Tagged: Haiti
Confined to ship – update
Nancy Waugh, executive producer of CBC News: Nova Scotia at 6 (And 5 and 530….) takes issue with the anonymous Contrarian source’s suggestion that CBC sent Rob Gordon Craig Paisley to Haiti without realizing their disaster zone training had expired:
What source said we discovered their lack of training after they’d departed? A source who didn’t bother to check to see if it was true? Jeepers creepers!
We knew their accreditation had lapsed and that they wouldn’t be allowed ashore. They signed documents to that effect before they left Halifax. Everyone knew the rules.
Craig and Rob did check (enroute) to see I their accreditation might be renewed on board, and the answer was no.
I’m quite worked up about the assertion that we’d play fast-and-loose about regulations that are there to protect them.
Because we knew they’d remain on the ship, we sent Rob and Craig with a bag full of flipcams and digital cameras that COULD go ashore with crewmembers.
I think we actually got something nobody else has managed in quite the same way: honest-to-God stories in the sailors’ own words, as seen through their eyes.
I think Andrew Cochrane already made it clear that CBC went into this curious arrangement with its eyes open, but Waugh nails the point. Besides, the Flip Cam ploy was brilliant.
Another take on grief porn
Contrarian reader Miles Tompkins:
I would like to see that little kid ask Anderson Cooper where the hell he’s been for the past 20 years.
Meek slags Ormiston’s grief porn – feedback
Cliff White defends Ormiston:
I happened to catch both the clip of Ormiston holding the hand of, and then carrying, the little boy, and the one of Cooper tousling the head of another. I didn’t think there was any comparison. I was moved by the first and disgusted by the second.
Watching Ormiston’s reports over the last week or so, it’s obvious she has been deeply affected by what she’s seeing and reporting on. Her actions conveyed a real human warmth. It’s not such a bad thing for viewers to occasionally see that reporters are not just automatons, but are real people with real emotions. On the other hand Cooper’s actions seemed a classic illustration of the opposite, a reporter cynically faking concern hoping to heighten the impact of his story.
As I said in the original post (about a Herald column by Jim Meek), I did not see the Ormiston piece. I did see, and didn’t like, Cooper’s display of affection, but I would not presume to say he was faking. My objection is to making the reporter’s display of compassion, real or contrived, the focus of a story, when the focus ought to be on the people who have been harmed by the catastrophe, and those who are trying to help.
It’s obviously a difficult line to walk, but surely this is a situation that calls for the most rigorous possible factual reporting, rather than titillation.
Security theatre: an asylum for authoritarian nuttiness
Last Saturday, 57-year-old Jules Paul Bouloute, got off a flight from Haiti to New York. While attempting to find his way out of Kennedy Airport’s American Airlines Terminal, he accidentally opened an emergency exit door and set off an alarm.
Jules Paul Bouloute
This has happened to most of us. In confusion, inattention, or an ill-considered attempt to find a shortcut, we open a restricted door and set off an alarm. Sometimes it leads to an embarrassed chat with the on-duty Commissionaire; sometimes there are no consequences at all.
In Bouloute’s case, however, security officials evacuated Terminal 8 for more than two hours. Police scoured the building with dogs and SWAT teams, and required hapless passengers to go through security theatre screening a second time. Arrivals were stuck on the tarmac; departures delayed for hours.
As for Bouloute, he was charged with first-degree criminal tampering and third-degree criminal trespass, and he faces up to seven years in prison.
Salon columnist Patrick Smith, an airline pilot, analyzes the consequences:
[W]hat shocks me the most is that throughout all the coverage of the incident, including numerous interviews with ticked-off passengers and somber-voiced officials, not once has anybody raised the point that maybe — just maybe — we overreacted. Everyone, instead, is eager to blame Bouloute.
“As a result of the defendant’s actions, thousands of people were required to evacuate and to be rescreened by TSA, causing substantial delays in the airlines’ schedules,” District Attorney Richard Browne said in a statement.
No, I’m sorry, Mr. District Attorney, but that’s not it. What caused the delays and what hassled so many travelers was not the defendant’s actions, but our mindless and hysterical response to them.
Smith goes on to recite the interesting history of air terrorism, and details how a country that once took real terrorist attacks in stride became a “nation of scaredy-cats.” He cites other recent examples of ludicrous overreaction, and urges us all to calm down.
Calming down will not make us “less safe,” as security zealots are wont to argue. Quite the opposite, it would free up time and resources, allowing us to focus on more credible and potent problems.
The whole piece is well worth a read.
Haiti
I was struck by the portentously antiquarian wording of the New York Times’ lead headline the morning after the calamity in Port-au-Prince:
Haiti Lies in Ruins; Grim Search for Untold Dead
I may eventually have something to say about this ghastly, stultifying event, but for the moment, I am speechless.
