The New York Times — via its T magazine “Spring Travel” issue — has published an entire cover story on actor Sean Penn’s Haiti charity work without quoting, interviewing, or discussing a single Haitian person. It is a classic piece of what I’d call “erasure journalism.”
From Matt Mudsprat’s Notes.
Bill Easterly, on the other hand, find much to commend in Penn, at least compared to his ex…
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Political correctness strikes again! How dare they write an article about Haiti without interviewing a Haitian?
And if they had done so, I’m sure we would have had some fantastic quotes like “Mr. Penn, he do good tings for the Haitian people,” or “I couldn’t feed my three children without this kind of help,” or even the more enlightened, “We appreciate this charity but what we really need is more local leaders and local empowerment.” Does a sprinkling of quotes like this (fungible from any other article on any other charity) really improve journalism?
Besides, lines like the following suggest this story isn’t about Haiti at all:
“When he is in grooming mode, he tends to shellac his hair into a high, rather splendid, Little Richard-style pompadour, but today, as on most days in Haiti, the hair had been allowed to collapse into a dusty quiff. With his big, arrow-shaped nose and his heavy eyelids hanging at half-mast, he emanated the slightly sinister allure of a fairground carny.”
This reminds me of this: http://ht.ly/4q011 (but come to think about it, maybe it was you who tweeted this article first?