What’s going on in Haiti these days?
If you read the New York Times yesterday, you might have seen this rather alarming headline from Reuters: “Haiti riot instigators set deadline to install [Prime Minister].”
The article began with this cheerful sentence:
“Slum leaders in the southern town of Les Cayes who started Haiti's recent food riots handed lawmakers an ultimatum on Monday to install a new government within a week or face more protests.”
Alarming stuff -- but maybe you didn’t read the Times yesterday; maybe you turned to the Herald, which seems to have brushed aside news of the possible collapse of Haiti’s government for something a little . . . well, not so serious, for God’s sake.
Yesterday’s Herald headline: “Young Haitian soccer players get lesson in shopping”
You can almost hear the exclamation marks dotting themselves.
The article described a few hours with 18 Haitian teenagers, here for a soccer match, who had been given a hundred dollars each to spend at target. The fact that their government might be toppled this week wasn’t mentioned; nor was the food crisis plaguing the country; nor were the riots and looting that have killed at least six people since April.
But hey, who wants to read that depressing stuff anyway? The important thing is that these kids got to buy a hundred bucks worth of whatever crap they wanted, and the Herald was there to chronicle it.
Indeed, the daily devoted itself to plugging every business and brand name the young Haitians came across during their tryst with good old fashioned American consumerism. And nothing wrong with that – it’s not like these kids were being used for shameless corporate self-promotion or something!
Just one bit of advice for the Herald, paper to paper: when someone wants to advertise in New Times, what we do, see, is we charge them for it.
Pretty smart, huh?
Below, we've bolded some of the article's more blatant ass-kissings (we included 'the United States,' as there's plenty of marketing for that brand, too).
When he got to Target, Andy Premier knew exactly what he wanted: an iPod.
The 15-year-old had seen a few kids with music players in Haiti. He would have one now.
Andy was among a group of 18 Haitian teenagers who flew to Miami over the weekend to play in a friendly exhibition soccer match organized by the city of Miami. A Haitian cellphone company, Voilà, paid for most of the airfare.
The teens hail from some rough-and-tumble quarters in the Port-au-Prince metropolitan area -- like the seaside slum Cité Soleil. A social program that aims to develop the kids through the use of sports helped give them the brief reprieve.
''It's a life-changing experience,'' Robert Duval, founder of Athletique d'Haiti, said about the weekend trip in Target's furniture aisle. ``It's like I'm opening up the world for these kids. They get perspective. . . Most of the kids haven't been out of Cité Soleil, much less the country.''
As soon as they stepped into the lobby of this Target in midtown Miami, the teenagers stood wide-eyed. Each had a gift card valued at $100, plus some extra cash jubilant spectators tossed on the field at their triumphant Saturday game. They beat a team of local high school kids 4-1. Some of the money spectators threw on the field will go to the Haitian kids' families.
So Andy moved ahead, snaking through the colorful ailes in search of technology.
''It's beautiful here,'' Andy said about the United States.
When he reached the electronics department, he passed on the iPod, opting instead on a Creative Zen MP3 player. He tugged at the packaged item, dangling from a hook. It had a lock on it.
. . . You get the idea.
"Paper to paper", hehe, that's pretty funny. I think its cute that you guys consider yourselves a "paper". If by paper do you mean that you're made of paper?
I never claimed all of my writers were good. Actually, most of them are pretty bad, but at least they're journalists and not the Alt Weekly equivalent of fast food franchises with the same basic formula in every market they've colluded themselves into. Hey, nice redesign on the inside, looks familiar...
Keep up the good fight, guys, keep on giving the big paper hell!
Posted at: May 7, 2008 10:29 AM