Reporting Humanitarian Disasters in a Social Media Age

Glenda Cooper

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781351054522
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Sprachen & Linguistik
• Subtopic: Journalismus

From the tsunami to Hurricane Sandy, the Nepal earthquake to Syrian refugees—defining images and accounts of humanitarian crises are now often created, not by journalists but by ordinary citizens using Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Instagram and Snapchat. But how has the use of this content—and the way it is spread by social media—altered the rituals around disaster reporting, the close, if not symbiotic, relationship between journalists and aid agencies, and the kind of crises that are covered? Drawing on more than 100 in-depth interviews with journalists and aid agency press officers, participant observations at the Guardian, BBC and Save the Children UK, as well as the ordinary people who created the words and pictures that framed these disasters, this book reveals how humanitarian disasters are covered in the 21st century – and the potential consequences for those who posted a tweet, a video or photo, without ever realising how far it would go.

1 Introduction

September 1943. Famine engulfed Calcutta in what Ian Stephens, then editor of the Indian publication The Statesman, described as “slow dispirited noiseless apathy” (Stephens, 1966:184). Absorbed in running his newspaper and with limited staff, Stephens was one of those who initially failed to notice what was going on. But when he—and others—did start to comprehend the scale of the unfolding tragedy, he found official denials and cover-ups all around him.

When Stephens broke ranks and started to report on the famine, he was warned by the British government’s chief press adviser, B.J. Kirchner, that the newspaper had come “very near the borderline and might get into trouble” (Stephens, 1966:185). Cables leaving Bengal were watched carefully. All “such meaningful words as famine, corpse, starvation were methodically struck out” by India’s central government (Stephens, 1966:187) and the Bengal authorities stopped publishing mortality statistics. But, for two months, The Statesman waged a campaign to expose the truth about the famine. Even so, estimates are that between seven and ten million people died of starvation, malnutrition and disease during 1943–44, out of a population of 60 million—and for too long, the wider world had simply no idea what was going on because the information was suppressed.

January 2010. An earthquake measuring 7.3 on the Richter scale hits Haiti at 16.53 local time on January 12. At 17.00, a Haitian—Fredo Dupoux—tweeted: “Oh shiet [sic] heavy earthquake right now! In Haiti”; another tweeter @FutureHaiti said “Earthquake 7 Richter scale just happening #Haiti” (Macleod, 2010). Figures vary on how many people died or were displaced,¹ but the eyes of the world were on the disaster within minutes. As the quake and its aftermath unfolded, according to the Twitter-tracking service Sysomos, 2.3 million tweets included the words ‘Haiti’ or ‘Red Cross’ between 12 and 14 January (Evans, 2010).²

November 2017. The eruption of Mt Agung in Bali leads to more than 100,000 Balinese being evacuated from their homes. The international airport is closed. Time and the Daily Telegraph report that tourists are flocking to Instagram to take beautifully constructed selfies of themselves in front of the ash cloud (Abrams, 2017; Smith, 2017), the latest manifestation of the ‘disaster selfie’ previously seen at the scenes of the 2015 Nepal quake and the Grenfell Tower disaster (Ibrahim, 2015; Meade, 2017).

On the surface, the contrast between the cover-up of the Bengal famine in 1943 and the extensive coverage of the Haiti earthquake nearly 70 years later or the Bali eruption could not appear more stark: one characterised by no information and disinformation; the other by ‘ordinary’ people describing the disaster to anyone who cared to listen around the world as it happened. In Haiti, even aid workers and journalists initially played catch-up with the public on the ground, who were alerting them to where the problems were and where aid was needed.

It is no wonder that the journalist Anand Giridharadas wrote of the experience:

The old paradigm was one-to-many: foreign journalists and aid workers jet in, report on a calamity and dispense aid with whatever data they have. The new paradigm is many-to-many-to-many: victims supply on-the-ground data; a self-organizing mob of global volunteers translates text messages and helps to orchestrate relief; journalists and aid workers use the data to target the response.

