You will have read some of the reports. "His body is a mass of suppurating sores..." "A baby is on her back, her belly bloated and pronounced..." "This is what hell looks like and the people of Haiti are adrift in its lake of fire..."

The earthquake in Haiti has not only exposed the fragility of that Caribbean state - it has also revealed the British media to be stuffed with wannabe hack novelists more interested in providing horror-porn than factual analysis.

Many British reporters have descended on Haiti, not to report on the aid effort or people's coping strategies, but to gawp at dead children with stiff limbs and bulging eyes and to write about it all in the style of a teenager who dreams of becoming the next Clive Barker.

Both the broadsheets and the tabloids have published tawdry disaster porn, designed not to enlighten the reader but to titillate him. "Dirty white sheets cover some of the dead, others lie out in the open, some, their limbs entwined with another's", said the front page of the Guardian.

"Three cockerels scratched among a pile of six now-bloated corpses, and pecked at the entrails of one of the deceased, a middle-aged man," said the Independent, under the headline 'Dignity: the scarcest commodity in Haiti'.

Is that headline supposed to be ironic? How can Haitians retain any dignity when British hacks are revealing their every unspeakable experience to the reading public, like Dickensian weirdos pulling back the curtain on a freakshow?

Amazingly, that Independent article mentioned birds eating human corpses twice, opening with the image of bodies being "casually pecked by chickens in the afternoon sunshine" and closing with a description of cockerels feasting on entrails. What's the point?

http://www.thefirstpost.co.uk/58588,news-comment,news-politics,haiti-earthquake-journalists-are-titillating-us-with-disaster-porn-media-coverage?DCMP=NLC-daily