Like any X-rated content, this smut is all flesh and no substantive plot. The lens flits between body parts and journalists pulling perverse Cronkite-in-Vietnam impressions (at one point, CNN showed Cooper and his T-shirt saving a child). But there is little discussion of how western Hispaniola was a man-made disaster before an earthquake made it a natural one.

Though neighboring the planet's wealthiest nation, Haiti has long been one of the world's poorest places. It sports 80 percent unemployment and a GDP smaller than the annual executive bonus fund at a single Wall Street bank. The destitution is tragic -- and a reflection, in part, of colonial domination.

For much of the last two centuries, Western powers used embargo threats to force the country's population of erstwhile slaves to reimburse their former European masters for lost "property." As Harvard’s Henry Louis Gates recounts, America aided these efforts from the beginning because President Thomas Jefferson feared a successful black republic would "inspire slave insurrections throughout the American South."

Crushed by this oppression, Haiti was then assaulted in the 1990s by American "free" trade policies that destroyed its agriculture economy and tried to turn the country into the world's sweatshop. In recent years, as the menace of Western-backed coups lurked, Haiti has at times been compelled to pay more interest on its debt than it received in foreign aid.

This is the real story of Haiti that the black T-shirts and safari button-downs (and, alas, their viewers) have never cared about. They've only noticed the country when a cataclysm provided more telegenic images than the daily death and despair of the island's pre-earthquake squalor.

Even now, as the casualty count rises, disaster pornographers barely mention the macabre history. They know that doing so would break unspoken rules against holding up a foreign policy mirror to America and against riling the politicians and business interests that contributed to Haiti's demise.

Rather than reporting on what made Haiti so poor and therefore its infrastructure so susceptible to collapse, we get clips of Haitians momentarily cheering "USA!" as food packages trickle into their devastated capital. Rather than inquiries about how poverty made Haiti so ill-prepared for rescue operations, the disaster pornographers instead obediently follow George W. Bush, who self-servingly says, "You've got to deal with the desperation and there ought to be no politicization of that."

"Politicization" -- so that's the safe-for-TV euphemism they're using these days, huh? Evidently, it must be avoided -- evidently, nothing kills an audience's heaving passion faster than "politics" or (God forbid) contextualized news.

Anything like that -- anything beyond the exploitation of raw disaster porn -- well, it might ruin the money shot. 

Journeyman NBA washout and (now former) ESPN music critic Paul Shirley garnered the wrong kind of attention when he posted a crazy rant against the Haitian people on the Flip Collective blog. (And rest assured, the above excerpt is only a sampling.) The entitled sneer went up on Tuesday; by Wednesday ESPN had dumped the brooding lug. Web sites have been rhetorically dribbling Shirley in ways that would hearten even the most jaded of sports blog junkies. It’s enough to restore your faith in the Internet.

What hasn’t been asked enough is: Why? Why would anyone expend energy composing this mean-spirited swipe at the dying? Why would an ESPN music critic risk his writing career by raining contempt on impoverished earthquake victims? (Relatedly: Why does ESPN have a music critic?)

If you listened to Shirley chat it up with Bill Simmons nearly three years ago, he sounded like an intelligent, composed, even likable guy. There must be an attribution for this madness -- some sort of rationale behind Shirley's lurch toward the dark side.  Perhaps. Ever meet that guy who enters retirement convinced he would have ascended higher were it not for wrongfully promoted minorities? Not that failing in a largely black sport made "Bootstraps" Shirley bitter or anything. You see, unlike those whiny Haitians, Paul never made excuses for himself. Shirley’s failure to carve out a protracted NBA existence rests solely on his own overgrown shoulder blades. Or, Shirley put it in 2006:

I have dealt with the issues of race in athletics all of my life. It is very difficult to make it in the world of basketball as a white person.

Oh. Shirley’s NBA hopes were in their final throes around the time he wrote that. In last week’s largely overlooked ESPN column, Shirley let some of that weird racial energy seep into the open:

I'm no great spokesman for race relations; many of the black men around whom I've spent time shared a seething dislike for me that had me checking my pockets to make sure I hadn't stolen something from them.

