Supplemental: What actually happened in Haiti?

MONDAY, FEBRUARY 9, 2015

Taking the PBS Challenge:
Many PBS stations are currently airing a three-part series, A Path Appears, which features Nicholas Kristof.

This is the official synopsis of the PBS series:

A Path Appears, from the creative team behind the series Half the Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide, follows Pulitzer Prize-winning journalists Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn and a group of dedicated actor/advocates to Colombia, Haiti, Kenya, and throughout the United States. They uncover the harshest forms of gender inequality, the devastating impact of poverty and the ripple effects that follow: including sex trafficking, teen-pregnancy, gender-based violence, child slavery and the effective solutions being forged to combat them.
Parts 1 and 2 of the series have already aired. Part 3 airs this week on most participating stations.

We were puzzled by one segment from Part 2 of the series. It concerned the experiences of a 13-year-old Haitian girl.

You can watch Part 2 of the series on-line, but only through February 14. For that reason, we're posting the links today.

This is our reason for calling your attention to this fascinating segment from Haiti:

We were puzzled, and nonplussed, by certain aspects of this segment from the PBS show. We didn’t understand why the girl in question was treated the way she was—why she was treated the way she was by Kristof and the team with which he was involved.

Let’s be frank. In some ways, it seemed to us that this girl had been treated very badly. That segment from Haiti is very much worth watching. But watching the segment left a bad taste in our mouths, a bad feeling in our stomachs.

We became more puzzled over the weekend when we saw that Kristof had written a column about these same events back on January 1. The column appeared in the hard-copy New York Times, but only in the paper’s New York editions.

To read the column, click here.

Why were we puzzled by the column? It told the story of this same girl. But the basic chronology was quite different from the chronology shown on PBS.

In Kristof’s column, he explains why the girl was weeping profusely at one part of the story. But his explanation is quite different from the story we seemed to see take place on PBS.

We expect to return to this matter on Friday. We wanted to alert you to it today, since the PBS show will only be available for on-line viewing through the end of the week.

To watch the PBS segment on-line, you can just click here. The fascinating segment in Haiti starts around the 31-minute mark.

The segment runs about one half hour. Because of the beautiful Haitian kids it involves, the segment is very much worth watching.

That said, we’ll suggest that you Take the Haiti Challenge! Watch the show, then read Kristof’s earlier column. If we might borrow from the ancient Dylan lyric:

“But oh, what kind of journalism is this, which goes from bad to worse?”

Kristof tells the story one way in his New York Times column. His PBS program tells the story quite differently, with a substantially different chronology being shown.

In each instance, a child is subjected to some very rough treatment, which leaves her weeping profusely, with no one bothering to explain why this had to occur.

The otherwise useless female movie star is in the PBS program, of course. In this way, we PBS viewers get ourselves pleasured with major celebrity fun.

As we've thought about the career-building affected by Brian Williams, we wondered more and more each day: What’s going on with Nicholas Kristof? Is Nicholas Kristof just a different version of Williams?

Perhaps he’s grossly overextended. That said, does he really care about Kevin Green’s kids? About that Haitian girl?

Go ahead—Take the Haiti Challenge! Read the original column, then watch the subsequent PBS show.

You'll see the story told two different ways. Which story do you prefer? And why was that lovely child forced to cry so hard?

28 comments:

  1. Let the poo-flinging commence.

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    1. I fully expect poor Marilaine to become this year's D'Leisha.

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    2. http://www.ted.com/playlists/171/the_most_popular_talks_of_all

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    3. @ 11:09 Let's be frank. Since the Kristof Khronicles approach Tuscaloosa Tales in length, it will be necessary for Somerby to single out one "lovely child" among those "beautiful Haitian kids" to demonstrate he cares more about than the author.

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  2. It's strange how progressives love consulting "root causes" all the way back to slavery and the pre-civil rights era when they consider remedies for social dysfunction, but are deeply offended when root causes dating back just one to two generations are noticed, at least where certain groups are concerned.

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  3. OK, I'll start. Clicking on the link to Kristof's column, I'm more convinced than ever of one of the fundamental premises of life --

    Haiti is an unmitigated hell-hole.

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    1. Bless you majneb. Many progressives have failed to see the wisdom in what I told them 5 years ago.

