American newspapers describe Haiti as failed, and as the poorest country in the hemisphere, laying its troubles at its own door while saying little of the outside forces that helped produce them. Potter tests that pattern empirically.

The approach is critical geopolitics, applied to a single year of coverage: everything five leading U.S. papers ran in 2004, examined for the vocabulary applied to the country and for the frames that vocabulary builds up.

Behind the method sits a line of criticism showing that how a place is represented can settle what counts as common sense about it, and can make social inequality look warranted. Potter's stated hope is that naming these images opens the way to rethinking how Haiti is popularly seen, and to a different conversation about it, one large enough to hold the whole country's story. Only then, the argument goes, can its problems be addressed.