Shirley’s right. He really isn’t a great spokesman for race relations. Maybe these supposedly aggrieved black men never warmed to his cute analogies. From the ESPN column:

As such, by the time my family had finished tiding its collective yule, my cache of music was as depleted as a UN rice truck after six hours in a Sudanese refugee camp.

No wonder he’s so angry with starving, suffering people. Shirley probably thinks their plight is analogous to craving some Pearl Jam. It’s curious that he would crack on the Sudanese a week before hating on Haitians. Anyway, more discordant racial griping from what’s supposed to be a music review:

As I've finished this column, it has occurred to me that this will be posted the day after Martin Luther King Jr. Day. I hate Martin Luther King Jr. Day. I think it's a divisive holiday. Instead of celebrating an intelligent man who happened to be black, there are those (and they are many) who would have us celebrate MLK because he's a black man who happened to be intelligent.

So Paul Shirley’s totally crazy Haiti bashing was preceded by a defensive music review that set up phony straw-man arguments about Martin Luther King Day and waxed on about how black people hate Paul Shirley (does he get points for liking Kid Cudi?). So there were at least some signs before this meltdown -- pouting Paul had his resentment-fueled reasons. (Note: When others expressed resentment, the hoopla stoked Paul into delivering a limp explanation later in the week.)  Still, unless Shirley’s gunning for commissioner of the all-white basketball league, his rant defies logic. Hey, Paul, we all deal with identity crisis and crushed dreams. We don’t funnel venom toward the most sympathetic people on the planet. That would just be crazy.

They pulled the plug Thursday afternoon, but the patient was a perennial intensive-care case. From its inception, the network faced an uphill fight. While right-wing talk radio enjoys enormous corporate support, lefty chat has always been a harder sell. Charlie Kirecker, the chairman of Air America Media, did his best to move mountains over the last few weeks, but it’s tough shoveling with a teaspoon. At times it looked as if investors might be found who could accept losses over the midterm in hopes that the company would eventually turn around and show a profit. In the end, though, what Charlie somewhat euphemistically called “a very difficult economic climate” combined with the tenuous prospects of talk radio in general and AA’s admittedly checkered history gave even the most promising suitors pause.

So, just when the left could use it most, a platform for progressive thought and opinion disappears.

These are strange days for the nation, the Democratic Party and progressives in particular. Having elected a fresh, dynamic, forward-thinking young president with a mandate for real systemic change, we’re seeing way too much of the same old same old. Democrats control both houses of Congress, yet seem incapable of overcoming minority party intransigence. Worse, there is growing suspicion they don’t really want to. An anonymous Senate staffer has sent an e-mail to the Web site Talking Points Memo observing that the mood among many elected Dems in the wake of Scott Brown’s victory in Massachusetts is one of relief -- now they have a ready excuse for failure. Are the words "cowardly" and "obscene" floating through your mind?

Failure isn’t an option. The Supreme Court has just opened the door to unfettered corporate cash in our political system. You think thwarting the influence of special interests is difficult now? Wait till lobbyists begin openly threatening already timorous lawmakers with multimillion-dollar attack-ad campaigns. Dissatisfied with the weak attempts to rein in the depredations of the private health insurance industry? Before long, giving up the public option will look like a profile in courage. Time to get cozy with your preexisting condition. Angry with President Obama for squirming away from some of his campaign promises? Think you can teach him and his party a lesson by voting Republican in the next cycle -- or not voting at all? Say hello to President Palin and her secretary of state, Glenn Beck.

Obama came to office pledging to reform not only healthcare but the entire way business is conducted in Washington. But to reform a system you have to expose it. Names must be named, shady practices revealed; the money must be followed. That’s a tall order, and it’s far from clear that the president, for all his brains and eloquence, can fill it. That’s why progressive media outlets are so important. Without them, where would you hear the contrary (and, more often than not, correct) economic prognostications of Joseph Stiglitz and Dean Baker? Who will call out the most egregious lies of the right? Where will it be revealed that the opponents of marriage equality for gay Americans cannot identify a single concrete harm that would befall our nation should their bigoted efforts fail? Or that the new strategy for Afghanistan makes little rational sense?

