Routledge Companion to Media and Humanitarian Action

Robin Andersen, Purnaka L. de Silva, Robin Andersen, Purnaka L. de Silva

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781134969241
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Política y relaciones internacionales
• Subtopic: Derechos humanos

In this moment of unprecedented humanitarian crises, the representations of global disasters are increasingly common media themes around the world. The Routledge Companion to Media and Humanitarian Action explores the interconnections between media, old and new, and the humanitarian challenges that have come to define the twenty-first century. Contributors, including media professionals and experts in humanitarian affairs, grapple with what kinds of media language, discourse, terms, and campaigns can offer enough context and background knowledge to nurture informed global citizens. Case studies of media practices, content analysis and evaluation of media coverage, and representations of humanitarian emergencies and affairs offer further insight into the ways in which strategic communications are designed and implemented in field of humanitarian action.

Part 1
Theories and Practice of Media and Their Impact on Humanitarian Action

1
Media, Politics, Compassion, and Citizenship in the Post-Humanitarian Debate

Visual Storytelling and the Humanitarian Imaginary

Robin Andersen

As we outlined in the introduction to this volume, one of the main theoretical foundations for humanitarian action is articulated by Lilie Chouliaraki (2013), identified as the humanitarian imagination. The idea is built upon the concept of cosmopolitan solidarity, which has been best developed by Craig Calhoun (2010). These concepts coalesce to explain the ethics, motivations, and context for humanitarian action, understood as the public’s response to the suffering of others—when confronted with the knowledge that people or groups, be they the same or different from us, find themselves in dire situations and in need of help, global publics are compelled to act to stop their suffering. The assumption of such a sensibility forms the basis of aid appeals. It also undergirds what has been called the CNN Effect, and later the Al-Jazeera Effect, because, of course, mobilizing such sentiments and the resulting public action, is dependent upon the mediations of humanitarian communication. How else would the public come to know about the suffering of those in need, or of the on-going campaigns to help them? We are dependent on media, the news photographs, the stories of suffering on television—both long and short—the latest word from the Internet and social media, accessed on our computers and hand-held devices, to bring the world to us. But the stories about the world are always, and can only be, media representations of the world and not the world itself. Unless we are the ones standing on the beach of a Greek island waiting for another boat of freezing refugees, or tracking the exploitation of children on a conflict-ridden island in the Philippines.

If not in the midst of helping or bearing witness, we must rely on those who see for us, who take the pictures, record the testimony, shoot the video, and tell the stories, either in print, on television, in an agency report, a Facebook page, or a YouTube video. But the process of mediation is always fraught; so many frames of reference from local to global can be applied to the news, some illuminating, others that only serve to obscure. Depictions represent or misrepresent the circumstances, explanations, and causes of disasters. They often contextualize those who suffer either as innocent or complicit, worthy or unworthy. As historical representations have also demonstrated, there are unintended consequences of the use of various media, the implicit assumptions they inherit from their embeddedness in social and economic relations—spectator and beneficiary, secure citizen of the global North and precarious victim in the global South. Media constructions often contain within them proscribed logics of compassion versus blame, familiar versus other, inevitability versus solutions. Ultimately media can influence and alter our understanding of events, our feelings toward the people affected, and our opinions about the official policies in response. In this way, such mediations can also either evoke compassion for the suffering of others and thereby reinforce the humanitarian imaginary, or they can fail to do so and the spectator/viewer is unmoved.

Many scholars have offered arguments about how and why media sometimes fail to address us in ways that evoke and confirm the humanitarian imagination. Many of those theories have developed over decades of assessment of the legacy of images of suffering in news and aid appeals. Some critics detail the long trajectory of loss of meaningful international news coverage and the failure to inform global publics in ways that nurture knowledge and citizenship. Other studies evaluate new media practices from the Internet to Social Media. Chouliaraki (2013) posits that the combination of media technology and strategic design of message appeals by competing aid agencies, have transformed our relationship to those in need of our help. In a commercial age when everything is defined as a brand, so too are humanitarian agencies. When we click on a donate button we often do so to affirm ourselves and establish an identity. Lost is our compassion for the suffering other—it is all about us, not them. We have become, in this way, ironic spectators to the suffering of others in a post-humanitarian age. Many scholars have also asserted that the visually driven imagery of those in need is so ubiquitous that it has led to compassion fatigue in the West with information overload and the perpetually flawed mediations of the suffering “other,” and we have become overwhelmed and lost our ability to empathize.

This chapter explores the historical connections forged between human disasters, media representations, and humanitarian responses, as well as the theoretical conceptions used to assess those interconnections. Put another way, we can say it seeks to untangle the threads that tie images, stories, and narratives of suffering to the complex ways they pattern humanitarian action. The fabric of humanitarianism is woven from the photographs and videos, words and narratives of the long history of disasters, campaigns, and media strategies that currently make up what we now call the humanitarian community.

