HAITI-DOMINICAN REPUBLIC: Media Unites to Fight Stereotypes

"With help from Plan International," journalist Elizabeth Eames Roebling writes in an article for Inter Press Service News Agency (IPS) "six Dominican journalists who run espacinsular.org as volunteers recently organised a three-day meeting of Haitian and Dominican journalists. Their website carries news articles from both Haitian and Dominican news sources translated respectively into Spanish and French in order to promote better cross-cultural understanding.

"The Nov. 14-16 meeting drew 50 representatives from newspapers, radio and television -- 25 Haitians and 25 Dominicans. All agreed to work towards better understanding between the two nations, draw the attention of their respective governments to the needs of the border region, and focus on specific human rights violations rather than allowing individual aggressions to escalate into disputes between their two nations.

"A group of eight media representatives was selected to form an ongoing network, the 'Dominican-Haitian Binational Press Network.' "

"Barack Obama's rise to power in the United States has exposed cracks in Brazil's self-image as a racially integrated society, with many seeing the Latin American giant years away from electing a Black president," Ana Nicolaci da Costa writes in an article for Reuters.

"With only a few Blacks in top government posts, deep-rooted, veiled racism in a country that is among the world's most racially mixed has prevented the emergence of a serious Black presidential candidate."