One of the biggest flaws in the major news media is its apparent allergy to important historical context. Past events that help explain complex present-day contours of wealth and power are either inconvenient or uninteresting to reporters and editors, often rushing to make deadline or publish something splashy that will grab readers and boost revenue.
Even the BBC, often seen as the premier international news channel, recently ran a series of stories along these lines. (more…)
An audio version of my report from Grand Goave aired Monday on Free Speech Radio News. On Thursday I called into the weekly program, “Haiti: The Struggle Continues,” which airs on New York City’s Pacifica station WBAI, to talk in more detail about the report and the student demonstrations I witnessed this week. A recording of the program is here; I come on at about the 25 minute mark.
Published today by Inter-Press News Service. Look for radio version on Monday’s Free Speech Radio News.
PORT-AU-PRINCE, Nov 20 (IPS) – Under a beating sun in the grassy field where two U.N. helicopters landed in Grand Goave last week, 19-year-old Benson Blanc moved his hands as if rapid-firing a gun into the ground in front of him and made a “tok-tok-tok-tok” sound. This is how the soldiers opened fire, he said.
Residents of this quiet seaside town an hour west of Port-Au-Prince were awoken at about 1 a.m. on Nov. 10 by the sound of helicopters flying low overhead. A curious crowd amassed around the aircrafts.
One of the helicopters had mechanical trouble and had to make an emergency landing, said U.N. spokesperson Sophie Boutaud de la Combe. To lighten the load on the damaged helicopter, the Chilean crew moved white boxes of supplies into the other helicopter for several hours.
She also said, in a radio interview broadcast here in the capital city, that troops only fired once into the air in attempt to disperse the crowd. They had called for backup from the local platoon of Sri Lankan U.N. troops.
“When the backup came they started shooting, the population ran away and hid behind the bushes,” Blanc said. “Their chief, Mr. Rodriguez, said that he is not playing with nobody’s ass. He said if anybody wants to cross the field they need to tell him first or he’ll shoot them.” (more…)
The Narco News team often calls its project an “online newspaper.” Isn’t that strange? After all, newspapers are dying. Young people like me don’t read them. Newspapers are going out of business left and right. The circulation of major national papers is down across the board.
Why associate your ground-breaking, independent blogging and reporting website with the stodgy, outdated newspaper model? Why not use a “new media” buzzword, something more attention-getting and edgy? “Online newspaper” sounds boring.
Boring-sounding they may be, those two words happen to describe this digital container for authentic journalism perfectly. The Narco News Bulletin is what a newspaper should be – online. For years newspaper publishers and journalists have complained that the Internet’s bloggers, news aggregators, and abundance of free content are destroying their industry – note the word “industry.” As this site’s publisher has noted, most newspapers fatally wounded themselves by becoming pieces of corporate conglomerates, reliant and partial to their advertisers, ready to downsize for greater profits at a moment’s notice. Blogs have not displaced the highly-valued, deep investigative pieces for which newspapers were known. It’s just that those articles have been increasingly crowded out by advertisements and rote establishment-view “objective” reporting. Newspapers made themselves boring.
Narco News is a high-strength concentration of the stuff that made some newspapers exciting. (more…)
I’ve been accepted to the Narco News 2010 School of Authentic Journalism, along with thirty other media-makers from around the world! Narco News relies entirely on support from its readers, so consider donating to offset my travel costs and support this vital alternative media project, and thanks.
As a kind of update to a heavily-trafficked list of decent white rappers I posted a while ago, I want to shout out two new songs directly addressing white (and light skin) privilege and its role in hip-hop culture and society at large. Credit to these guys for taking on a difficult subject and shedding light. There is way too much 50 Cent and Soulja Boy on the radio here in Haiti… Listen: Wale’s “Shades featuring Chrisette Michelle” and Macklemore’s “White Privilege.” (Macklemore is white and from my hometown of Seattle.)
Michele Pierre-Louis, seen at right, is no longer the Prime Minister of Haiti. A crowd of journalists, including myself, amassed in the Senate chamber yesterday awaiting her arrival for questioning by lawmakers, but she decided not to appear and distributed a letter in her stead. The Senators argued late into the night, eventually holding a vote. Here’s my short headline story for today’s FSRN newscast.
MP3. I’ll also post below an exchange I had with the Prime Minister on September 30, at a press conference during an gathering of investors at Hotel Karibe, about her government’s handling of a effort by Haitian lawmakers to increase the minimum wage. (more…)
