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The first anniversary of the catastrophic earthquake that leveled Port-au-Prince would ordinarily--Tucson aside--have received extensive follow-up coverage. After all the death toll in Haiti has now reached an unimaginable 316,000. CBS' Bill Whitaker aired the second of his 1 Year Later features: Tuesday was on continued homelessness; now he turns to Haiti's children, its orphaned and abandoned, and the charities that try to look after them. ABC's Matt Gutman told us, astonishingly, that in twelve months only 10% of the city's rubble has been removed: the government does not have the funds to pay for clean-up. Almost 2m people rely on international aid agencies for their daily food. NBC did not have a reporter in Haiti.
NBC did send Ian Williams to Brisbane to file a brief stand-up next to the bloated Brisbane River. CBS relied on Danielle Isdale of its Australian newsgathering partner Network Ten. "An inland tsunami," she called it. The video takes your breath away.
Sadly, this is the second time that NBC has cast Haiti coverage aside. Last February, Nightly News shifted most of their coverage to the Vancouver Olympics and relegated the Haiti story to also-ran status. That month, Nightly News devoted 160 minutes to Olympic-related stories--far more than they spent on Haiti. Maybe if those 316,000 Haitians had all died in luge accidents, Nightly News would have spent more time reporting on them.
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