The media transformation has already began. Like it did in the Katrina disaster, it took only a couple of days for the media to switch its focus from the almost unbearable suffering of the hapless victims to stoking the fears of looting.

The same thing is happening in the media this very moment, before the bodies have begun to be buried, and while people are still dying from lack of water and food.

Like the media treatment of New Orleans after Katrina, there is a purpose to this sudden obsession: to erase any compassion on the part of the American People. If people become too concerned about Haiti they might start looking deeper into its miserable history—especially the heavy hand of the U.S. that has played such a large part in creating that misery, from the invasion by the Marines under the southern racist president, Woodrow Wilson in 1915 to the ouster of its first legally-elected president in modern times, Aristide, in 1993.

This column was inspired by a column on tomdispatch.com by Rebecca Solnit, When the Media is the Disaster.

Last Christmas a priest, Father Tim Jones of York, started a ruckus in Britain when he said in a sermon that shoplifting by the desperate from chain stores might be acceptable behavior. Naturally, there was an uproar. Jones told the Associated Press: “The point I'm making is that when we shut down every socially acceptable avenue for people in need, then the only avenue left is the socially unacceptable one.”

The response focused almost entirely on why shoplifting is wrong, but the claim was also repeatedly made that it doesn’t help. In fact, food helps the hungry, a fact so bald it’s bizarre to even have to state it. The means by which it arrives is a separate matter. The focus remained on shoplifting, rather than on why there might be people so desperate in England’s green and pleasant land that shoplifting might be their only option, and whether unnecessary human suffering is itself a crime of sorts.

Right now, the point is that people in Haiti need food, and for all the publicity, the international delivery system has, so far, been a visible dud.  Under such circumstances, breaking into a U.N. food warehouse -- food assumedly meant for the poor of Haiti in a catastrophic moment -- might not be “violence,” or “looting,” or “law-breaking.”  It might be logic.  It might be the most effective way of meeting a desperate need.

Why were so many people in Haiti hungry before the earthquake? Why do we have a planet that produces enough food for all and a distribution system that ensures more than a billion of us don’t have a decent share of that bounty? Those are not questions whose answers should be long delayed.

Even more urgently, we need compassion for the sufferers in Haiti and media that tell the truth about them.

The Clarion-Ledger is running without comment the AP wires that are increasingly turning their attention from suffering to looting:

Pockets of looting and violence also are hindering a slow improvement in getting aid to victims.

Just four blocks from U.S. troop landing at the palace, hundreds of looters were rampaging through downtown.

Even the venerable New York Times has shown its concern over looting.

Major General Smedley Butler, USMC (ret) put it all together in 1933:

I helped make Mexico, especially Tampico, safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefits of Wall Street. The record of racketeering is long. I helped purify Nicaragua for the international banking house of Brown Brothers in 1909-1912 (where have I heard that name before?). I brought light to the Dominican Republic for American sugar interests in 1916. In China I helped to see to it that Standard Oil went its way unmolested.

Follow the money.

You owe it to yourself to read the Solnit column. It’s an eye-opener.

Tags: Looting, Haiti, earthquake