Regurgitating the party line

In two separate pieces, Heather Williams and Jeffrey Sachs outline how the story of Aristide's ouster from Haiti got mucked up. Both authors contend that the media paved the way for the coup by uncritically repeating the line emanating out of Washington.

In her piece for Counterpunch, Williams identifies several glaring problems with the reporting over the past few days (and, well, few years): the media failed to identify who the rebels were and why they were stirring up trouble; the media kept reiterating that Aristide had lost popular support, in part due to what transpired with the parliamentary elections of 2000; and not enough attention was paid to the partisan nature of the State Department officials dictating US policy towards the poverty-stricken nation.

Picking up on this last point, Sachs writes in the Financial Times that "President George Bush's foreign policy team came into office intent on toppling Mr Aristide, long reviled by powerful US conservatives such as former senator Jesse Helms who obsessively saw him as another Fidel Castro in the Caribbean."

Indeed, as Ron Howell of the AP reports, it seems that Helms' understudy, Roger Noriega, has his fingerprints all over this one.