And the award for coverage of the Haitian cholera epidemic goes to …
No, not The New York Times, nor The Washington Post, nor even the Miami Herald.
No it goes to Al Jazeera, the news organization that found the cause of the epidemic and told the world about it.*
Al Jazeera, the Arab world’s version of our AP broadcast, is like an upstart intruder, trying to build a reputation in the self-denominated land of the free press. Last December, Al Jazeera won a DuPont Award for its “uncompromising look at the shortcomings of international aid and peacekeeping in Haiti … after the devastating earthquake” and for “reminding the world that the survivors still face urgent crises.”
How did the New York reading public come to learn lately of Al Jazeera’s journalistic coup?
The information was offered in an April 1, front-page Times report headlined “In Haiti, Global Failures on a Cholera Epidemic.”
More than halfway down into the 6,000-word article, Times writer Deborah Sontag noted that back on Oct. 27, 2010, Al Jazeera took film of the cholera epidemic’s source.
It was an area where UN peacekeepers from Nepal kept their septic tanks. After Al Jazeera broadcast its report, which was followed by other reports, it became increasingly clear to experts that the epidemic originated in Nepal.
One might reasonably expect that if a paper is publishing a 6,000-word article on an epidemic, the person or organization that discovered the epidemic might be mentioned high in the piece, rather than 3,000 words down into it. On a matter of such import, to Haiti and to journalism, the bold and very impactful work of Al Jazeera should merit more than a brief paragraph in a 6000-word story. [Update: Not to mention the work of the Associated Press. See the end of this piece for more.]
But as a 30-year veteran of American newspapers I know that journalistic kudoses are typically reserved for buddies and kindred thinkers, not rivals and those who challenge your assumptions. Op-Ed columnists give prominent credit to Times colleagues whenever they can, it seems to me. But the Times and other papers are nowhere near as quick to credit rival outlets when they get a scoop.
Al Jazeera wasn’t the only entity that got short shrift in the Times story. Cuba is the nation that has worked most strenuously to contain the Haitian cholera epidemic. But Cuba, still formally a Communist state and reluctant to let Times reporters into its country, was not credited by the Times until pretty close to the end of the long story:
“The Cubans alone, who claimed in a report that without their help ‘another 1,000 Haitians would have died at Haitian Health Ministry institutions,’ dispensed antibiotics to all cholera patients and preventively to their relatives.”
Consider yourself recognized, Cuba.
Such problems of downplaying credit are due, generally, to unwritten editorial restrictions, most notably at MSM papers where opaqueness rather than transparency are the rule. A reporter, in other words, after years of working at a publication, intuits what’s going to be yanked from a story and what’s going to be rearranged. And so that silent voices says to them as they’re writing, “Hey, choose your battles wisely and go with the flow.”
And let’s be clear about something. Sontag, the Times reporter who did this far-ranging update on the Haitian cholera epidemic, is a wonderful, principled journalist who has covered Haiti devotedly for years.
Having followed her for years, I suspect that Sontag would agree with my complaints here—theoretically at least.
This pickiness of mine is a screwface that’s moving to front rows of the mass reading room. Seasoned readers today see between-the-lines words once thought to be invisible. And, increasingly, those characters left out of big media stories are able to strut the stages of the blogosphere and of potentially viral three-minute videos.
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I'm a big fan of Debbie Sontag, Al-Jazeera, and -- by the way-- the Associated Press, which broke the cholera-sewage-UN story on the same day as Al-Jazeera. (Your failure to note AP's role does not, I assume, constitute anti-wire bias.)
Moreover, Randal Archibold, the Times' Latin America Bureau Chief, delivered a big feature story on Cubans' unsung-heroism in combatting the cholera epidemic. That was just a few months ago. http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/08/world/americas/in-haitis-cholera-fight-cuba-takes-lead-role.html?pagewanted=all.
Generally, I don't think a single paragraph devoted to who broke the sewage story constitutes bias in this story, which is about continuing failures and controversies in the cholera epidemic. The Times could have not mentioned Al Jazeera/AP's role at all. And a more striking omission, I thought, was its failure to mention by name the legal organizations involved in trying hold UN peacekeeping to account. (They are the Bureau des Avocats Internationaux and the Institute for Justice & Democracy in Haiti.)
A more interesting critique of the Times in Haiti, or internationally, begins with shrinking newsholes and overtaxed reporters (I believe the Latin America bureau has just two full time reporters, who cover Mexico, the border, Central America, and the Caribbean-- whoa). The Times isn't devoting adequate resources to important, ongoing international stories.
#1 Posted by Pooja Bhatia, CJR on Fri 13 Apr 2012 at 01:01 PM
NYT - Zionism
Al Jazeera - truth for everybody else.
America -- zionist gulag in denial
#2 Posted by Paula Thomsen, CJR on Sat 14 Apr 2012 at 07:52 AM
I thought that Al Jazeera posted the video that was effective proof of the source, and that AP came up with a substantiating wire story.
As for the insinuated accusation of a bias against the wires, I'll only say that AP is deep in my heart because it was my introduction to Mexico and Central America almost 30 years ago, when they hired me to report and edit (at $300 a week) out of their Mexico City bureau.
That said, the more relevant and power-challenging question would be whether AP -- under it's new president, who formerly oversaw The Miami Herald -- will show due fairness to Cuba, which has done so much great work in Haiti. Having met some AP staffers in Cuba, I hope and expect so.
Lastly, there's no way I can deny getting wound up from time to time about The Times (all the news our editors choose, I sometimes say of them), though I concede that I, an army of one, should probably try to check my impulses.
#3 Posted by Ron Howell, CJR on Sat 14 Apr 2012 at 10:08 PM