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Media Ignore People in Crisis, Say NGOs- NGOs - Global policy Forum Media Ignore People in Crisis, Say NGOs
By Ruth Gidley
AlertNet
November 8, 2002
Media coverage of humanitarian crises frequently portrays passive victims, attacks NGOs out of ignorance and fails to provide contextual analysis, according to relief specialists and journalists meeting in Copenhagen.
Humanitarian organisations, often critical of the mainstream news agenda for ignoring crises, discussed the issue at a conference in the Danish capital on the theme "Forgotten Humanitarian Crises" in late October, organised by the Danish Refugee Council.
"The Western media are biased. They're racist when it comes to reporting Africa," said Sorious Samura, a Sierra Leonean journalist. He criticised the common portrayal of African humanitarian emergencies. Samura, who now lives in London, contrasted coverage of African disasters with coverage of events in Europe, such as Kosovo. "They gave people names and faces. They became individuals, real people. And somehow I started caring for those people."
He said the mainstream media turned their attention away after an emergency passed. "They don't go back to find out how we pull ourselves together." Samura said journalists sometimes shied away from criticising African governments involved in humanitarian abuses or corruption because they were afraid of being labelled racist.
Europeans told their own stories, but Africans were rarely given the chance, Samura said. "We need to trust African journalists to tell our own stories."
NGO representatives said coverage of conflict often failed to focus on its humanitarian consequences.
"Most of the reporting on Iraq is all about Washington," said Antonella Notari, spokeswoman for the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC).
Poul Nielsen, European Commissioner for Development and Humanitarian Aid, said journalists sometimes jumped to criticise aid agencies for not responding quickly enough, as occurred during the floods in Mozambique in 1999. He accused the media of monopolising the first helicopters and said: "It is objectively easier to organise a handful of people to cover a story than to get to the people on the ground or in the water. "They're not doing anything wrong, but I did feel irritated when accused of being slow when we were not being that slow."
LOW-LEVEL COVERAGE
In most cases, however, the criticism was that the media failed to focus on long-running crises where people were suffering.
"If there is low-level media coverage and the need is great, that would be defined as a 'forgotten crisis'," said Nielsen. He said NGOs' perception that being in the public eye would make them more attractive to donors could lead to misguided decisions. "All humanitarian organisations aspire to a needs-based approach but there can be pressures if they rely on appeals."
Lizbeth Knudsen, the Danish Broadcasting Corporation's managing director for news, said: "We share a very important problem -- the attention of the audience."
Nielsen argued that there was some reality behind the concept of the "CNN effect" -- media attention stirring up a public reaction and humanitarian assistance -- but he said: "We shouldn't overestimate the power of the media. Humanitarian action is usually well on its way before press images are published."
He said that many Western media organisations had been hit by growing competition and economic recession, and had closed foreign bureaux, reducing their presence in many areas further from centres of influence.
Relief workers could make an effort to explain to the media what was really going on, Nielsen said.
Toby Lanzer said that being in the media spotlight was not always an advantage, in his experience. Lanzer, head of the Russian office of OCHA, the U.N. Office for the Coordinatiion of Humanitarian Affairs, said: "It might actually help to be forgotten, at least by the media." Challenged that being in the spotlight could provide some protection to people living and in working in volatile regions, he countered. "Protection comes with access, and access goes up when the spotlight goes down."
Anna Jefferys of Save the Children Fund UK said the motivations of media and humanitarians were inherently different. "We have long-term goals. Journalists are accountable to their readers, not to people in crisis." She said quality of coverage was as important as the extent of coverage.
Samura said: "The big question for me is how do we make the important interesting. Context has got to be the watchword."
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