over a caller using
the N-word, and asking why the new zero tolerance policy wasn’t
used on Ryan Seacrest. “How come the F-word and the S-word are
going out on other shows? Don’t they own KIIS-FM in Los Angeles?
Didn’t Ryan Seacrest’s first day have the F-word and the S-word?
Why was the guy not fired?”
Stern also brought up the hiring of Michael Savage at CC’s KPRC/Houston.
Savage was fired from MSNBC for saying a caller was a sodomite who should
“get AIDS and die.”
“Clear Channel had no problem hiring him after comments like that,
because he’s pro-Bush,” Stern alleged.
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