ABC had a show last night showing their talking heads being concerned about the tragedy. They had a phone number for donations to help and couldn’t get it on screen for the viewers to read. Instead they had Georgie Popoloudopolopolou…s say it several times.

This tragedy is FSM’s way of showing the true colors of amerika. Pat Robertson says the tragedy is because some dude sold his soul to the devil thereby absolving him (Pat) from giving a shit. He could probably fund the entire rescue effort out of pocket.

Obama pledged $100M and of course sent massive relief resources and supplies.

W is gonna cochair some committee and Cheney is gonna pay Pat Robertson for brokering the deal with him for that dude’s soul.

Limbaugh will soon arrive with a ton of viagra.

The Pitts each gave a million to the relief effort.

The bankers who got bailouts were too strapped to contribute but would be willing to issue credit cards to the victims at a reduced interest rate of 140%.

Barb Bush was thrilled that the people of Haiti could sleep outside and have all that fresh air.

The republican party issued a statement:

“Those people are black, aren’t they?”

Not that I’m simpatico with these media shits, but this might be a little unfair. The local media, whether it’s US, British, or say, Taiwanese, will always play up “local” interest and, well, there are a lot of white people here in the US. I have seen a few “black family members in the US concerned for their Haitian relatives” stories when this all started. If it’s Fox you are prolly right and never mind.

A strange version of the “Missing Young White Woman” story for the teevee news.

Except it’s “Young White Woman Missing!” (Leg).

Uh, MSNBC is hardly the East Podunk Bugle-Gazette… “The local media” are certainly entitled to run a human interest story about any local Americans who might have been caught up in the tragedy, but MSNBC likes to pretend it’s one of the “big boys” who do big picture stuff, and — sad though it is — focusing on Christa’s ordeal simply distracts and detracts from the plight of several million other people and the deaths of hundreds of thousands.

Having said that, their editors may be callous, but they’re obviously not stupid: they know what plays in the heartland, and they’re not going to ignore a “good” story when they see one.

Shorter stoicjim: All news is “News for Parrots”

Imagine the catfight when Nancy Grace hears Matt did this story.

Well this isn’t the BBC, so I would come to expect a very USA-centric slant on the news.

Eh, it’s no different with other countries’ news services. I’ve seen the same type of coverage in Japan, Germany, Hungary, and England. Not that it’s ok because others do it, it’s not just an American thing.

dowah @#2
“Barb Bush was thrilled that the people of Haiti could sleep outside and have all that fresh air.”

Yes…..and could we please get each of these folks a brand new pair of sneakers so we can claim that they “were underprivileged anyway so this (chuckle) – this is working very well for them.” –Former First Lady Barbara Bush, on the hurricane evacuees at the…..

She is one nasty piece of work.

I happened to catch this story twice yesterday and both times it ended with the young woman saying she was lucky to have only lost a leg and that she wished the Haitians had access to the same medical care she was currently receiving. So it may not have been intentional but the impact of the story did highlight the radical differences in experiences. She seemed to be a very compassionate young woman I’d like to hear more about as time goes by.

Bonus: she’s white and blonde! Not to diminish as you said… but we all know white blonde America suffering trumps every other suffering on the planet. “Just ask Hitler.”

Pat Robertson’s running the “earthquakes and poverty is what happens when you make deals with the devil” schtick.

I wonder what this poor blonde white girl did to deserve her “fate”.

Callous stupid burns…

Please, please, separate what this young woman has done and her motivations from the actions and motives of the American news media.

She is a doctoral student in international studies/sustainability and she was in Haiti volunteering as a literacy tutor. Knowing her family, I know that she has a longstanding dedication to helping overcome the inequalities that places like Haiti face daily. Now for her dedication she faces life without one of her feet. And as she herself had the ability to state, even after she’s had surgery to remove her lower leg, she’s lucky, the Haitian’s need the same sort of care she’s getting, and she wants all of us to provide care and she herself wants to go back and help more. Yes, she is a white blonde woman — but at least she’s trying to do something with the privileges she’s been blessed with. Can the rest of us commenting here, especially the cynical commenters, claim the same?