Air America was not alone. The voices of progressive media figures like Rachel Maddow, Keith Olbermann, Ed Schultz, Thom Hartman and Randi Rhodes can still be heard. Off the airwaves, there's still Salon, Talking Points Memo, the Huffington Post and the vital progressive blogosphere. With a bit of luck, I and some other Air America hosts will be back on the air before long. Let’s hope so. Progressives -- and the rest of America -- can use all the help we can get. 

Within days of the Haitian earthquake, for example, the Los Angeles Times ran a series of photographs with captions that kept deploying the word "looting." One was of a man lying face down on the ground with this caption: "A Haitian police officer ties up a suspected looter who was carrying a bag of evaporated milk." The man's sweaty face looks up at the camera, beseeching, anguished.

Another photo was labeled: "Looting continued in Haiti on the third day after the earthquake, although there were more police in downtown Port-au-Prince." It showed a somber crowd wandering amid shattered piles of concrete in a landscape where, visibly, there could be little worth taking anyway.

A third image was captioned: "A looter makes off with rolls of fabric from an earthquake-wrecked store." Yet another: "The body of a police officer lies in a Port-au-Prince street. He was accidentally shot by fellow police who mistook him for a looter."

People were then still trapped alive in the rubble. A translator for Australian TV dug out a toddler who'd survived 68 hours without food or water, orphaned but claimed by an uncle who had lost his pregnant wife. Others were hideously wounded and awaiting medical attention that wasn't arriving. Hundreds of thousands, maybe millions, needed, and still need, water, food, shelter, and first aid. The media in disaster bifurcates. Some step out of their usual "objective" roles to respond with kindness and practical aid. Others bring out the arsenal of clichés and pernicious myths and begin to assault the survivors all over again.

The "looter" in the first photo might well have been taking that milk to starving children and babies, but for the news media that wasn't the most urgent problem. The "looter" stooped under the weight of two big bolts of fabric might well have been bringing it to now homeless people trying to shelter from a fierce tropical sun under improvised tents.

The pictures do convey desperation, but they don't convey crime. Except perhaps for that shooting of a fellow police officer -- his colleagues were so focused on property that they were reckless when it came to human life, and a man died for no good reason in a landscape already saturated with death.

In recent days, there have been scattered accounts of confrontations involving weapons, and these may be a different matter. But the man with the powdered milk? Is he really a criminal? There may be more to know, but with what I've seen I'm not convinced.

What Would You Do?

Imagine, reader, that your city is shattered by a disaster. Your home no longer exists, and you spent what cash was in your pockets days ago. Your credit cards are meaningless because there is no longer any power to run credit-card charges. Actually, there are no longer any storekeepers, any banks, any commerce, or much of anything to buy. The economy has ceased to exist.

By day three, you're pretty hungry and the water you grabbed on your way out of your house is gone. The thirst is far worse than the hunger. You can go for many days without food, but not water. And in the improvised encampment you settle in, there is an old man near you who seems on the edge of death. He no longer responds when you try to reassure him that this ordeal will surely end. Toddlers are now crying constantly, and their mothers infinitely stressed and distressed.

So you go out to see if any relief organization has finally arrived to distribute anything, only to realize that there are a million others like you stranded with nothing, and there isn't likely to be anywhere near enough aid any time soon. The guy with the corner store has already given away all his goods to the neighbors. That supply's long gone by now. No wonder, when you see the chain pharmacy with the shattered windows or the supermarket, you don't think twice before grabbing a box of PowerBars and a few gallons of water that might keep you alive and help you save a few lives as well.

The old man might not die, the babies might stop their squalling, and the mothers might lose that look on their faces. Other people are calmly wandering in and helping themselves, too. Maybe they're people like you, and that gallon of milk the fellow near you has taken is going to spoil soon anyway. You haven't shoplifted since you were 14, and you have plenty of money to your name. But it doesn't mean anything now.

