Dying For a Bit of News

I’m pretty sure I’m not the only one who was doing a rough mental calculation in my head every time I was faced with the sight of some carefully unkempt TV reporter standing at the edge of a scene of desolation in Haiti.

That calculation went something like this – there are probably fifty crews there from the US alone, about twenty from South America, four from Canada, five from Britain, one from Ireland, twenty from the rest of Europe and let’s say conservatively another twenty from the remainder of the world. That’s a total of one hundred and twenty camera crews. I imagine each crew would consist of a cameraman, driver, sound man and of course the individual on the other side of the lens. That’s four hundred and eighty people with all the associated vehicles and equipment. There was no problem getting all that stuff onto the island though, was there? The logistics of distributing food, water and humanitarian supplies seemed to be insurmountable while there was a fairly obvious open door policy on morons in khaki pants with cameras.

And I was not alone in thinking as I looked at the tragic events unfold that four hundred and eighty pairs of hands could move a lot of rubble, could search a lot of collapsed houses, could carry a lot of water, could change a lot of bandages. If those pairs of hands were so inclined.

I’d like to think that I speak for the majority when I say that I would have happily foregone the grave, quasi profound commentary of any of these Pulitzer chasing fools, I would happily have forsaken hearing one of your sickeningly contrived “ Perhaps the sun will never rise over Haiti again. This is Simon Jones BBC News at the collapsed UN headquarters in Port au Prince, Haiti” type sign offs if I thought you were doing something to help. I would have been glad to have the anchor in London tell me that Simon Jones will not be filing a report today as he is busy digging graves to bury some of the dead.

I mean you’re right there for Christ’s sake, you’ve done the hard part, now drop the bloody mike and do something useful.