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How NGOs and Media Can Help Banish Stereotypes - NGOs - Global policy Forum How NGOs and Media Can Help Banish Stereotypes
By Lars Inge Staveland
Alertnet
February 11, 2003
Humanitarian organisations and journalists have a responsibility to explain the context of humanitarian emergencies and avoid a gloom and doom caricature of developing countries, according to a senior official of Médecins sans Frontières (MSF).
Nicolas de Torrente, executive director of MSF USA, told AlertNet that media reports often conveyed an image of Africa as a continent where human suffering was a result of climatic conditions and ethnic fighting rather than politically motivated warfare, forced displacement and violation of basic humanitarian norms.
De Torrente was asked about the 2002 edition of MSF's annual report on the 10 most underreported humanitarian stories by U.S. television networks, published in December. He said it was the job of humanitarian agencies to inform people about a crisis, but they also had a responsibility to explain its causes.
"It is a political issue and there are connections to the rest of the world," he said. "If you want to report on the eastern Congo today it is extremely complex and difficult for people to understand what is going on, and it is very easy to caricature."
Published in December, the MSF survey was compiled in collaboration with the Tyndall Report, which monitors news on the three major U.S. television networks, ABC, NBC and CBS. The survey showed that the networks devoted 25 minutes' coverage from January to November 2002 to eight of the crises highlighted on MSF’s list of Top 10 underreported humanitarian stories.
During this period, the famine in Angola received one minute's coverage and the war in Liberia received none. Nearly three years of war in Angola came to an end in April 2002 after rebel leader Jonas Savimbi was killed in an ambush.
According to the World Food Programme (WFP), humanitarian organisations now have access to hundreds of thousands of malnourished people who have been hiding in the countryside for the past four years.
In Liberia, civil war raged throughout 2002 between Charles Taylor’s government troops and rebels from the Liberians United for Reconciliation and Democracy (LURD). According to figures from the Office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees, there are 196,000 internally displaced people in the country.
COVERAGE OF PEACE NEGOTIATIONS
De Torrente said that, while the media devoted some coverage to peace negotiations and peace plans in Angola, Sudan and the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), the humanitarian emergencies that have followed were often ignored.
According to the WFP, the economic devastation resulting from the war in the DRC had led to high malnutrition rates among internally displaced people, refugees, children and the elderly. The WFP estimated that about 1.4 million people urgently needed food aid.
In Sudan, the WFP estimated that 2.9 million people were dependent on food aid. "The media cover the crisis from the top down. They cover the diplomatic efforts and meetings of ministers and so on. But the fact that these developments are not translated into changes in the well-being of people on the ground is not being covered at all, " de Torrente said.
He added that a growing interest in world affairs since the suicide-hijacking attacks in the United States on September 11, 2001 had translated into a focus on countries and topics with a connection to the U.S. national interest.
"It is pretty striking to see that there is hardly any coverage of an international story that does not have something to do with U.S. national security interest right now," he said. De Torrente dismissed the explanation that the public had little interest in humanitarian issues and said the lack of coverage was rather a result of priorities in the media industry.
"Our experience is that the media, insiders in the media and media analysts agree completely with our analysis and view this as a big problem and basically say: ‘You are right -- there is a very selective focus’," he said. "People are more interested and hungry for more stories."
De Torrente said that a five-part series on the DRC on ABC’s "Nightline" programme demonstrated there was a general interest for humanitarian news among the U.S. public. "The industry trend of agglomerating the news media in big, corporate entertainment companies -- ABC owned by Disney, for example -- has worked against this. There are alternative media coming up but still Americans get most of their news for the local TV station and mainstream TV," he said.
The MSF report identifies access to medicine as one of the 10 most underreported humanitarian stories of 2002.
FUNDING MECHANISMS
Despite scientific advances and the establishment of funding mechanisms to fight infectious diseases, the report says, the vast majority of people suffering from HIV/AIDS, malaria, tuberculosis and other infectious diseases have no access to life-saving drugs.
"Wealthy countries have contributed only a small fraction of the estimated $7–$10 billion needed annually to fight AIDS alone. The United States’ pledge to the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, TB and malaria, for example, is paltry," the report says.
De Torrente said that although the lack of access to affordable AIDS medicine in southern Africa has received some coverage in the U.S. media, there has been little attention to access to medication for diseases such as malaria or sleeping sickness.
"There is a connection with AIDS because it affects our countries as well, and there is a more direct connection that can be made. Malaria and sleeping sickness affect people in developing countries almost exclusively. And so public attention has not been so much focused on those," he said.
MSF has published the report annually since 1998. The conflicts in the DRC and Colombia have featured on the list in the past four years. In 2002, the conflict in Colombia escalated after peace talks between the government and rebels of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia collapsed. The UNHCR estimated that there were 720,000 displaced people in Colombia.
New in the 2002 report is how the media ignore the issue of disregard for humanitarian law. De Torrente said that, although disregard for humanitarian law predated the September 11 attacks, the U.S.-led coalition had shown signs that the U.S.-declared war on terrorism might involve deviating from these fundamental guarantees.
He said that there had been some media concern about domestic human rights in the United States and attention to the lack of legal guarantees for the detainees from the war in Afghanistan held by the United States at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba.
He said that respect for humanitarian law in the war on terrorism was receiving little attention. "The problem we face is that if the U.S. slips, this sends a very bad signal to fighting forces throughout the world," he said.
MSF's top 10 under-reported humanitarian stories for 2002 were:
• End of war reveals nutritional emergency in Angola
• Civilians caught up in increasing violence in Colombia
• War and lack of health care in the Democratic Republic of Congo
• Food aid and refugee protection in North Korea
• Hundreds of thousands displaced by civil war in Liberia
• War, disease, hunger and lack of health care contribute to mortality in Somalia
• Violence, health and access to aid in Sudan
• Pressure rises on civilians escaping war in Chechnya
• World’s poor still die for lack of access to medicines
• Disregard for humanitarian law erodes protection for war-affected people
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