Haiti earthquake reporters titillate with disaster porn
Brendan O’Neill: Journalists are so vain they think this quake is about them
You will have read some of the reports. "His body is a mass of suppurating sores..." "A baby is on her back, her belly bloated and pronounced..." "This is what hell looks like and the people of Haiti are adrift in its lake of fire..."
The earthquake in Haiti has not only exposed the fragility of that Caribbean state - it has also revealed the British media to be stuffed with wannabe hack novelists more interested in providing horror-porn than factual analysis.
Many British reporters have descended on Haiti, not to report on the aid effort or people's coping strategies, but to gawp at dead children with stiff limbs and bulging eyes and to write about it all in the style of a teenager who dreams of becoming the next Clive Barker.
Both the broadsheets and the tabloids have published tawdry disaster porn, designed not to enlighten the reader but to titillate him. "Dirty white sheets cover some of the dead, others lie out in the open, some, their limbs entwined with another's", said the front page of the Guardian.
"Three cockerels scratched among a pile of six now-bloated corpses, and pecked at the entrails of one of the deceased, a middle-aged man," said the Independent, under the headline 'Dignity: the scarcest commodity in Haiti'.
Is that headline supposed to be ironic? How can Haitians retain any dignity when British hacks are revealing their every unspeakable experience to the reading public, like Dickensian weirdos pulling back the curtain on a freakshow?
Amazingly, that Independent article mentioned birds eating human corpses twice, opening with the image of bodies being "casually pecked by chickens in the afternoon sunshine" and closing with a description of cockerels feasting on entrails. What's the point?
Jon Snow, who now fronts Channel 4 News directly from the rubble of Haiti, seems to be fascinated by people's injuries. "The eye completely overwhelmed by a huge mound of knotted flesh… poison seems to have set in," he says, perhaps having recently read Cormac McCarthy's The Road and wanting to emulate its sparse, brutal descriptions of the impact of apocalypse on mankind.
Snow's reports for the Channel 4 News website are all "mangled hands" and "vastly swollen arms" and most importantly are about the impact that these hellish scenes are having on Snow himself. He describes his and his team's "guilt and incapacity and the complete helplessness in our hearts".
This reveals what lies at the rotten heart of the Haiti horror-porn: journalists’ obsession with themselves, their desire to show off both their creative-writing skills (such as they are) and their emotional intelligence. They’re so vain, they think this quake is about them.
Some newspapers seem to relish in shocking their readers. The People, next to a photograph of a man hurling the body of a six-year-old on to a pile of other bodies, announces: "You will want to look away. You will be sickened, shocked and outraged."
What next? "Roll up, roll up! Watch through your fingers as a cockerel pecks out a dead baby's eyes!"
The end result is that readers struggle to find out the facts about post-earthquake Haiti. We want to know whether the aid is getting through, whether refugee camps have been set up, and how widespread that violence and looting really is - but we have to plough through paragraph after paragraph about blood, limbs and scavenging dogs to find anything out.
This horror-porn hints at a serious crisis of values in modern journalism. Many hacks now appear more interested in describing their own reactions to events than uncovering the facts about those events, and objective reporting is increasingly being replaced by a sub-Dante search for signs of hell, depravity and indignity.
In place of a cool, stand-back analysis, the media is giving us visceral, violent coverage designed to jolt us into feeling some kind of emotion. We are being provided, not with information, but
with morbid entertainment. 
Filed under: Haiti, Earthquake, Media
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About the author
Brendan O'Neill is editor of spiked. He has written for The Spectator, New Statesman, The Guardian, Christian Science Monitor, Slate and... MORE
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Interesting article that just regurgitates the information that it is against! And that with a photo of bloated bodies! How does this article add to the "uncovering the facts about those events"? This is another example of the reporting that it says it is against! There is a word for that: Hypocracy.
Posted by Ian Thomas at 3:35pm on January 19, 2010
Yeah, Ian Thomas, there's another word: hypocrisy. But anyway, exactly how would the writer make his point so effectively if he didn't, as you say, "regurgitate" the crass scribblings of the reporters hs rails against?
