Anderson Cooper's Haiti Reporting: Better Than Nothing, but Still Not Great
Posted Wednesday, February 10, 2010 4:04 PM
Jeneen Interlandi
It's been two days since Anderson Cooper resumed yeniden başlamak his coverage of the crisis in Haiti. The CNN news anchorhas taken great painsto take painsçok çabalamak, özenmekto explain his decision to return to the earthquake-ravaged Port-au-Prince, nearly a month after the quake.No one should die in silence, and no one's struggle to live should go unreported as well, he said—two, three, four times in the space boşluk of an hour. Then he had the camera pan Sabit bir konumdan yatay (soldan sağa veya sağdan sola) kamera hareketine geçme to his colleague Sanjay Gupta, who spent several minutes echoing the same sentiments his. On Tuesday's show, Sean Penn, who has been in Port-au-Prince helping earthquake victims with his own team of aid workers stopped by—not to detail his organization's efforts so much as to engage in another round of mutual and gratuitous back-patting.
Don't get me wrong, as a reporter who's struggled to cover the situation in Haiti from a desk in New York, I'm both thrilled heyecanlanmak and heartened yüreklendirmek to see any journalist so determined to keep a spotlight on the issue, let alone a journalist as prominent önde gelen as Cooper—especially given that we are a full month past the initial quake and now amid ortasında a Super Bowl, a series of blizzards tipi, and the coming Winter Olympics.
But as a viewer I was frustrated hayal kırıklığına uğramak to see that the show's reported segments bölüm were about as long as the touchy-feely Muhabbetini, sevgisini ve diğer duygularını açık biçimde ve dokunarak ifade eden interludes ara, and they weren't terribly revealing at that. At one point Cooper wandered through a tent city narrating the scene with only the briefest of exchanges between himself and the city's inhabitants. At another, Gupta visited a makeshift geçici çözüm TB clinic and tried framing this particular public-health threat as a new one for the people of Haiti. It isn't. Gupta went so far as to stick his microphone in the face of a TB patient—a 20-year-old woman in obvious pain. After explaining that the woman had lost her entire family in the quake and had run out of medicine for her illness, he asked,How are you feeling? and then,Where will you go after this? After considering those questions, the woman erupted into tears. I mean, come on. How does that help anyone?
It's tough to keep stories like Haiti in the spotlight for more than a few weeks. Not because the story isn't important or doesn't deserve sustained coverage. It is and it does. But invariably her zaman, audience interest waned azalmak, reporters grow weary bıkkın, and fresh angle açı start to seem few and far between seyrek olarak. And with most newsrooms constrained rahatsız by budget cuts and staff cuts and the pressure to write only zillion-click stories, consistent in-depth reporting in another country can seem like a mere yesteryear relic kutsal emanet from journalism's glory days. But if you're actually in Haiti? Instead of running through a list of clichés about the resiliency dayanıklılık, esneklik of the Haitian people (even if you admit that they're clichés, as Cooper has done on air canlı yayında), how about looking into what the Haitian government and international community are doing to clear the rubble döküntü or prepare for the coming hurricane season? I'm actually a big fan of Anderson Cooper: he's got a special report coming up on child trafficking ticaret, kaçakçılık, and I hope that work will render açıklamak this criticism superfluous bol bol. (I also contacted his team for reaction to this story, and will post it as soon as I hear something.) I think that by returning to Haiti long after most reporters have left, he has brought a powerful spotlight to one of the world's dark corners. In the days ahead, I just want to see him put that light to better use.
Source:blog.newsweek.com