Edwidge Danticat: belief

Transcript context

…In a world with so much mobile and social media, do you think radio is still of central importance for Haitian politics, as it had been in the past? I think radio remains very important there. For example, there are a lot of cultural figures, even younger people, in Haiti who emerged out of radio culture and now have transitioned into more social media, who do Lives and Facebook but who started out in radio. Radio certainly was very important when I was growing up, and there weren’t as many other outlets. Now I find, for example, my mother-in-law, who’s 85, who lives with us — she’s in Haiti most of the time. Sometimes she’ll watch a YouTube video about something that’s happening in Haiti, but it’s a YouTube video of someone in a radio station, and she can watch it on YouTube. Someone can send the clip on WhatsApp. I think radio now is part of a series of many different ways that people get information. When we’re in the country, if you don’t have internet, it remains one way that you get news, on the radio. Also, I find, even the older people in my life get a lot of news through their phones, through WhatsApp, also through YouTube clips. There’s a constant loop of information now that radio is just one part of, whereas for example, when I was younger, it was the primary, if not the only source of information that we had. With a Haitian background, do you think you have a different perspective on the fake news debates of the United States? Because Haiti, it seems, had a lot of fake news well before social media. It was a country of rumor in some ways. Or not?…

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