Even my twelve-year-old noticed this morning. He pointed out that this was another variation on the missing-pretty-white-girl story.

There are hundreds of thousands of Haitian girls, missing, dead, displaced — and our media had to cover this one American white girl, the one who was lucky enough to have a choice to serve and study, the ability to escape and get medical attention? Our media couldn’t have covered the hundreds of thousands who don’t have any of those choices or luxuries?

It’s wrong. It’s immoral. Even kids get that.

Come on now! They are poor, black and foreign. Why would the media care? If you are not rich, white, and preferably American (you know, their buddies), they really don’t give a shit.

In domestic politics, the biggest hurdle to get passed when it comes to strengthening government assistance in peoples lives (welfare, food stamps, etc.) with an unfortunately significant fraction of the electorate is: Will it help people who look and act like me? Folks are far more willing to let government lend a hand with people who they can identify with, who make them get a tickle from some instinctive tribal loyalty that overcomes their natural cheapness.

For many americans, Haiti is just another far away exotic place populated by brown people who don’t even have the good manners to speak english. Added on top of this is a real discriminatory attitude in some quarters toward Haitians specifically, for some of the same reasons that Irish immigrants were discriminated against in the 19th century.

If only one person is pushed out of their comfort bubble and do something positive about the horror that has and will continue to unfold in Haiti just because a pretty white blond woman lost a foot there, then I think tolerating “Summer of the Shark/Missing White Woman” style journalism in this instance might not be so awful.

As one who works in international development, I certainly agree with what you say. I have known quite a few pretty blond women who have worked in Haiti’s extremely difficult conditions with a dedication few of us in our comfortable U.S. “lifestyles” ever experience. While we pat ourselves on the back for not discriminating against those brown Haitians, let’s extend the same courtesy to the blond women who choose to work for justice and human dignity in places like Haiti.

I have known quite a few pretty blond women who have worked in Haiti’s extremely difficult conditions…

Extremely difficult conditions notwithstanding, far too late I think I may have chosen the wrong career path – most of my coworkers seemed to be hairy, sweaty tool and die machinists who smoked too much. And while I admit there are certain quarters of the internet where that would be thought of as a good thing, in my younger years I would have preferred the company of young, pretty, idealistic super hotties to those walking coronaries.

I hate to call you out on this one TBogg, but this post is fairly insensitve. I’m as sarcastic, and snarky as anybody, but what’s happening in Haiti is tragic. The impact on Port-au-Prince is pretty clearly like Nagasaki, without the background radiation. The city will never recover to anything like it was before.

First of all, it’s too soon. Second of all, this is one of the many stories the media has told (and I’ve read a number of them), not all of them have been about white women, or Americans, for that matter.

I think the media has done reasonably well with this one, for the most part. Stories like this personalize things a bit. One of the Americans confirmed as killed in Haiti by the quake went to my high school. Like this young woman, he was just out of college, doing his year or two in Haiti as a volunteer. It personalized it for me greatly. He was white, had sandy blond hair, and was twenty-something. Does that mean his story wasn’t worth telling?

Yes, there are undoubtedly greater tragedies that happened in Haiti than a woman losing a leg. Yes, most of them happened to people whose skin tone and hair color are considerably more dusky and are far poorer than this young woman. Many of them lost more than a leg. But that doesn’t make her story the less bittersweet for it. That doesn’t make what happened to her less of a tragedy.

By the way, for what it’s worth, this young woman was trying to make a difference there in people’s lives. How much have any of us done here, other than maybe send a few bucks to the Red Cross? We didn’t give nearly as much as she has, and in fact most of us never will.

You know, it’s not just americans that do this. Let me paraphrase the headlines in just about every Italian newspaper: The shock of Haiti: x Italians still missing.