Potter treats a single year of American press coverage as a problem in critical geopolitics. Working through more than seven hundred articles published during 2004 in five major newspapers, she counts recurring words and sorts them into frames covering poverty, the economy, history, illicit drugs, refugees and Vodou. The vocabulary turns out to be very narrow. Haiti is the poorest nation in the hemisphere, its economy shattered, its people arriving on rickety boats, its territory carrying a quarter of United States bound Colombian cocaine, a share federal drug assessments do not bear out. What the frames leave out is any account of how outside actors helped produce the conditions described, from nineteenth-century isolation to rice subsidies and aid routed through a small elite. Since such coverage shapes tourism, aid decisions and asylum policy, and since most readers encounter Haiti nowhere else, she treats this language as a force acting on Haitian life.