An interview with New Channels Communications’ Ellen Braune and the Haiti Information Bureau’s Jane Regan.
FAIR: We’ve seen an overwhelming dominance in US talkshows of US-based policy analysts, mostly discussing the action in Haiti from a Washington, DC, point of view. You’ve tried to expand that spectrum of guests; give us some examples of the efforts you’ve made and what successes you’ve had.
Braune: Well, we have been able at key moments to inject alternative voices into the discourse. We’ve been able to work with a leader from the peasant movement in Haiti named Chavannes Jean-Baptiste and place him both on progressive and mainstream programming, as well as US analysts like Allan Nairn. However, it’s not on a consistent basis, and the spaces open and close.
FAIR: One of the efforts I imagine you expend is to try and get people actually from Haiti brought onto these programs. Our next guest, Jane Regan, is an example. Have you suggested that producers bring on Jane Regan or other people from the Haiti Information Bureau?
Braune: We have sent producers and journalists their way to gather information from them, and more often than not, we don’t see it reflected in the coverage.
FAIR: Well, let’s hear it from your end, Jane. What’s been your experience?
Regan: Well, Ellen is right. She and her co-workers have sent people here. And sometimes they do end up giving us a call, and we end up having a briefing with them. Sometimes we help set up some interviews, but I think that the phrase Ellen used, that the spaces open and close, is very relevant because a producer or reporter can come down here with an open mind, and full of ideas that he or she can do a different job than everyone else.
But once they hit the ground, especially in times like these when there are an estimated 2,000 foreign journalists here, they get caught up in pack journalism, they worry that they’re not getting what is happening, that everyone else is down somewhere getting whatever there is that’s happening, whatever the visual thing is of the day. So a lot of times they come down here thinking we’re going to meet and we might dream up some story ideas together, but for one reason or another they kind of lose interest.
Another problem is the language barrier. The US journalists—including print, but especially TV and radio they’re all extremely crippled by the fact that they always have to have English. Of course, if what the person [interviewed] has to say is progressive, that’s another hurdle you have to get over. So sometimes Ellen will send people who will say all the right things to her in New York or Washington or wherever their launching pad is, but once they get down here, things change.
FAIR: Ellen Braune is nodding her head. You obviously have had similar experiences about trying to get certain guests through the obstacles that are put in their way. What kind of hurdles have some of your clients been put through?
Braune: The most basic and frustrating problem is that journalists do not understand the political landscape, and what constitutes a key player. They understand that [Jean-Bertrand] Aristide was the president. They understand that [Raul] Cedras was the de facto ruler. But the fact that the majority of the population—67% voted for Aristide—have been and continue to be key players in the democracy movement is not something that they understand. So when you bring them a peasant leader who represents 80% of Haiti’s population, they have a very difficult time understanding that this is an analysis that they need to hear and that it would reflect the real thinking of important organized sectors on the ground who do have an impact on what happens.
One of the key people that we’ve worked with is Chavannes Jean-Baptiste, who is the leader of the Peasant Movement of Papay, which is the oldest and largest grassroots popular democratic organization inside Haiti. And just those very terms are hard for journalists to understand. Popular is a difficult concept for them. Grassroots is extraordinarily difficult, especially when they’re looking at power. And usually speakers are legitimized by the degree of power they’re perceived to have. The fact that he represents a grassroots organization of peasants is in contradiction to their traditional notions of legitimized power.
FAIR: You said something about pack journalism. How have you seen journalists actually gathering information?
Regan: Every morning most of them go down to USIS, the United States Information Service, and they listen to the embassy spokesperson, and then sometimes they listen to somebody else, like a colonel from the army or some police person. And then after that usually people break up.
Some people are working on longer-term stories, but there’s always the hunt for bodies, although that has gone down a little bit because the repression in the city has dropped down a little bit. It used to be that they would just go after bodies, you know? In fact, there were these young guys who would come up to the Hotel Olafson, which is a great press hangout. They would come up in the morning and they would say, “Well, we know where a body is,” and then would see how much would be offered to them as far as cash to take the journalists there. And then they all go screaming off in their cars to film the body, or photograph the body, to talk to witnesses of the body.
That’s changed a little bit; now it’s like, where is the US seizing an arms cache? Or where are Haitian people pillaging or looting? It’s that kind of sensational stuff. They really don’t get into the political background, the historical background. They certainly stay as far away as possible from anything about US policy.
FAIR: Ellen, you had something to add about the way US reporters are going about their business in Haiti.
Braune: I just wanted to address this notion about pack journalism, having once been a mainstream journalist myself. If you’re a journalist with one of the large networks or CNN, God help you if you miss what everyone else got. So if someone is running to see the body of the day, if you call your home office and you don’t have the body of the day, and instead you have an interview with somebody from a popular organization, you’re out of there. You’ve missed the story that every other network has, and the idea is that your picture should match the picture on the next network.
FAIR: So, really, what’s the difference between an operation like this, where something has been made of the fact that the journalists are operating freely, and Iraq or Panama or Grenada, where there were press pools and more conspicuous control?
Braune: I think there’s a slight difference that creates some political openings—for example, when there were pictures of the US Army watching people getting beaten up without being able to do anything about it. When those pictures slipped through the filter, it does create a certain amount of damage that has to be controlled and it does open up a little bit of space. And that makes room for the kind of wonderful reporting like Allan Nairn has done about the CIA [and its links to the Haiti’s military], because suddenly there is a little bit more contradiction around the policy. Not that they haven’t done a wonderful job of damage control.
