News Values and Aid Work
18 May 2005
[510w]
One can’t fault the news media on getting things done. I was at Colombo airport last December with a team from Medair (a Swiss-based Christian aid agency I’ve worked with on and off for many years). But most of the other travellers, seemingly with three or four luggage trolleys a head, laden with neatly labelled plastic kit boxes, were news people. In Albania during the Kosovo war, the Red Cross struggled to reunite families separated by forced deportation. But at the refugee camp I ran, more than one news crew turned up with a long lost relative of a resident they had tracked down, heaven knows how, with unerring precision.
How do they do these wonderful things? With skill and equipment. What do you need to get both these commodities? Money. Where do you get money? By selling newspapers. What sells newspapers? Stories.
But a story is a series of events that make sense. From “once upon a time”… to “they lived happily ever after” it has a structure. It has villains and heroes, suspense and resolution. It has meaning. And aid crises rarely have any of these things. By their nature, they’re a mess. Quite often they are boring and repetitive. Quite often they are not dramatic.
This is not to minimise the suffering. Undramatic and repetitive suffering can be worse, and certainly lasts longer, than the dramatic kind. But without a bit of geeing up, it may not sell newspapers.
One day in Sri Lanka a journalist called. “I’ve heard there’s cholera in Hambantota… have you heard anything where you are?”. If only, one could hear her thinking… if only… now cholera, that would be a story. Then there was a photo in a foreign newspaper of the beach in the town where I was working. It showed the one bit of road that had been washed away, on one of the few rainy afternoons (and caught one of the few non-smiling Sri Lankans). A picture of abject misery. Whereas in fact, though a terrible thing had happened, people were bearing up with cheerfulness and pitching in to get things fixed. But that wasn’t the story.
Now we read that reconstruction is taking a long time. Well blow me down. You need wood to build houses. Wood is regulated in Sri Lanka for sound environmental reasons. You have to ship it in. Ports are slow and bureaucratic. And you need somewhere to build. But most people who got washed out were within 300 metres of the shoreline, and there is a law, long ignored, that you can’t build in this zone. So what should the government do? Let people go back against the law? Find land elsewhere? These are not easy questions to sort out quickly.
But again, the painstaking unpicking of the mess doesn’t sell papers.
In the end we’ve only ourselves to blame. We buy the papers. We demand the stories. The least we can do is take the trouble to read between the lines.
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