(Giridharadas, 2010:3)

The Haitian earthquake came six years after the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, seen as a turning point (Gillmor, 2005)—where images and accounts taken by ordinary people superseded those taken by journalists. In the tsunami’s aftermath, the claims made for user-generated content (UGC) were extensive: that it would transform reporting, making a more diverse range of stories and voices heard; that creators of content could be active shapers rather than passive bystanders in their own stories (Gillmor, 2005; Glocer, 2006; Jenkins, 2006; Deuze, 2007). And no longer would the world be able to turn its back on those suffering in faraway places: this could be a revolution in reporting. Or so UGC’s early supporters thought.

The Aim of This Book

As a journalist working at the UK’s Sunday Times at the time of the 2004 tsunami³ it soon became clear that this disaster was being covered in a very different way. While we were, of course, trying to get our own journalists out there as soon as possible, I found that the use of camcorder footage from tourists on the beaches, as well as blogs such as waveofdestruction.org sharing tsunami photos, seemed to be ushering in a new era of what some scholars called convergent and collaborative journalism. A paradigm shift appeared to be taking place “in which once the media was the centre of the universe and now the user is the centre of the universe” (Robinson and De Shano, 2011:977).

The impact it had on aid and aid workers was equally groundbreaking with the coverage affecting the scale of the donations. In the newsroom, looking for new angles on the tsunami story, on 4 January 2005, I came across a Press Association story, saying the charity Medecins Sans Frontieres issued an unprecedented statement asking that no more money be given to its fund earmarked for the tsunami. The story spread across the world (Bennhold, 2005). Aid agencies asking not to be given money? It seemed incredible—and indeed it was a statement that was attacked by other aid agencies at the time but which proved to be judicious (Barbagallo, 2005).

A second development was the ‘DIY aid squad’ (Hodson, 2005) which focused on so-called ‘guerrilla aid workers’ who had watched the coverage on TV, and were determined to go and help themselves. This of course again was not new in itself—there had been previous examples during 1990s crises in particular the Balkans war and the collapse of Romania, but these aid workers in the 2000s were able to use blogs and film to publish what they were doing (Campbell, 2005; Hartley-Parkinson, 2005; Thompson, 2007; Ramos and Piper, 2005).

Six months later, journalists were confronted by blogs and images, which had been created by the survivors and witnesses to the 7/7 terrorist attacks when journalists themselves could not get near the sites.⁴ It became clear that the tsunami was only the beginning: ordinary people began to share their images and texts of elections, conflicts, disasters and riots.⁵ By a decade later such was the ubiquity of social media as a communications tool that there would be a US president who chose to communicate messages to his electorate and fellow world leaders not via official bulletins or interviews with the press but over Twitter, whether announcing airstrikes or conducting diplomacy with the North Koreans.⁶

Yet 15 years on from the 2004 tsunami, those camcorder footage and blogs now appear to be ancient history. The availability of the smartphone to capture stills and video, coupled with the growth of social networking sites such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Snapchat, as well as the ability to livestream via platforms such Facebook Live or Periscope, have made publishing and sharing content far easier for the public.

However, the early optimism of a new era of collaboration and equalisation, in which different stories would be told and different voices heard has not necessarily been borne out, as the Bali volcano showed.

This book examines the effect the increasing availability of words and images produced by non-journalists (‘user-generated content’) and facilitated by social media platforms has had on the reporting of humanitarian disasters and traditional source–media relationships between journalists and aid agencies. But rather than focusing on textual analysis as many researchers have done (Naab and Sehl, 2017), this book takes an empirical approach and speaks to journalists, aid agencies and creators of UGC.

As a result, I interviewed more than a hundred people, mainly face to face, although for those who whom this was impossible sometimes via Skype or email. The idea was to look at the informal reality, which can only be perceived from the inside—whether that is from inside media organisations or within the NGOs that are their sources. It allowed the processes that lead to the coverage we the audience receive, and on occasion create, to be examined: how and why UGC is used, what relationship creators of UGC have with the media, and what procedures NGOs use when dealing with the media.

The subjects of the interviews were, in the main, ‘elite’ (Gillham, 2000)—journalists and NGOs who have particular experience in this field. However, there were also a considerable number of ‘accidental journalists’—members of the public who found themselves caught up in humanitarian crises (Allan, 2013).

Humanitarian Disasters—Definitions

The definition of ‘humanitarian disaster’ has traditionally proved contentious, whether it is ‘natural’ or ‘man-made’, and what scale of destruction qualifies it as a disaster.