If you grab that stuff are you a criminal? Should you end up lying in the dirt on your stomach with a cop tying your hands behind your back? Should you end up labeled a looter in the international media? Should you be shot down in the street, since the overreaction in disaster, almost any disaster, often includes the imposition of the death penalty without benefit of trial for suspected minor property crimes?

Or are you a rescuer? Is the survival of disaster victims more important than the preservation of everyday property relations? Is that chain pharmacy more vulnerable, more a victim, more in need of help from the National Guard than you are, or those crying kids, or the thousands still trapped in buildings and soon to die?

It's pretty obvious what my answers to these questions are, but it isn't obvious to the mass media. And in disaster after disaster, at least since the San Francisco earthquake of 1906, those in power, those with guns and the force of law behind them, are too often more concerned for property than human life. In an emergency, people can, and do, die from those priorities. Or they get gunned down for minor thefts or imagined thefts. The media not only endorses such outcomes, but regularly, repeatedly, helps prepare the way for, and then eggs on, such a reaction.

If Words Could Kill

We need to banish the word "looting" from the English language. It incites madness and obscures realities.

"Loot," the noun and the verb, is a word of Hindi origin meaning the spoils of war or other goods seized roughly. As historian Peter Linebaugh points out "At one time loot was the soldier's pay." It entered the English language as a good deal of loot from India entered the English economy, both in soldiers' pockets and as imperial seizures.

After years of interviewing survivors of disasters and reading firsthand accounts and sociological studies from such disasters as the London Blitz and the Mexico City earthquake of 1985, I don't believe in looting. Two things go on in disasters. The great majority of what happens you could call emergency requisitioning. Someone who could be you, someone in the kind of desperate circumstances I outlined above, takes necessary supplies to sustain human life in the absence of any alternative. Not only would I not call that looting, I wouldn't even call that theft.

Necessity is a defense for breaking the law in the United States and other countries, though it's usually applied more to, say, confiscating the car keys of a drunk driver than feeding hungry children. Taking things you don't need is theft under any circumstances. It is, says the disaster sociologist Enrico Quarantelli, who has been studying the subject for more than half a century, vanishingly rare in most disasters.

Personal gain is the last thing most people are thinking about in the aftermath of a disaster. In that phase, the survivors are almost invariably more altruistic and less attached to their own property, less concerned with the long-term questions of acquisition, status, wealth, and security, than just about anyone not in such situations imagines possible. (The best accounts from Haiti of how people with next to nothing have patiently tried to share the little they have and support those in even worse shape than them only emphasize this disaster reality.) Crime often drops in the wake of a disaster.

The media are another matter. They tend to arrive obsessed with property (and the headlines that assaults on property can make). Media outlets often call everything looting and thereby incite hostility toward the sufferers as well as a hysterical overreaction on the part of the armed authorities. Or sometimes the journalists on the ground do a good job and the editors back in their safe offices cook up the crazy photo captions and the wrongheaded interpretations and emphases.

They also deploy the word "panic" wrongly. Panic among ordinary people in crisis is profoundly uncommon. The media will call a crowd of people running from certain death a panicking mob, even though running is the only sensible thing to do. In Haiti, they continue to report that food is being withheld from distribution for fear of "stampedes." Do they think Haitians are cattle?

The belief that people in disaster (particularly poor and nonwhite people) are cattle or animals or just crazy and untrustworthy regularly justifies spending far too much energy and far too many resources on control -- the American military calls it "security" -- rather than relief. A British-accented voice-over on CNN calls people sprinting to where supplies are being dumped from a helicopter a "stampede" and adds that this delivery "risks sparking chaos." The chaos already exists, and you can't blame it on these people desperate for food and water. Or you can, and in doing so help convince your audience that they're unworthy and untrustworthy.

Back to looting: of course you can consider Haiti's dire poverty and failed institutions a long-term disaster that changes the rules of the game. There might be people who are not only interested in taking the things they need to survive in the next few days, but things they've never been entitled to own or things they may need next month. Technically that's theft, but I'm not particularly surprised or distressed by it; the distressing thing is that even before the terrible quake they led lives of deprivation and desperation.

