Relief Groups and the Press: a Delicate Balance

At the turn of the millennium, information has become a more powerful — and more volatile — tool for humanitarian organizations than a sack of rice or flour ever was.

Those who work for charitable relief organizations need to understand that the handling of information is as central to any mission as the management of refugee camps or the feeding of thousands. In a business where a high profile is essential to fund raising, organizations need to jockey for airtime.

But in order to remain viable news sources, humanitarian organizations also need to retain their reputations as accurate purveyors of facts and as unimpeachable defenders of those they purport to aid. Giving out information for reasons of politics or public relations can backfire. In Central Africa, as in the Balkans, for example, warring factions and outside mediators trying to resolve a crisis, as well as the news media, have all too often come to assume that humanitarian organizations are either partisan adversaries or commercial opportunists — or both.

The dynamic of today’s all-news, all-the-time environment means that there is an insatiable demand for information, but little if any time for journalists to independently check and confirm the information they are disseminating — especially in those regions of the world where access is problematic and coverage is irregular. In the post-genocide refugee crisis in eastern Zaire and Rwanda in the late fall of 1996, for instance, one BBC correspondent filed live reports, lasting from 50 to 90 seconds each, up to 30 times a day. The demands on the CNN and other reporters were similar. At that rate, there obviously was no possibility for reasoned analysis.

Reporters’ regurgitation of what they were told offered opportunities for the humanitarian organizations to get their “sound bites” aired with a minimal amount of filtering, but it also meant that there was constant pressure for the clearest statistics, the simplest explanations, and the most human drama. Rival humanitarian organizations competed for the television cameras and the mantle of hero. The United Nations’ World Food Program, for example, whose mandate is the delivery of food, deliberately began speaking about refugees — in part because sacks of food were less photogenic than people.

The problem of accurate and nuanced coverage was further exacerbated by the situation: There was clear evidence of a military operation along the border near the vast refugee camps of Hutus and Tutsis, but with no access to Zaire, no one knew what was happening in the camps, whether the camps were being forcibly closed, or whether the mass of refugees would be allowed to return to Rwanda.

The various humanitarian organizations argued bitterly and publicly about what was happening. In the rivalry to get on television in late October and early November of 1996, both United Nations agencies and international charities released projections that were little more than speculations about the scope of the crisis across the border. UNICEF released a projection that some 1,000 Hutus out of a potential refugee population of over a million were dying each day of starvation and disease in eastern Zaire. And Doctors Without Borders (Médecins Sans Frontières), using projection models it had refined during previous refugee crises, extrapolated that 1,200 people could be dying per day from famine and epidemic disease.

Even though the doctors’ group couched its estimate with qualifiers, the figure was reported in the news media as a cold fact. As Nik Gowing of the BBC wrote in a report prepared for the European Community’s Humanitarian Office, “Within hours the [Médecins Sans Frontières] extrapolation had taken on a scary dynamic of its own. … [Médecins Sans Frontières] had lost control of its own data.” Newspapers reported the numbers without caveats. Headlines screamed: 1,200 refugees a day are dying.

Some reporters and news organizations went even further. They began using the Doctors Without Borders estimate to project their own figures and impressions. On air, one BBC correspondent even filed a radio report describing “a holocaust taking place unseen by TV cameras.”

Several weeks later, refugees began visibly flooding across the border. By the end of the month, more than 600,000 refugees had returned to Rwanda. Their return was televised, and it was evident to all that they weren’t suffering from cholera or malaria or starvation. The crisis appeared not to be a “real” disaster — except to the relief groups, whose credibility plummeted as a result of their crying wolf.

The humanitarian organizations had come to that pass because, back in the mid-1980s, they had learned to recognize and trade on their power over the news media’s portrayal of global crises. They discovered that they were often the means by which journalists found a trouble spot — either because an organization had been promoting one of its own relief operations or because it literally transported reporters and camera crews to the scene of a disaster. The humanitarian groups learned that the press often looked to the aid workers to act as guides and translators — especially during full-fledged crises, when the demand for the story was such that neophyte journalists were parachuted in with little understanding of what they were getting into.

In the white heat of the televised crises of the 1980s — such as the famine in Ethiopia in 1984 and 1985 — the relief organizations had played the roles of both narrators and actors. As articulate English-speaking sources, they had defined what was happening, and as doctors and nurses, they had been portrayed as saviors. The relief charities saw the relationship as a quid pro quo: They told the journalists where the stories were, and the journalists provided them with precisely the types of images and articles that the organizations wanted, largely to heighten their profile for fund raising.

For a while, the relationship was salutary, albeit co-dependent. Images of physicians ministering to ragged toddlers are attention getters, and photographs of starving children and noble doctors became icons. Both the press and the international aid charities got what they wanted. As Malcom Browne, a New York Times editor, has said, “To be crass about it, a really good series of heart-rending human-rights stories wins Pulitzer Prizes.” And the aid organizations noted that the evening television interviews and front-page newspaper pictures prompted their phones to ring off the hook with people who wanted to give money.

But the recent revolution in communication technology and news delivery has meant that the careful dynamic between the press and humanitarian charities has been thrown off balance. Without the checks built into the earlier system — made possible by a slower pace of news gathering and reporting — statements by charities are more likely to get reported without caveats and confirmations.

What’s more, humanitarian groups’ reputations are more likely to rise and fall on the perceived veracity and disinterestedness of their information. A loss of credibility can lead to increased criticism in the press and greater difficulty dealing with multinational relief forces and local governments. And once credibility is lost, it is virtually impossible to win back.

Thus, the stuffing of the information gullet, in the absence of hard information, can turn out to be catastrophic for international relief groups. The noble, moral cause that inspires many aid workers to join the humanitarian organizations can be severely compromised by careless feeding of the press and by too-facile agreement with the news media’s simplification of a crisis.

As Urs Boegli, the head of communications at the International Committee of the Red Cross, has said, “We shall have to learn to navigate between the rock and the hard place of modern institutional communications.” Charity leaders have to understand that the potential for manipulation and distortion of information is exponentially greater in today’s world of journalism-and that the pressure for constant news delivery, not only on television but also on the Internet, will only exacerbate that potential.

Susan Moeller is the author of Compassion Fatigue: How the Media Sell Disease, Famine, War and Death, published by Routledge, and director of the Journalism Program at Brandeis University.