This book looks mainly at crises and disasters that fall under the contentious heading of ‘natural’, but will use the term ‘humanitarian’ because of the problems with the terminology ‘natural’ and to emphasise that the disasters I will be looking at have had an impact on human societies.

In 2017, 318 ‘natural’ disasters occurred across the world, killing 9,503 people and affecting more than 96 million others; according to the Centre for Research of the Epidemiology of Disasters (CRED), a World Health Organization collaborating centre.⁷ While the mortality figures were considerably lower than the average for 2007–16 of 68,302 deaths yearly, the 2017 disasters caused significantly more economic damage worth US$314 billion, reflected in the impact of three hurricanes—Harvey (US$95 billion), Irma (US$66 billion) and Maria (US$69 billion), affecting the United States and the Caribbean (Wallemacq, 2018). The low mortality rate for 2017 is explained by the fact that there was no single major event responsible for increased mortality. This is unlike more recent years where the earthquake in Nepal (2015) killed 8,831 people and Typhoon Haiyan in the Philippines (2013) killed 7,354.

While hurricanes, floods and earthquakes are the result of what we might see as weather events or geological faults, Cottle points out that they are “increasingly known as ‘unnatural phenomenon’” (2009:43), while Beck calls them the products of the “manufactured uncertainties” of the global risk society (1999:19).

For the scale of a disaster—or even the fact a ‘natural’ event becomes a disaster all—is often the result of the existing living conditions of the people caught up in it. For example, the Guatemalan earthquake of 1976 affected the slum dwellers of Guatemala City and the Mayan Indians living in impoverished towns so much more than their more affluent neighbours that it was eventually dubbed a “classquake” (Wisner et al, 2006). This explains, too, why Haiti’s 2010 earthquake (measuring 7.0 on the Richter scale) was much more devastating than the 2010 and 2011 Canterbury and Christchurch earthquakes in New Zealand (7.1 and 6.3 on the Richter scale).⁸ Haiti’s frail infrastructure and food insecurity meant the quake effectively destroyed a country already on the brink of collapse (Kolbe et al, 2010).

Food crises are also far from ‘natural’ phenomena. While drought affects crop growth, famines occur because of political situations (see Sen, 1999). The rise in 11 million people facing food insecurity and requiring urgent humanitarian action between 2016 and 2017 was because of new or intensified conflict in Myanmar, north-east Nigeria, Democratic Republic of Congo, South Sudan and Yemen (Food Security Information Network, 2018). This can lead to incongruous situations: in the food crisis occurring in Niger in 2005, there were markets full of food 2km away from the place where the BBC were filming stories that would lead the Ten O’Clock News (Vasagar, 2005).

Both the International Federation of the Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC) and CRED define ‘natural disasters’ as ones where there is disruption of a community or society’s functioning, and losses which exceed that community or society’s ability to cope using only its own resources and end up by needing assistance from a national or international level. For a disaster to be entered into the CRED database, at least one of the following fairly modest criteria of scale must be fulfilled:

• ten or more people reported killed
• 100 or more people reported affected
• declaration of a state of emergency
• call for international assistance.⁹

What these definitions have in common is that they describe events that affect human society, rather than that happen in deserted areas, i.e. “extreme natural events are not disasters until a vulnerable group of people is exposed” (Wisner et al, 2006:i).

The link between ‘natural’ events and their consequences for human beings can be expressed in another way—by looking at how such events are anticipated, prepared for and respo...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Preface and Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Distant Suffering in a Digital World: The Background to the Changing Nature of Disaster Reporting
• 3 “The Odd Mucky Weekend, Not a One Night Stand”: The Relationship Between Aid Agencies and Journalists When Covering Disasters
• 4 The “First Draft of History” or Just “Smoke and Mirrors”? How Journalists and Aid Agencies See the Use of UGC in Humanitarian Crises
• 5 Twitter Takeovers, Blogging and ‘Following the Sun’: How Aid Agencies Use the Tropes of Social Media and User-Generated Content
• 6 Cloning and Co-opting: How Mainstream Media Control User-Generated Content
• 7 ‘Tweeting the Quake’: How Ordinary Citizens Tell Their Stories
• 8 Ethical Questions Going Forward: Payment, Permission, Privacy
• 9 Conclusion
• Appendix of Interviewees
• Index