In ordinary times, minor theft is often considered a misdemeanor. No one is harmed. Unchecked, minor thefts could perhaps lead to an environment in which there were more thefts and so forth, and a good argument can be made that, in such a case, the tide needs to be stemmed. But it's not particularly significant in a landscape of terrible suffering and mass death.

A number of radio hosts and other media personnel are still upset that people apparently took TVs after Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans in August 2005. Since I started thinking about, and talking to people about, disaster aftermaths I've heard a lot about those damned TVs. Now, which matters more to you, televisions or human life? People were dying on rooftops and in overheated attics and freeway overpasses, they were stranded in all kinds of hideous circumstances on the Gulf Coast in 2005 when the mainstream media began to obsess about looting, and the mayor of New Orleans and the governor of Louisiana made the decision to focus on protecting property, not human life.

A gang of white men on the other side of the river from New Orleans got so worked up about property crimes that they decided to take the law into their own hands and began shooting. They seem to have considered all black men criminals and thieves and shot a number of them. Some apparently died; there were bodies bloating in the September sun far from the region of the floods; one good man trying to evacuate the ruined city barely survived; and the media looked away. It took me months of nagging to even get the story covered. This vigilante gang claimed to be protecting property, though its members never demonstrated that their property was threatened. They boasted of killing black men. And they shared values with the mainstream media and the Louisiana powers that be.

Somehow, when the Bush administration subcontracted emergency services -- like providing evacuation buses in Hurricane Katrina -- to cronies who profited even while providing incompetent, overpriced and much delayed service at the moment of greatest urgency, we didn't label that looting.

Or when a lot of wealthy Wall Street brokers decide to tinker with a basic human need like housing ... Well, you catch my drift.

Woody Guthrie once sang that "some will rob you with a six-gun, and some with a fountain pen." The guys with the six guns (or machetes or sharpened sticks) make for better photographs, and the guys with the fountain pens not only don't end up in jail, they end up in McMansions with four-car garages and, sometimes, in elected -- or appointed -- office.

Learning to See in Crises

Last Christmas a priest, Father Tim Jones of York, started a ruckus in Britain when he said in a sermon that shoplifting by the desperate from chain stores might be acceptable behavior. Naturally, there was an uproar. Jones told the Associated Press: "The point I'm making is that when we shut down every socially acceptable avenue for people in need, then the only avenue left is the socially unacceptable one."

The response focused almost entirely on why shoplifting is wrong, but the claim was also repeatedly made that it doesn't help. In fact, food helps the hungry, a fact so bald it's bizarre to even have to state it. The means by which it arrives is a separate matter. The focus remained on shoplifting, rather than on why there might be people so desperate in England's green and pleasant land that shoplifting might be their only option, and whether unnecessary human suffering is itself a crime of sorts.

Right now, the point is that people in Haiti need food, and for all the publicity, the international delivery system has, so far, been a visible dud. Under such circumstances, breaking into a U.N. food warehouse -- food assumedly meant for the poor of Haiti in a catastrophic moment -- might not be "violence," or "looting," or "law-breaking." It might be logic. It might be the most effective way of meeting a desperate need.

Why were so many people in Haiti hungry before the earthquake? Why do we have a planet that produces enough food for all and a distribution system that ensures more than a billion of us don't have a decent share of that bounty? Those are not questions whose answers should be long delayed.

Even more urgently, we need compassion for the sufferers in Haiti and media that tell the truth about them. I'd like to propose alternative captions for those Los Angeles Times photographs as models for all future disasters:

Let's start with the picture of the policeman hog-tying the figure whose face is so anguished: "Ignoring thousands still trapped in rubble, a policeman accosts a sufferer who took evaporated milk. No adequate food distribution exists for Haiti's starving millions."

And the guy with the bolt of fabric? "As with every disaster, ordinary people show extraordinary powers of improvisation, and fabrics such as these are being used to make sun shelters around Haiti."

For the murdered policeman: "Institutional overzealousness about protecting property leads to a gratuitous murder, as often happens in crises. Meanwhile countless people remain trapped beneath crushed buildings."

And the crowd in the rubble labeled looters? How about: "Resourceful survivors salvage the means of sustaining life from the ruins of their world."

