Commentary by Bob Butler
VP Broadcast, National Association of Black Journalists

At church on Sunday, my pastor spent about seven minutes talking about the situation in Haiti.

He opened his comments by shaking his head and saying Pat Robertson had spouted “the most ridiculous rubbish he had ever heard” when he said that Haiti was paying for a pact it signed with the devil resulting in a curse that led to the destruction from Tuesday’s earthquake. He then explained why Robertson was incorrect and urged us to donate to a second collection next Sunday for Haitian relief.

I was struck that my pastor spent about as much time talking about Haiti as the big three on Fox News – Bill O’Reilly, Sean Hannity and Glenn Beck – did on Wednesday night.

Fox repeatedly ran promos touting its coverage of the “Horror in Haiti.” And they did plenty of stories during the day.

But, according to Media Matters, the hosts of the shows with the most viewers covered the crisis in Haiti for a total of six minutes and 47 seconds. Beck spent 37 seconds talking about Haiti; he had an hour-long interview with Sarah Palin. O’Reilly talked about Haiti for just under three minutes and devoted much of his time to Bo Derek and the plight of wild horses in the West. And Hannity gave the earthquake three minutes and eight seconds when he wasn’t discussing “the culture of corruption” in the Obama Administration with Michelle Malkin.

As a journalist for 30 years, I know a little about what is news. What happened, and continues to happen, in Haiti is news. It will be news for the foreseeable future. This is the kind of story that defines us as journalists. We ache to collect the information and present it quickly and accurately to our viewers/readers/listeners.

I understand that Beck, Hannity and O’Reilly are not reporters. But I find it hard to believe that the managers at Fox decided they did not want to inform their hundreds of thousands of viewers about the breaking news in Haiti. There must have been something else at play here.

Did the hosts decide that their viewers didn’t care about the plight of a black nation? I’ve seen some comments on blogs suggesting Haiti is so corrupt that it would be better to just let everyone die … and there is resentment that American tax dollars are being used for Haitian relief. Maybe those people are responding to the de facto voice of the conservative movement, Rush Limbaugh, who suggested Americans withhold charitable donations to Haiti relief because, “we’ve already donated to Haiti. It’s called the U-S income tax.”

Critics calls FOX the propaganda arm of the Republican Party. By all-but ignoring the Haiti story Wednesday night, the network gave its detractors more ammunition and missed a chance to at least act like a legitimate news organization.

All you can do is shake your head.

Butler also is a reporter with KCBS Radio and a Vice President to the board of American Federation of Television and Radio Artists.

Photos courtesy of United Nations Development Programme.