Posted by Holly Cox at 4:01pm on January 19, 2010
Thanks for the spell-check Holly...oops. This article fits in "with morbid entertainment" that we are all looking for...otherwise we would not have read the article...the link on the home page gives the quote of cockerels to get us to click. This article adds nothing to the post-quake problems of Haiti...therefore it does not achieve its own aims. Therefore this article was written with the purpose of titillating us from the shock and horror that such things are being reported. Until I read this article I was not even aware that such gruesome things were reported and now I know...but to what benefit? This reporter has benefitted by finding another angle in on the dreadfulness of events in Haiti by re-using other reporterâ??s articles. I wonder if he can write an article about post-earthquake Haiti that he says that he wants and as a reporter, he says, is supposed to provide.
Posted by Ian Thomas at 4:22pm on January 19, 2010
Quite. Add to that the mannered emoting of the BBC's stars.
Posted by jasper pepper at 6:32pm on January 19, 2010
Likely so but gore porn is a sure way to catch attention in an increasingly jaded world. And I admit to being drawn to it myself.
Posted by HTuttle at 8:56pm on January 19, 2010
I totally agree. I am sick of seeing Jon Snow's smug face (and all the other reporters) prattling on, bitching about the rescue efforts. I am sure they are going back to some nice comfy hotel and doing very little to help - except their careers.
Posted by juliette cottam at 10:49am on January 20, 2010
All fair points Brendan, but we perhaps ought to remember that journalists are (mostly) human beings as well, and when they arrive in Haiti and see this foul destruction and devastation, they are bound to be affected by it emotionally, and of course they will want to transmit that in the stories that they file. It's easy for those outside the country to say "talk about whether the aid is getting through, talk about the refugee camps" but if I was there, even if I were an experienced hack I'm sure I'd find it hard to get past these awful scenes. As for Jon Snow, I have always respected him as a broadcaster - and I don't think he simply wants to "titillate" his viewers. Brendan, I suggest you go there yourself - and then let us know how easy it was to ignore the "horror-porn" that you speak of.
Posted by Muppet at 10:56am on January 20, 2010
An excellent article, the best O'Neill has written for First Post. This is something that has bothered me about the TV reporting all along, with some reporters trying to find anything to complain about the aid effort's failure, whilst adding to the difficulties of those working there by clogging the roads and flights in and out. Finding people who have had nothing and reporting it, while also having nothing to give them. The dispassionate journalist, or, rather, couldn't give a damn hack, a handy leg up for their careers. It's rich porn, gawping at all the poor people suffering, while being able to leave to return to their comfortable lives. But then this is what journos do, they are never involved, never the ones to help, always the ones to pick fault and their exhibitions of caring for the camera or tabloid are just that. And what are we but voyeurs, getting our daily fix of 'thank god it's not me'.
Posted by foolonthehill at 11:11am on January 20, 2010
well put. It is all ridiculous reporting. And the never ending snow reporting here. I despise these smug journalists. The slow dignified funeral procession of a lost soldier or the throwing of a body onto a pile of bodies. Both are simply human beings coping as best they can in the sadness of death. Do not be amazed by either of these things happening. Neither needs anything else but factual reporting with no horror or misplaced guilt. Both are how life is. (and of course how death is)
Posted by dockbogggs at 12:12pm on January 20, 2010
I agree with this article. Note to all journalist: Please stop asking a person who has lost everything but the shirt on their back " How do you feel? We know you spent hours hand -picking the miserablest person you could find, to ask. & we know the answer. So pause the suffering-on-show and bombarding us with mind-numbing figures.
Posted by jvporter@gmail.com at 12:34pm on January 20, 2010
Well said, Brendan O'Neil. There is nothing the British media like better ( and this includes the majestic BBC) than gloating over someone's woes, especially when the people involved are poor and from the developing world. They could not wait for the rioting to start, they had been predicting this from day one. If there is such a place as hell it would be overcrowded with British journalists. The good news is that fewer and fewer people are prepared to pay to read their trash.
Posted by Yolande Agble at 3:14pm on January 20, 2010
Horror-Porn sells. Ballard was right.
Posted by K. Sommerville at 4:17pm on January 20, 2010
Silly article.
Posted by vconcerned at 6:00am on January 21, 2010
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