That one might not be totally accurate, but it's likely to be more accurate than the existing label. And what is absolutely accurate, in Haiti right now, and on Earth always, is that human life matters more than property, that the survivors of a catastrophe deserve our compassion and our understanding of their plight, and that we live and die by words and ideas, and it matters desperately that we get them right.

At the dawn of the millennium, three catastrophes were forecast for the United States: terrorists in New York, a hurricane in New Orleans, and an earthquake in San Francisco. Rebecca Solnit lives in San Francisco with her earthquake kit and is about to make her seventh trip to New Orleans since Katrina. Her latest book, "A Paradise Built in Hell," is a testament to human bravery and innovation during disasters.

I see both points, but when I gave Horyn's post a fair read, my reaction was somewhat different. First of all, I have a hard time believing the Times' distorted photo was anything more than the "processing" mistake Horyn claims it was. It's not like the goal of the piece, which appeared on NYTimes.com's T magazine blog, is meant to convince us that Hendricks is a heifer. Rather, it's a quick take on how uninspired the night's red carpet dresses were. Here's the offending text, part of a list of which outfits didn't do it for Horyn: "Not pretty Christina Hendricks in Christian Siriano’s exploding ruffle dress. (As one stylist said, 'You don’t put a big girl in a big dress. That’s rule number one.')"

First of all, the quote makes it clear that Horyn isn't the one calling Hendricks "big"; it was an anonymous stylist. Of course, it is Horyn who used the snarky quote to add zing to her piece. Horyn wouldn't be the first writer to hide behind someone else's quotation marks to circumvent actually saying such a remark herself, but to be fair, Horyn's descriptor was "pretty."

It's also significant that the stylist used the word "big" rather than "fat." Personally, I wouldn't use either word in reference to Hendricks. But it's certainly true that part of what distinguishes Hendricks is her curvy body shape and unapologetic presence. She's 5'8" in an industry where even some leading men (cough cough, Tom Cruise) are shorter than that. So, compared to the clients the stylist may be used to dressing -- size-2 cheerleaders hoping to find outfits that make them look even smaller -- Hendricks probably is "big." 

And that's where I think the Horyn/Hendricks debacle actually says something about the way we see women's bodies in the media. The range of body types we're used to seeing on TV and in the movies is so ridiculously narrow that we don't even have the vocabulary to discuss a size-10 woman without causing offense. Case in point: Gothamist was also bothered by another post about Golden Globes fashion, also on the T magazine blog, in which writer Andy Port points out that some leading ladies walked the red carpet "sporting sexier curves." Directing readers to Jennifer Aniston, Kate Hudson and Courteney Cox's apparently larger upper arms, Port writes, "Instead of a Barbie-doll circumference, there was suddenly, amazingly, a womanly roundness to their frames. More Marilyn than Twiggy, that’s for sure." Last night, a friend tweeted the link to Port's piece with the announcement that it was enough to make her boycott the Times.

But I'm not sure what's so outrageous about writing positively about women's weight gain. If the fashion press must obsess over lady stars' bodies -- and let's face it, that preoccupation isn't going anywhere soon -- then I'd rather read flattering comparisons to Marilyn Monroe that include words like "sexy" than a parade of shaming tabloid headlines. Even the TV Guide channel's hideously snarky fashion police were glowing in their praise for "Precious" star Gabourey Sibide. (Though frankly, I part with them on this. While I found the color beautiful, I hated the cut. Undoubtedly Gabourey is this year's "fat woman we love," and heaping praise on her may help salve the self-hatred for those whose business is cutting others down for their minor shortcomings. But that's another post.)

Ultimately, our indignant reactions to both blog posts seem to have more to do with our learned negative associations with words like "big" and "round." To begin changing media perceptions and improving our own body image, we need to stop taking those words as insults -- especially when writers like Port are using them in a positive light (a subject about which Broadsheet's Kate Harding has written frequently, and eloquently). Why is it impossible for us to imagine that a woman who can fairly be called "big" -- not Christina Hendricks, who is still smaller than the average American lady -- might also be incredibly, ravishingly beautiful?