February 15, 2007

This month Haitians mark the third year since their elected president, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, was overthrown in a coup organized by the country’s wealthy elites and backed by the United States and Canada, with support from France. The way the local Haitian media and the U.S. media covered Aristide during the country’s crisis has lately come under scrutiny, as well as the anti-Aristide campaign waged by the press freedom group Reporters Without Borders.




According to Canadian researcher Isabel MacDonald, who teaches journalism, the private Haitian media worked actively in support of the 2004 coup. The Association National des Medias Haitiens, which includes the owners of the largest Haitian commercial radio stations in Port-au-Prince, was a member of the Group of 184, a leading anti-Aristide coalition. In the lead-up to the coup, the ANMH, which met weekly, acted as a space of “co-ordination, decision making, enabling the different commercial media outlets to forge agreements,” which had a “very strong impact on public opinion,” one of its members told MacDonald.

“It was our own way as the media to combat the dictatorship,” the association’s vice president told her, adding that the ANMH media owners made it their job to cover all the demonstrations against Aristide.

MacDonald reports that anti-Aristide organizers were able to promote their events for free on these stations, and they had a policy of not identifying the anti-Aristide demonstrators’ numbers, which allowed organizers to inflate the size of the protests. As one ANMH radio station owner explained, “We always support the pro-democracy demonstrations,” and “sometimes we advance fantastical numbers because we don’t want the public to draw the wrong conclusion.” He added that if “a group has 10 people but they want you to say 2000 or 300,000, if you say 10…you can make enemies, you can damage the group and their credibility.”

At the same time, these same media “steered clear” of pro-Aristide demonstrations, unless it was to emphasize the “violence” of Aristide supporters. They also “instituted an ANMH-wide ban barring Aristide from speaking on the airwaves,” according to MacDonald.

“I would definitely characterize them as a coup media,” she says. Besides the fact that the ANMH was conspiring with the Group of 184, she cites the fact that Jean-Robert Lalanne, the owner of Radio Maxima in Cap Haitienne, admitted he provided weapons to the rebels and sat in on military planning meetings before the invasion which forced Aristide out of the country.

This biased reporting by the Haitian commercial media may have affected reporting by the international press. One deputy bureau chief at a major international newswire agency told MacDonald that the agency’s staff reporter in Haiti relied heavily on Radio Metropole. In retrospect it made him “wonder if we could trust any of what we’d been reporting.” MacDonald found that many international journalists were relying on this same wire service in their reporting during the period leading up to the coup.

Some reporting in the U.S. media mimicked the one-sided coverage of the Haitian media. In 16 articles published in the South Florida Sun-Sentinel and Newsday, which used reports filed from Haiti by special correspondent Michael Deibert, President Aristide was repeatedly accused of corruption, thuggery, political assassination, drug trafficking, using armed gangs against opponents and being “dictatorial.” In not one instance in the 16 articles is the government allowed to respond to these accusations—a breach of journalistic fairness.

“When you put someone in a negative light it’s important to contact that person and give him a chance to respond to the allegations,” says Dr. William A. Mulligan, a CSULB journalism professor with many years of experience as a copy editor.

The articles make most of these allegations anonymously, which also goes against accepted journalistic practices. The authors use expressions such as “critics charge” “critics say” “critics counter” or simply make accusations without any attribution, as if they were widely accepted as fact.

“I would prefer to use the name of the critic,” says Mulligan. Who are these people? How do we know the reporter didn’t make that up?”

U.S. and Canadian-funded non-governmental organizations in Haiti actively campaigned against Aristide before the coup. Reporters Without Borders, the press freedom group based in Paris, also worked internationally to demonize the president by listing him among the group’s “Predators of Press Freedom,” because Aristide’s government had allegedly failed to arrest and prosecute the killers of two journalists.

Robert Menard, the group’s secretary general, told Associated Press on Nov. 24, 2001 that he held President Aristide “personally responsible for the deterioration of press freedom in Haiti” and that he would lobby in Europe to maintain the crippling embargo of international aid to the country. On Jan. 10, 2002 Menard said he “had sent letters to members of the U.S. Congress and the European Union Council of Ministers, asking them to cancel entry and tourist visas and freeze the bank accounts” of President Aristide and Prime Minister Yvonne Neptune, among others.

Reporters Without Borders has received grants from the U.S. State Department since at least 2002, according to its Washington representative, Lucie Morillon, and documents received under the Freedom of Information Act. It is also funded by the governments of France and Taiwan. Morillon said in a telephone interview in May of 2005 that the U.S. grants were only to support the families of so-called independent journalists in Cuba, and that they in no way affected the group’s advocacy. She also said that they represent only a small fraction of RWB’s budget. Other yearly U.S. grants are for the group’s work in Africa.

Jim Brown, the former FOIA officer at the National Endowment for Democracy, said in a phone interview on Feb. 28, 2006, that RWB was also receiving money through the International Republican Institute, but Morillon denies this. The NED’s current FOIA officer, Patrick Thomas, does not deny the existence of past IRI grants, but has provided no documents about them.

Asked if she thought it was appropriate for a human rights group to lobby for economic sanctions against the Hemisphere’s poorest country, Abi Wright, communications director of the New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists, said “I don’t even know how to answer that.” The CPJ works closely with Reporters Without Borders, but does not approve of the group’s government funding: “We don’t accept a penny of government funding; we never have and we never will,” Wright said.

“We think it’s important to maintain our institutional independence, because an integral part of what we do is to act as a watchdog on governments,” she explained. Wright called RWB’s recent award of $100,000 from the Taiwanese government "unbelievable."

Haitian rebel leader Guy Philippe, trained by U.S. Special Forces, acknowledged the important role played by the media in facilitating the coup, telling MacDonald, “[I]nternational media, the media leaders helped us a lot. And thanks to them we were able to overthrow the dictator. And without them I don’t think that we could have.”

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