Aquadoodiloop.com

We Really Need a New Word For Looting (from the Awl)

“Looters,” reported the Wall Street Journal yesterday from Port-au-Prince, “were scaling a crumpled building, apparently a grocery store, and throwing items to the assembled throng below.” That “looting” is traditionally construed to mean illegally obtaining goods for one’s own benefit—not for the benefit of a waiting crowd of the recently homeless—seems to have entirely escaped these reporters.

…

just a few blocks away on the road, a store owner was calmly overseeing an orderly emptying of his broken shop. He was using a kind of bucket-brigade of some 30 young men stretching over the store’s shattered roof, handing out goods can by can.” This article, incidentally, is headlined “Haiti Authorities Battle Looters.”

You can read the whole article but you’ve probably already figured it out.  Haitians intent on surviving are doing what it takes to survive.   But newspapers are nothing if not predictable in their headline writing.

I had MLK day off, but I’ll have a Monday Jam up for you later today.

Tags: haiti, idiocy, newspapers