Haiti, the media, and looting

Once again, I digress from the science of the earthquake to refer you to an eloquent alternative perspective on the media treatment of the earthquake in Haiti, including the discussion of "looting."

Tom Engelhart, from Tom's Dispatch, make several points about the meida in his blog, including the following:

And of course, with the drama of people pulled from the rubble went another kind of drama:  impending violence -- even though the real story, as a number of reporters couldn’t help but notice, was the remarkable patience and altruistic willingness of Haitians to support each other, help each other, and organize each other in a situation where there was almost nothing to share.  It might, in fact, have been their finest hour, but amid the growing headlines about possible “violence” and “looting,” that would have been hard to tell.

Tom's piece, well written itself, is followed in the same blog entry by a longer essay by Rebecca Solnit, whose recent book, A Paradise Built in Hell, reflects on how communities bond after disasters. An extract:

Within days of the Haitian earthquake, for example, the Los Angeles Times ran a series of photographs with captions that kept deploying the word “looting.” One was of a man lying face down on the ground with this caption: “A Haitian police officer ties up a suspected looter who was carrying a bag of evaporated milk.” The man’s sweaty face looks up at the camera, beseeching, anguished.

Another photo was labeled: “Looting continued in Haiti on the third day after the earthquake, although there were more police in downtown Port-au-Prince.” It showed a somber crowd wandering amid shattered piles of concrete in a landscape where, visibly, there could be little worth taking anyway.

A third image was captioned: “A looter makes off with rolls of fabric from an earthquake-wrecked store.” Yet another: “The body of a police officer lies in a Port-au-Prince street. He was accidentally shot by fellow police who mistook him for a looter.”

The “looter” in the first photo might well have been taking that milk to starving children and babies, but for the news media that wasn’t the most urgent problem. The “looter” stooped under the weight of two big bolts of fabric might well have been bringing it to now homeless people trying to shelter from a fierce tropical sun under improvised tents.

The pictures do convey desperation, but they don’t convey crime. Except perhaps for that shooting of a fellow police officer -- his colleagues were so focused on property that they were reckless when it came to human life, and a man died for no good reason in a landscape already saturated with death.

Haiti: looting, or self-relief?

The news is reporting increasing anger and frustration among the populace of Haiti. With the immensity of the damage, the slow speed of the relief efforts, and the widespread poverty and poor infrastructure to begin with, can people be blamed?

I'm not sure what to make of the skimpy reports of looting. I imagine there is some theft of semi-luxury items, but who could blame people for taking food and water from stores that would declare total insurance losses anyway?

This is the Merriam-Webster definition of "looting":

1 a : to plunder or sack in war 
   b : to rob especially on a large scale and usually by violence or corruption
2 : to seize and carry away by force especially in war

I'm not sure the word "loot" is quite the right one to describe what is probably happening in Haiti.

I wonder how much the use of this word is bound up with images of race and poverty?

It may be too early to really know, but there were some interesting comments on this issue after Hurricane Katrina:

New Orleans, Looted
By Bidisha Banerjee Posted Wednesday, Aug. 31, 2005, at 7:26 PM ET

New Orleans, looted: Bloggers ponder the moral dilemma of looting in New Orleans. Some of the most corrosive disapproval comes from the city's residents. "I'm all for grace. But it's very difficult not to hope they get shot on sight," writes Otter's Burrow, a medieval literature Ph.D. displaced by the hurricane. It's Just the Perspective's Frank, another evacuee, is even more abrasive: "I mean, there's actual video of these animals running around with handfuls and basketfuls of stuff they've stolen from stores...many of them laughing about it. I don't want to come across as racist, but it's the poor black people creating a warzone out of the natural disaster that's plagued the entire city."

Much of the talk of race, looting, and the media's coverage of it all has been sparked by Flickr user Dustin3000, who posted this screenschot of a Yahoo! page containing two similar photos with very different captions. Tech blog Boing-Boing's Xeni Jardin explains: "The images were shot by different photographers, and captioned by different photo wire services. The Associated Press caption accompanying the image with a black person says he's just finished 'looting' a grocery store. The AFP/Getty Images caption describes lighter skinned people 'finding' bread and soda from a grocery store." Many are taking the captions as an unambiguous marker of racial bias in the media. Ramblings of a Tainted Mind's jadedmyrrhmaid believes, "Now maybe they did ask these people where they got the stuff, and it doesn't much matter at this point, everything may as well be eaten before it goes bad....but it does make the press look like assholes." Bol at hip-hop blog Mindset of a Champion, asserts: "The message here is clear: A white man's property rights is greater than a jig's life." Stone-Bridge's Huitzil, a Texan, shares similar concerns about media coverage. He says that most people seem to be taking necessities, and that the looting is justified "since the Corps of Engineers does not seem to have had an actual plan in place to deal with levee failure."

Law professor Ann Althouse has iniated a more nuanced discussion of the ethics of looting. "It's almost an invasion of privacy to photograph people doing bad things when they are in such a state. But we've got to also feel sympathy for the rest of the people who are stranded there and frightened by a breakdown in order," she claims.