Fox News leaves false report on Haiti uncorrected because it doesn't conform to their reality

[Magda Hassan]

No surprises here of course. Just putting it here for documentation

http://rawstory.com/2010/01/fox-false-re...corrected/

Fox News leaves false report on Haiti uncorrected

By Daniel Tencer
Monday, January 25th, 2010

Fox News is staying silent after bloggers and commentators criticized
the news network for a January 13 report on its Web site that stated
Cuba was "absent" from global aid efforts in Haiti.

Observers note that the communist country was, in fact, one of the first
to arrive after the earthquake that is now estimated to have taken the
lives of 200,000 people. That has led some bloggers to accuse Fox of
using the devastation in Haiti to propagandize against Cuba.

In an online news story entitled "US Spearheads Global Response to Haiti
Earthquake," Fox reported that "one geographically close country is
conspicuously absent from the roster of helping hands. Cuba, which had
evacuated some of its residents as a precaution in case the earthquake
triggered a tsunami, has so far not offered any assistance publicly to
its devastated island neighbor."

"The opposite is the case," reports Tony Iltis at Green Left Online. "At
the time the earthquake struck, Cuba already had 344 doctors and
paramedics working in Haiti. Also, in the past 12 years 450 young
Haitians have graduated as doctors from Cuban colleges, free of charge."

Iltis reported:
From January 13, more teams of Cuban health workers, accompanied by
Haitian medical students studying in Cuba, began arriving in Haiti with
medical supplies.

A January 12 Granma article said that, within a week of the earthquake:
?Cuban doctors in the Haitian capital [had held] 13,418 consultancies,
with 1,078 operations, more than 550 of them considered major surgery.
The Cuban doctors have also assisted 38 births.?

Notably, on the same day that Fox published its report, the network also
ran an article from the Associated Press that stated, "Cuba, which
already had hundreds of doctors in Haiti, treated injured in field
hospitals."

Fox doesn't appear to have corrected the error. As of press time, the
network had not responded to Raw Story's repeated requests for comment.

For nearly two weeks media watchdogs have been complaining that Fox News
has been minimizing its coverage of the Haiti earthquake. MediaMatters
reported that, in the first full day after the earthquake -- Jan. 13 --
MSNBC devoted 20 times as much time to Haiti as Fox News, and on January
14, the ratio was roughly five to one.

But other observers say the lack of coverage is more widespread than Fox
News. Freelance journalist Dave Lindorff reported last week that Cuba
was commonly overlooked when US news outlets reported on international
aid efforts.

Far from ?doing nothing? about the disaster as the right-wing
propagandists at Fox-TV were charging, Cuba has been one of the most
effective and critical responders to the crisis, because it had set up a
medical infrastructure before the quake, which was able to mobilize
quickly and start treating the victims.

If Cuba is to share any blame for the misconception that it's doing
nothing, it may be that the government in Havana simply didn't put out a
press release fast enough. A Jan. 13 article in Granma, the Cuban
state-run publication, didn't mention Cuban relief efforts. That led
bloggers to post the article as proof Cuba was absent from the rescue
effort.

But news of the country's efforts is slowly beginning to trickle into
the United States. On Monday, NPR reported that "the day after the
earthquake struck the Cuban doctors reopened two hospitals. Since the
Cubans live in the poorest neighborhoods amongst the most disadvantaged
Haitians they were actually the first responders."