Portfolio at NYU

Posted 07.05.05
War of the Hearts
In a city with more than 198 ethnic news publications, three Haitian journalists struggle to keep readers abreast of affairs at home while often competing for the same pairs of eyes. But despite their efforts at handling competition professionally, these men's careers, like their country, have histories that just may be too hard to melt their differences into fine print.

By Gergana Koleva

Leo Joseph and I have identical digital voice recorders. "How many hours does it hold?" he asks with the earnest cluelessness of a man not fully caught up with the electronic designs of modernity. About a hundred, I say, and you can store your interviews as sound files to a computer. Joseph looks pleased. Though he rarely goes to interview sources these days, much less with a two-by-four-inch slim Sony unit, he takes his device out of his messenger bag and holds it up against mine, bent on showing me how same the two are, as if to demonstrate that he hasn't forgotten his own grunt days as a reporter.

But those days are long gone -- now, as for the last 34 years, Leo Joseph is an editor. From a cluttered office on the third floor of a windswept building in the Navy Yard in Brooklyn, he directs the fiercely partisan and graphic Haiti Observateur, the oldest Haitian weekly newspaper in New York. In one recent issue the picture of a Haitian prison guard's head, covered with cuts and curdled blood, is splashed in full color on page two. In another issue a photograph shows in stunning detail the naked body of a castrated man, surrounded by crouching, grinning thugs.

"We know how to present things to Haitians, we just write for Haitians," says Joseph, whose even-toned brown skin offsets a crescent of wispy white hair that during our conversation will seem to bristle with every passionate point he makes. "It is shocking, but these things do happen in Haiti. They continue happening because people don't feel they should get rid of this sort of thing...You have to show it to them for them to feel this should not happen."

His assumption that everyone should know the "sort of thing" he's referring to may be the side effect of total journalistic absorption. Joseph, who travels to his homeland at least twice a year, is acutely interested in the current political crisis there that has enmeshed loyalists to former president Jean-Bertrand Aristide and supporters of the interim government in a bitter all-out street war. Like his peers -- in fact, like most Haitians -- he has a firm stand on the issue, so much so that he fashions his entire newspaper according to those views. For him, reporting and speaking your mind are equally important parts of the journalist's enterprise.

"This is the way it was done and there's no other way of doing what we're doing," he says with the poise of an historian. As he leans back in his swivel chair to ponder the matter momentarily, the tiny halo of hair rests nobly on the black leather. "Because if you try doing it in a different way, they would not accept you. You would not have this paper."

***

The Haiti Observateur began in 1971 as an independent alternative to a radio broadcast Joseph and his brother Raymond had been beaming from New York to Haiti. The half-hour daily program had debuted in 1966, the same year that Joseph enrolled at the New York School for Famous Broadcasters. It was hosted by a radio station of the exile movement Haitian Coalition that was founded a year earlier to disseminate information about Francois Duvalier's dictatorship. However, sometime in 1969, "Papa Doc," as the late dictator was popularly known, found a way to bribe one of the Josephs' radio engineers to doctor their tape and put his own propaganda on it. As a result, the Haitian Coalition saw the brothers as too incendiary, felt threatened by the stately scrutiny they invited, and told them it cannot offer them hospitality any longer.

"From that day forward, I said I'm never going to use station again," says Joseph, the trajectory of his eyes gathered in relived determination at the tip of his nose. With that determination, after the premature end of his radio program he went to the office of a local Brooklyn newspaper called Brooklyn Today and asked its student staffers to let him work for them.

"I went on interviews for them, I wrote articles for them, I sat with them and saw how they physically did their paper, and I learned from them...In July of '71, I said 'We are ready and we're gonna start the paper.'" He leans forward, staring intently into the space before him and punctuating his words with a wave of his bony index finger. "We had to have something of our own where if they had to stop us, they would have to pay us. If you want to do this, you have to be prepared to do it to the bitter end...We don't want to be limited in what we're saying, you understand?"

Limited they sure aren't. The line of Joseph's paper, which is written in French, leaps to the eye of any French illiterate instantly. It's all in the visuals: when the photos in its pages depict mobs of swinging, strapping gangsters, the captions identify them as "Lavalas," the brand name for members of Aristide's "family" party. When they show bloodied, disfigured or dead victims of abuse, the inscriptions say they're freedom fighters and often spell out the word "Latortue," the name of the current prime minister who with the help of the U.S. government allegedly ousted Aristide last year.

While Joseph freely admits his hostility toward Aristide, who he believes took advantage of the Haitian people after they elected him to office in 1990, he maintains that anyone who wants to formulate a different opinion can do so on the pages of the Observateur.

To this point, the paper's staff, which consists of three permanent reporters-cum-columnists (the titles are often used interchangeably), even has a resident Marxist. Fritz Saint-Macary, who in the early sixties was sponsored by Gerard Latortue to study law at New York University and who is Joseph's brother-in-law, writes a socialist column. Joseph's wife, Gisele, a retired nurse, helps out with the page layout. And Merritt Gelfand Claude, a fifty-something white American woman enamored of the Haitian cause, who is equally fluent in French, Haitian Creole, and English, assists in translating the editorial and entertainment pages, which are the sole sections of the paper dubbed in English.

***

"They are Duvalierists," says with a shrug blue-eyed Kim Ives, the main reporter and de facto editor (the actual title belongs to Ben Dupuy) of Haiti Progres, the second oldest Haitian newspaper in New York. As its name suggests, the Progres is a leftist paper that loudly supports the return of Aristide or else a revolution.
Much like the street fighters on the island, the Progres and the Observateur are entwined in a mutually abrasive relationship, one that surpasses mere journalistic rivalry. According to Ives, who recalls the "well known fact" that Leo's brother Raymond was a C.I.A. agent who left his paper only last November to become Haiti's Charge d'Affaires in Washington, the Observateur favors an imperialist U.S. regime in Haiti.