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  4. Kristof seems to be arguing in favor of the Restavek system, which is essentially child slavery. He seems to argue that if the slaves are well-treated, it doesn't matter that they are slaves. He thinks it is OK to force poor children to work as domestic servants instead of nurturing them as children. He suggests several times that the do-gooders are perhaps misguided (as if he knows what is best for Haitian kids). If anyone were to seriously argue that American slavery should be reinstated because black children today live in poverty, would such a view be acceptable? Why is OK for Haiti? The fact that 2/3 of these children are girls is pretty much ignored.

    Kristof tells two different stories because he is using this girl's life circumstances for his own purposes, just as she was used by her Restavek family for their purposes. It is abuse when no one considers what the girl's best interests are. I found myself wondering who had the authority to sign the release for her video to be used in this show, since her guardianship was contested. Does it not matter who signed for her, since she is a third world child?

    Haiti is not a hell-hole. It is poor. Many parts of the world are poor. It doesn't make them hell-holes. To assume that people who are poor do not have a life with joy, friendship, relationships and family, and are not entitled to such things leads to people assuming that it is OK to beat this girl as long as she is being given food. Katherine Boo's book on the slums of India is an excellent example of how people are able to build full lives under extreme poverty and why assuming they must be miserable is wrong, just as it is wrong to assume our elderly are miserable because they are old or ill, or our rural poor are miserable because they are uneducated or non-working. In my opinion, the most miserable people on earth are lawyers, because they hate their work and have no time for any life beyond it.

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    1. It's rare to see Americans of any social class or ethnicity heading to Haiti for a better life.

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    2. They head for Mexico though.

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    3. I find my self wondering who had the authority to allow 7:05 on the internet.

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    4. If it's good enough for Newt Gingrich, it's good enough for Haiti.
      How else will the disadvantaged learn the value of hard work and self-discipline?

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    5. Kristof was neither saying nor implying of those things.

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    6. He stated in the video that perhaps the girl should be left with her Restevek family since she was being fed and allowed to attend school. He said several times he thought the system helped poor families who could not support their kids. He seemed untroubled by the beatings, the forced labor, the separation of kids from all family contact and the sexual abuse. He kept repeating that he was troubled by the intervention on this girls behalf. What a guy!

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  5. Jennifer Garner: "I can't wait to get back to my kids." Unspoken: and my enormous, luxurious, fastidiously clean house, with soft sofas and espresso machine and pristine kitchen and walk-in closets and giant master bath.

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    1. Things don't lead to happiness. Relationships with people and life experiences do.

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    2. Life is going to tend to suck without the availability of daily hot showers and central heat and AC in extreme climates no matter how many relationships or life experiences one has.

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    3. What do hot showers and AC have to do with this post.
      Hell, what does Jennifer Gardener have to do with it.

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    4. Jennifer Garner was the Hollywood celeb in the segment prior to the Haiti segment (which featured Alfre Woodard). Jennifer was visiting the poor in their rented trailers in West Virginia.

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    5. So Jennifer Garner has actually nothing to do with "What Actually Happened in Haiti." And what was unspoken is 9:52 has an imagination working with the same fertility as Kristof and Somerby.

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  6. Bob already has two factual errors in this preview post, so we can't wait to see him allege timeline inconsistencies and other problems through what "seems" to be written by Kristof or shown on PBS. I will point them out when the time comes, and his followers will quickly say Somerby errors don't count.

    Whenever you see the word "seem" in a Somerby post, prepare for novelizing or worse. He has already started in this one. He "seemed to see" the story on PBS. He never "seems" to tell the truth when he is already wiggling over whether he saw something or not.

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    1. Your comment @ 12:13 seem to illustrate that word gap Bob wrote about when forcefully reminding us at great length that liberals don't care about kids. My mom had a big vocabulary but she was short on positive conversation, so I can at least empathize half way.

      I'd link you to his post on solutions so you could read it and work on your problem, but can't find it off hand.

      Please stay and keep trying. You remind me of that eloquent description Alfre Woodard gave in the film Bob linked us all to.

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    2. I found one of the posts @ 12:13. I'll keep looking.

      http://dailyhowler.blogspot.com/2014/06/anthropology-lessons-oleaginous-oily.html

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    3. Uno mas, as they say:

      http://dailyhowler.blogspot.com/2014/05/starting-tomorrow-our-month-of-gaps.html

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    4. Go away, as they say.

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    5. See, it's working already.

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  7. What happened in Haiti, Bob?

    Black people sold their souls to Satan.

    They bought eternal damnation in return for getting rid of the infernal French.

    Don't you watch the 700 Club?

    Liberals like you asking stupid questions. No wonder your progressive agenda is lost.

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