Dispatch Interim: Haiti – Update

28 January 2010

I write to you again from Sunny Florida, where I continue my training. Having come across some gut wrenching information, I couldn’t help but add an update to my interim dispatch. Be forewarned, this is not a lame stream media fluff editorial or essay cleansed to keep people from experiencing a disturbance.

Media coverage of the CF in Haiti lacking

Canada has troops in Haiti, and a good many of them are from CFB’s Valcartier and Bagotville. Air Force and Navy personnel from CFB’s Gagetown and Shearwater. DART from CFB Trenton, and many others from other parts of Canada. And all these members are, in themselves, from different parts of Canada.

But If I use Google News and select Canada, not one story on Haiti pops up; and the National Post and CTV, have nothing on their main page. Toronto’s Sun and Star – nada.

CBC had one story about a poll on Canadian approval of our country’s response, and the Ottawa Citizen, two human events stories on a rescue and the sudden exploitation of orphan selling as the criminal element exploits the misery.

Not that we need the exposure, as the point of this is to bring more attention to a disaster which in all accounts Main Steam Media (MSM) will ignore as a headline within a week, but where is the coverage of what our troops are doing? Obviously, as the story fades from the MSMs in the realm of old news, the desperation becomes even more desperate, and troops from many Western democratic nations are on the ground doing the dirty work. It is not these types of military deployment which attract the embedded journalist, probably because it isn’t “sexy” enough.

If any representatives of that trade, which has recently achieved the ignominy of becoming less respected than Lawyers, had bothered to join our troops on this mission, these “Journalists” might have been able to report on some very interesting news of late: One of the CF’s distribution points was overwhelmed and pilfered, as control is difficult without using force. Not to make an issue of it; Canada will try again today. After all, we’re there to help them, not hurt them.

Exploiting a tragedy

The orphan for sale story in the Ottawa Citizen exposes only part of the problem, but doesn’t tell the truth about a situation which has pervaded Haiti’s mothers. In poverty, the kind of poverty wherein child services in rich nations would intercede immediately and save the child, but which exists not in Haiti, food is often a luxury. The innate need for survival will force any animal to forage, and as we humans are of the same kingdom of Animalia, hungry babies left to their own devices will wander and crawl. In a post two-week disaster time period, the babies are pretty hungry, the parents are dead or foraging on their own, and what little community spirit Haitians had to look out for one another has been vanquished by this calamity. It would have seemed like the End of Days, complete with a collapse of civilization including “survival of the fittest” feral gangs bent on existence, had the West not helped.

So the babies crawl because they are hungry, and the Western nations who are there cannot just ignore a crawling baby, as they stop and put things in their mouth, a natural oral fixation for our children, but a survival instinct for them. So the babies get picked up, and the disaster relief troops try to find a parent or a relative, but there’s only so much time you can spend looking for their kin. When a search begins to find the baby’s guardian, you find another baby, and another, and another…so many babies crawling around the rubble and undergrowth.

Imagine doing a relief tasking in a military vehicle and you return to your point of departure with 50 babies. The Citizen reports children are being kidnapped and sold, but can only prove one such event, because the miscreants got caught trying to sell this kid online. What morons, but then again, criminality doesn’t attract the brightest. But when does a human become a child rather than a baby? It’s a rhetorical question, because every mother’s child is their baby, regardless of age, but when I say baby, they’re a crawler. The 50 baby story is from the rumour mill, as is the overwhelming of a food distribution station, but they come from what I would call a reliable source.

Had our Lame Stream Media moved beyond the initial human tragedy and stayed the course to study and record the history of our Canadian Soldiers, not only in Haiti, but in all deployments since Korea; and used that as real news rather then covering Ugly Betty being cancelled, or bothering to explore the truth about Climategate, perhaps the real human tragedy being experienced by Canada’s real ambassadors to the world would get a voice. And just perhaps, the work being done by our CF members in Haiti might stir more Canadians to go up to Canadian Forces members and shake their hands for doing service for their county, just like they do here in the USA, regardless of the uniform you wear.

When was the last time you saw politicos assemble in formation to parade in public, and which ones get paid better for exercising the will of our nation? The CF in Haiti doesn’t need photo ops, nor do they have time to write about the stories MSMs don’t have the sexy will to write about either. But the horrors of this mission, like every other deployment my comrades have been on, are first born in thought and emotion by their next of kin. The job of the journalist is to bring that same story to the homes of their readers or listeners, and if they do it right, will purvey the truth rather than diluting it to a thirty-second bite aimed at the consuming masses.

Editors and their media masters in control

But don’t blame the journalists, because like the hard working members of the CF, they have their own CoC, known as the editors, and they in turn have their own masters who set the policy for what must be reported. The unwritten rules of the editors is hard coded in a policy mixing PC, MC, libel-avoiding, short-span-memory-keep-‘em-busy-assault-with-the-next-story-keep-the-sponsors-on-board ideology. And the editors, the icons of our fourth estate, still have to answer to owners who still believe controversy sells. And waiting for the CF to do something wrong and reporting on it is news, but the good work that soldiers do is only worth coverage on a slow news day.

Therefore, as long as our 3000+ troops, who are working the disaster in Haiti, do their job, the MSM coverage will continue to wane. However, should any event or situation come available that puts them in a bad light as proscribed by the propagandist media, the coverage will be there.

But in the end, the only boots on the ground are the unsung heroes sent to help the helpless, and NOT the editors who decide what stories should appear and what context they are allowed to imply through censorship based on whatever leftist or propagandist policy they employ.

There is an opportunity for the press to applaud the events of all those who are acting in Haiti, but my guess is only the bad news will make the “news” and not the acts of humanitarianism which continue, because when it comes to western values, doing good ain’t front page news.

Tagged as: Dispatches from a member of the CF, editors, exploiting a tragedy, Haiti, Haiti update, Haitian orphans, journalists, journos, Kaffir Kanuck, kidnapping, media ignoring the positive work of the Canadian Forces, orphan for sale, poverty, rescue