Everybody in the Pool? No Way

We noted earlier today that longtime great L.A. Times reporter Tina Susman and a WSJ colleague were hassled by authorities at Orlando airport on return home from Haiti. Susman has since sent me this note.

I'm assuming you saw the New Republic piece today suggesting that journalists should have pooled the Haiti earthquake. While I agree that there often is redundancy in coverage of a story like this, to suggest the media cut back when covering a disaster of epic proportions is so ludicrous -- and the "pool" idea suggests that the person behind the plan assumes that all stories can be covered like a presidential visit, with working communications, transport, and the like. Most of the journos are getting in there on their own (I flew on one of the last commercial planes from DR into PAP), and we were there before the bulk of aid agencies arrived -- not because we nudged them off planes or choppers but because we simply don't have to deal with the bureaucratic delays that aid workers invariably face when confronting such situations. And as one who worked inside an aid agency for a few months, I know that aid workers can't just run to the airport and jump on a plane like most journos can. And the idea that we're just going there to get stories and not doing anyone any good is silly -- they said the same thing about us in Somalia, yet if it weren't for journos going in before anyone else, nobody would have done anything about the famine there, or Ethiopia, or so many other places.

Then she sent a followup:

Oddly, for all of his allegations about journalists somehow interfering in the aid process, all I heard from Haitians down there were thanks that journalists -- that anyone for that matter -- was paying attention to their plight and putting out the word of just how awful things were. And for the record, at least one of our reporter's reports -- by Tracy Wilkinson -- may very well have saved the life of a Mexican national badly injured but unable to help himself. Tracy came across the man while out reporting one day, alerted the Mexican government in Mexico City (where she normally is based), and they sent a Mexican rescue team to pick up the man, who was a Spanish language teacher at a Haitian school that collapsed. That is not the sort of thing that's possible if you have a few pool reporters flying around in military or government choppers -- it's only possible when you have reporters literally on the ground walking the disaster zone and telling stories from the ground up.

-- Greg Mitchell