And now our Canadian friends propagate the same hoary disaster tropes:
Here's the subhead:
Looting flares as President announces fatalities - likely to rise - from quake, tsunami
And here's the troublesome language.
People desperate for food and water ransacked stores in some quake-stricken areas, raising speculation that the government would use martial law to crack down on looters.
And in a later paragraph
A lack of water, food and fuel sharpened the hardship for the hundreds of thousands of people left homeless.
It appears that at least one journalist and one editor have learned nothing from the discussions that followed the Haiti earthquake or, for that matter, Hurricane Katrina. My research suggests that governments sometimes do learn from experience--as the generally good performance of many buildings in Chile, compared with Haiti, suggests--but it appears that journalists learn little or nothing. This, I suspect, is because general assignment reporters just rely on some story frames from other inexpert journalism, relying on the amplification of themes by other cub reporters, rather than actually gathering information and placing it in anything like a context. Of course, the decontextualization of news is one of the biggest problems of journalism, as this story so aptly points out.
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