Of course, space prevents us from including all that is outlined above, but we will track key historical campaigns and mark important turning points in order to reveal the bonds and identify the challenges that tie, sometimes uncomfortably, media to our ability to engage in humanitarian action. Possibly more importantly, we will ask where we can go from here. Are there communication practices that result in effective action, and at the same time bolster our ability to empathize with others? Are there depictions and narratives that accurately represent the complexities of crisis that can lead to solutions based on humanitarian principles? Along the way we will address the ideas of a humanitarian imaginary, the benefits and drawbacks of humanitarian communication, the descriptive value of the idea of an ironic spectator, and the question of compassion fatigue in Western countries.

Early campaigns that forged the immutable bond between media and humanitarian disasters go back more than half a century. Those early images are a good place to start to tell the story of media and its unintended consequence for humanitarianism.

Biafra, Ethiopia and Sudan

Media and humanitarian action as we know it was forged in 1968 when a group of journalists flew to eastern Nigeria where Igbo separatist rebels had formed a new state they called Biafra. There two of the journalists, led by an Irish Father named Kevin Doheny of the Holy Ghost Order, were taken to a hospital where they saw severely malnourished children, victims of the Nigerian government’s deliberate policy to starve the Biafrans through a land and sea blockade. UK reporter Alan Hart (2010) was filming for International Television Network ITN and the impact of the film, along with black and white images of starving children were widely published in the press and stunned the Western world. As one writer put it “within hours people worldwide were asking how they could donate money to stop the suffering” (Waters 2004). Frederick Forsyth (the fictional author) would later write:

Quite suddenly we’d touched a nerve. Nobody in this country at that time had ever seen children look like that. The last time the Brits had seen anything like that must have been the Belsen pictures … Starving children were on the front page of every British newspaper, and from there to newspapers all over the world.

(Harrison and Palmer 1986, 33)

Haunting news photographs depicted skeletal, swollen-eyed, mostly naked children struggling to survive, many about to die. Coverage led to an outpouring of charity, political activism, and, in France, the founding of the international, independent, medical humanitarian organization, Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) or Doctors Without Borders. All this prevented many more from dying of starvation. The effects were monumental, as Franks puts it in this volume, “The shocking images of Biafran children starving became a cause célèbre for radical protest in western capitals. And for years to come the very word ‘Biafran’ was associated with these images of extreme starvation.” But in retrospect, the images obscured as much as they revealed about the conditions depicted, and the complex politics in Nigeria at the time.

Over the decades since, the actual consequences of the relief effort in Biafra, and the nature and impact of the images that drove it, have been the subject of debate and analysis by writers, researchers, academics, media strategists, and documentary filmmakers seeking to understand the circumstances, and the interactions set up by visual representations and the public response to them. Many have provided pieces of this narrative explaining how the charity output also extended the Biafran war for 18 more months, ultimately causing tens of thousands more deaths. The relief efforts fortified the rebels, and brought in currency from landing fees that meant that the rebels could buy more guns (Barrow and Jenkins 2001). Though the Nigerian government actions starved a civilian population, rebel leaders were also willing to sacrifice civilians to press on with the conflict. A documentary film shows rebel leaders explaining their glee from the public response to what they considered a successful “propaganda” effort.¹ The plane that took the journalists to eastern Nigeria was actually part of the PR effort by a little-known agency based in Geneva that the rebels hired.

By 1984 another set of images from Africa would hold the West in its grip, and again confirm the power of the visual language of suffering, this time combined with dramatic prose, to evoke public concern. Ethiopians were experiencing mass starvation and world opinion galvanized around Michael Buerk’s vivid stories that aired on the BBC. On October 23, 1984 the midday report opened this way:

Dawn, and as the sun breaks through the piercing chill of night on the plains outside Korem, it lights up a biblical famine, now, in the 20th century. This place, say workers here, is the closest thing to hell on earth.

The historic broadcast of this “biblical” famine resulted in worldwide interest and donations. The footage was transmitted by 425 television stations worldwide, including major US news channels, some that retain Buerk’s original British voice-over (Jackson 2015). “Coverage of the famine in UK tabloid newspapers went from 50 column inches in the first three weeks of October to nearly 1,200 column inches in the last 10 days of the month” (Nguyen 2013). It inspired pop star Bob Geldof to organize the Live Aid concert, and thus to the next step in the process of media, and now popular culture, intimately tied to humanitarian appeals fronted by performers and celebrity spokespersons. This in turn led to the unprecedented growth of foreign relief organizations, all of which would change the face of humanitarian organizing and fundraising.

