ABSTRACT
This chapter aims to present a case study of the coverage of a peripheral country by the American news media to illustrate the significant continuity, along with the changes, in US journalism’s portrayal of the Global South as deriving from journalism’s embeddedness in structures of power and privilege, and cultural prejudices, including racism. After discussing relevant historical background, this chapter reviews academic literature on the American news coverage of Haiti from the early 20th century to the present. It subsequently presents a critical discourse analysis of how the New York Times covered the 2021 assassination of the Haitian president, with a special eye to how new(s) facts were embedded in established frameworks of meaning. The conclusion is that, fundamentally, the American media coverage of Haiti mirrors the unequal power dynamics between the two republics: one of which is big and one of which is little. The concept of the ‘imperial mindset’ is introduced to help explain Western, specifically American, reporting on peripheral nations.
