http://mediamatters.org/columns/201001140050The right-wing media react to Haiti
Jamison Foser
January 14, 2010 6:07 pm ET
Tuesday's devastating earthquake in Haiti continues to bring grim news. Estimated death counts range from the tens of thousands to more than 100,000. Haiti's capital and largest city, Port-au-Prince, sustained massive damage: its hospitals -- all of them -- destroyed or rendered unusable, the presidential palace and a United Nations mission flattened. Damage to Haiti's airport, seaport, roads, power supplies, and other utilities has exacerbated the suffering and hindered relief efforts.
Public and media reaction to the tragedy has been swift and in many cases admirable. Record-setting donations have poured into the Red Cross -- $4 million via text message alone. Some 30,000 people contributed another $2.6 million to Clinton Foundation relief efforts in just 24 hours. Much of this support can be attributed to the quick and powerful distribution -- by both old media and new -- of news, information, and photos relating to the earthquake. Social media platforms such as Twitter and Facebook have been a valuable source of information, as have news organizations that scrambled to cover the tragedy. (The Business Insider has a good round-up of those efforts, with links to several useful resources.)
But much of the conservative media elite has reacted quite differently.
Fox News Channel's highest-rated shows, for example, all but ignored the disaster, according to a new Media Matters study:
On January 13, Fox News' three top-rated programs for 2009 -- The O'Reilly Factor, Hannity, and Glenn Beck -- devoted a combined total of less than 7 minutes of coverage to the earthquake in Haiti, instead choosing to air such things as Beck's hour-long interview with Sarah Palin, Bill O'Reilly's discussion of Comedy Central host Jon Stewart, and Sean Hannity's advocacy for Massachusetts candidate Scott Brown's Senate campaign.
Fox News never hesitates to boast that its prime-time lineup draws more viewers than its competitors. But that success comes with a responsibility -- a responsibility to bring people important information in times of crisis. Fox fell far short of meeting that responsibility, instead inflicting upon viewers Sarah Palin's fumbling, bumbling attempt to answer a question about which of America's founders she most admires and continuing its attempts to elect Republicans to the Senate.
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If you're more interested in compassion than conspiracy theories, The New York Times has a list of relief efforts that can use your help.
In 1994, Limbaugh ridiculed Haiti, suggesting our only interest in the nation is "the fact that baseballs are made in Haiti" -- which he deemed "irrelevant" because of the baseball strike going on at the time. This week, he again ridiculed Haiti, saying the nation produces "zilch, zero, nada."
If Limbaugh and Robertson are any indication of the way the conservative media think about Haiti, maybe it's for the best that Fox's top-rated shows are ignoring the tragedy. I don't even want to think about the bizarre claims Glenn Beck would come up with. Probably something about the Obama administration faking the earthquake so they could funnel billions of dollars in funds to ACORN, just like Hitler would do.
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