"Haiti Observateur was a post of the Duvaliers, but it was fundamentally pro-U.S.," declared Ives, whose Marxist outlook is rounded out by a wiry, restless body wrapped in a well-worn checkered jacket and topped by a head of surprised gray hair.

Ives charges that Joseph's publication is given to rumors. "You know the biggest-selling paper in the United States? The National Enquirer. Haiti Observateur is the forum of National Enquirer. People like to hear gossip, but they don't take it seriously the same way they don't take the National Enquirer seriously. There are so many things they've put out that have proven to be complete fabrications. We ourselves have been the subject of many of their fabrications. So the paper has very little credibility."

"It's kind of a running joke in the community when you see 'sources combinees,'" he laughs dryly. "Which means you take a little bit of everything you've been hearing out there and you put it in your paper."

***

Sources combinees, the French phrase for "combined sources," is a common tool in the Observateur's brand of journalism. Nearly all of the paper's above-the-fold front page stories have that dateline, which doubles as a byline; sometimes they don't have it at all. When I put the question to Joseph, he tackles it with an evasiveness that he explains as a prerogative of the oppressed.

"In the past when we were really fighting the Duvalier dictatorship, we did not really want to write our bylines. We just wrote the paper...With this culture that started since the very inception of the paper, it carried on to this day."

In effect, Joseph denies that the Observateur was ever an imperialist paper. He maintains it aimed to temper Papa Doc's atrocities by collecting and using information from local Haitian sources, but at the same time did not want to bash the dictator openly for fear of repercussions. That's why he never offered writers to work for him and made it his policy to alert all volunteer contributors to the potential danger.

"At that time the dictator could do anything to you," he says. "They have long arms, and they have money. So this was a chance that every single person working with us was taking, and we wanted them to know that."

What with the authority he feels from being the first Haitian newspaperman in New York -- in fact, in the country -- and the risks he believes he took upon himself and his staff during those rough times, Joseph is deeply resentful of the Haiti Progres and his real patron, Ben Dupuy. Dupuy, who in the early nineties was the ambassador-at-large of Aristide's exiled government in the United States, wrote for the Observateur at that time, until he realized that their ideology was too sharp for him to stomach. He severed his relationship with Joseph and in 1983 founded the Progres.

"Ben Dupuy is a very obnoxious fellow," offers Joseph in the same honey-toned voice that earlier recalled his paper's earnest beginnings. "He's a transfuge. He's not open. He doesn't want anyone to question him...unless [Haiti Progres] know exactly that [the interviewer] is a person who is a leftist or in the same camp with them, then they are very active." Joseph doesn't stop to explain the word "transfuge," but by the way he wedges it into the denunciation of his rival, it is clear that he intends it as an insult -- a way to describe a traitor who "transfuses" himself from one journalistic vessel to another.

***

But does a "transfuge" journalist invariably prove a turncoat? Ask Garry Pierre-Pierre, the editor and publisher of the Haitian Times -- New York's newest Haitian newspaper -- and he will tell it to you. Pierre-Pierre was a reporter at the New York Times for seven years before he quit his job and in 1999 started his own paper.

"Every day for about three years there was a front page Haiti story," he says, recalling his first years on the job, which coincided with the aftermath of the coup against Aristide in 1991. Pierre-Pierre was hired by the Times in 1992 as a general assignment reporter, but mainly to cover the political and economic crisis gripping the island. "It's like Iraq now. Everything I wrote got on the front page, especially if I was in Haiti."

But his star status did not sidetrack him from what he knew was a timed endeavor. "I came into the Times knowing that my stint there would be between five and ten years...It was too stressful, you were too much under a microscope. Inside and outside."
Like most of his peers who've spent lifetimes of observing, if not themselves leading, a struggle for independence, Pierre-Pierre prizes entrepreneurship. Despite his love of photojournalism, which he studied in college in the early eighties, social activism as a peace corps volunteer in West Africa, and a dense journalistic experience at local Florida papers as well as at the Times, he is now primarily interested in advertising. He sees ads as the bread and butter of the Haitian Times, the better business model in a politically stained journalistic milieu.

"Right now we're in the process of building a loyal readership," Pierre-Pierre, who beams a look of utter calm and method, says. "They have that. And you can't take that away from them. What you can take is the advertising."

***

With a circulation of 15,000, the Haitian Times pales next to the 75,000-copy mammoths Haiti Observateur and Haiti Progres. It is also written in English (though it has one page in French and one in Creole), which further diminishes it in the eyes of its older brethren.

"Garry Pierre-Pierre, he doesn't understand much about anything. He is aping the New York Times, that's why it's the Haitian Times," says Ives, who resents Pierre-Pierre just as much as he dislikes Joseph. Where the latter crosses him with his rigid anti-Aristide ideology, the former irks him with his pretense to objectivity. In a sense, in Ives's view lacking a bias is just as bad as having a different one than his own.

"The analysis is the essential part, because most people get their news not through the newspapers but through the radio. Which is why Haiti Progres is more popular and more read than any of the other papers, because we offer a way to understand. The people don't need news," he declares.

"We're not a political organ, we're a newspaper. We have an educated reader base that needs to know the news first and foremost," Pierre-Pierre refutes.

"We say not only can't you be objective, but you should make your position clear, as we do," insists Ives.

"Ours is not a shrill newspaper, we don't scream, we don't scorn people," Pierre-Pierre explains.