Just how much did Haiti's election news get overshadowed by the protests in Egypt last week? Perhaps I just had my head in the sand, but I heard very little about the fact that Haitian election officials reversed themselves and set a presidential run-off between Mirlande Manigat and Michel Martelly. And that is big news.
It symbolizes one of my (many) beefs with the nature of mainstream press coverage -- in this case, the surge of momentum that big breaking news stories can generate (newsmentum?), sweeping along generally bright, independent-minded people into a big, gaping, perspective-free hole of hype. It's not that these stories aren't important (Egypt is obviously of immeasurable geopolitical importance on any number of levels), but the collective impact of this rush to coverage can warp even the most important story so that it seems as if it is the ONLY story that MATTERS.
The same thing happened in Haiti just over a year ago, but the pendulum has swung back as heavily as it swung towards the chaos in Port-au-Prince. Sudan -- which just confirmed the results of its referendum granting South Sudan independence on Monday -- also received somewhat anti-climactic news coverage. Sure, the results were a foregone conclusion, but there are a lot of dramatic issues still to be debated and determined in what is a very unsettled region of the world.
It should be our job as journalists to provide a little bit more of that perspective, and evoke the drama where it may not always be so blatantly obvious.
It symbolizes one of my (many) beefs with the nature of mainstream press coverage -- in this case, the surge of momentum that big breaking news stories can generate (newsmentum?), sweeping along generally bright, independent-minded people into a big, gaping, perspective-free hole of hype. It's not that these stories aren't important (Egypt is obviously of immeasurable geopolitical importance on any number of levels), but the collective impact of this rush to coverage can warp even the most important story so that it seems as if it is the ONLY story that MATTERS.
The same thing happened in Haiti just over a year ago, but the pendulum has swung back as heavily as it swung towards the chaos in Port-au-Prince. Sudan -- which just confirmed the results of its referendum granting South Sudan independence on Monday -- also received somewhat anti-climactic news coverage. Sure, the results were a foregone conclusion, but there are a lot of dramatic issues still to be debated and determined in what is a very unsettled region of the world.
It should be our job as journalists to provide a little bit more of that perspective, and evoke the drama where it may not always be so blatantly obvious.
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