Haiti coverage “disaster porn”: British columnist

In a column for British online daily The First Post, Brendan O’Neill writes that in Britain “both the broadsheets and the tabloids have published tawdry disaster porn, designed not to enlighten the reader but to titillate him.”

In his column titled “Journalists are so vain they think this quake is about them,” O’Neill wrote:

“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.”

O’Neill uses examples from British newspapers The Guardian and The Independent as well as television reports to illustrate his opinion, which is that the earthquake coverage has “revealed the British media to be stuffed with wannabe hack novelists more interested in providing horror-porn than factual analysis.”