But like the images and broadcasts of Biafra, they oversimplified the crisis and converted a famine with a long genesis and deep political roots into a natural disaster. The famine in Ethiopia was far from that. Starvation had become a weapon of war for the dictator Mengistu Haile Mariam in the battle against insurgents in the north. As in many conflicts, fighting caused problems with food supply. Just as in Nigeria, foreign currency brought in by aid agencies helped the conflict continue. In addition, both government and rebel forces diverted the vehicles used to distribute relief supplies (Nguyen 2013). Ultimately, the media-driven aid influx strengthened a bad government, and according to Franks, “did more harm than good” (see Chapter 15).

Picturing Famine Victims

Ethiopia followed Biafra and the images and their power chronicled a set of visual conventions, especially for famine in Africa that has been frequently repeated over the years since. As Zelizer (2010) notes the “visual standard for all of the images of famine that followed” were “depicted by pictures suggesting vulnerability and cued by bodily frailty” (163). Mostly children, and generally anonymous, they stood staring or sitting with distended stomachs, their hollowed out features showing little emotion. Close up and frequently shot from above—diminished—they often stared up at the camera, their pitiful eyes dominating bony, despondent faces. Images from Ethiopia included starving mothers and children similarly, many about to die, waiting for food deliveries.

Since then, the nature of the imagery itself has also inspired writers, theorists, and critics, all of whom have offered astute and original insights into the visual language of suffering. Theoretical and analytical frameworks track the politics of photographs, the psychosocial impact of visuals, their performativity in the humanitarian cultural imaginary, the impact of their form and content on viewers, and their meanings within the larger context of media and narrative tropes. In journalism studies, scholars question the limits and verisimilitude of imagery, and the influence such photojournalism has on the press, from framing news reporting and practices to journalistic ethics. These discussions also include the “rights of photographic subjects, the duties of producers, and the extent and degree of harm or benefit these images generate” (Fehrenback and Rodogno 2015). Probably the harshest critique was penned by Susan Sontag (2004) who noted that the images carried a double meaning. “The ubiquity of those photographs, and those horrors, cannot help but nourish belief in the inevitability of tragedy in the benighted or backward—that is, poor—parts of the world.” To Sontag, they were part of an age-old practice of “exhibiting exotic, that is colonized, human beings displayed like zoo animals in ethnological conditions” (2004, 71).

Kevin Carter and the Starving Sudanese Girl

Toward the end of the 1980s the use of imagery and narratives had become a concern to the humanitarian community. By 1989 a Commission for Images published a Code of Conduct in which NGOs were advised to be “attentive to messages that over-simplify or over-concentrate sensational aspects of life in the third world.”² Four years after that report, photojournalist Kevin Carter took a picture of a starving Sudanese child that was published in the front section of the New York Times on March 26, 1993. The picture would further shake the received wisdom that a photograph “is worth a thousand words,” and that an image contained within it the power to explain and move the public to act. In Carter’s picture the tiny girl is collapsed upon herself face down on the dusty ground and a large vulture lurks on its hunches just behind her in the frame, waiting for her last movement. Carter waited for up to 20 minutes to see if the vulture would spread its wings to look even more threatening before he settled for the shot he took (Marinovitch and Silver 2000). Readers responded to the picture immediately, demanding answers to questions about the child and what had happened to her. Much has been written and said about the image including a documentary about the life of Kevin Carter. Zelizer (2010, 166–172) offers the best, most recent discussion of the image and the responses to it, and its movement ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• CONTENTS
• Notes on Contributors
• Preface
• Introduction: The Power of Media in Times of Humanitarian Crisis: Global Challenges, Constraints, and Consequences
• PART 1 Theories and Practice of Media and Their Impact on Humanitarian Action
• PART 2 Documentary, News, Human Traffickers, and the Rescue Narratives of Global Migrations: Humanitarianism and Human Rights in an Age of Crisis
• PART 3 Global Humanitarian Information Policy: Financing, Early Warning, and Crisis Response
• PART 4 Famine, Violence, and Compassion: The Politics of News, Perception, Aid, and Security
• PART 5 Voices at the Table, on the Internet, and Over the Airwaves: Expanding the Global Dialogue on Science, Religion, Civil Society, and Human Rights
• PART 6 Communication, Humanitarianism, and Crisis: Case Studies from the Global Community
• PART 7 Legacy Media from Fiction to Documentary: Representations of Crisis, Conflict, Humanitarian Assistance, and Peacekeeping
• PART 8 The Contradictions of Social Media and the New Technologies of Communication: Information, Fake News, and Xenophobia; Activism and Witness
• PART 9 Media Industry and Government Influences on Policy and Humanitarian Affairs: The Propaganda of Warmaking
• Conclusion Assessing the Media and Humanitarian Landscape: Amidst Complexities, Global Peace and Prosperity Require New Directions and New Expressions of Solidarity
• Index