Panellists (clockwise from top-left): Janine di Giovanni, Toby Porter, Gordon Weiss, Terry Morel, Ann Leslie, Anne Penketh. Chair (centre): Sarah Montague, presenter for BBC Radio 4&${esc.hash}39;s Today programme ALERTNET/Tim Large
LONDON (AlertNet)- What does a photographer pack for an assignment in a war zone? Along with their cameras, lenses and flak jackets some used to carry a teddy bear.
The idea was that if there were no starving or orphaned children around you could always toss the teddy bear in a burnt out ruin and, bingo, you had your front page picture.
The story was told by British tabloid reporter Ann Leslie at a lively debate on children, humanitarian crises and the media, hosted by Reuters AlertNet in London. Journalists and humanitarian workers on the panel swapped ideas on why newspapers and television channels cover some stories and neglect others.
Click here to listen to the debate.
As Anne Penketh, diplomatic editor for Britain&${esc.hash}39;s Independent newspaper, said, if there&${esc.hash}39;s no photo there&${esc.hash}39;s no story.
"The fact is if you haven&${esc.hash}39;t got a picture it won&${esc.hash}39;t get in the paper. It&${esc.hash}39;s as simple as that. Agencies are often good at producing case studies, but they don&${esc.hash}39;t have pictures. If they did then it&${esc.hash}39;s a story that could be on the front page of the Independent."
Save the Children&${esc.hash}39;s emergencies director, Toby Porter, said there had to be a connection between the reader and the people caught up in the disaster for it to work as a story. He agreed a picture could be vital for generating coverage of a crisis such as happened with the Mozambique floods in 2000.
"It was a baby in a tree that somehow became a defining image that allowed people to see the humanity behind the suffering in these disasters," he said.
Many aid agencies do not like the media using pictures of starving children as they did in the 1980s Ethiopian famine. They say such images can reinforce debasing stereotypes of Africa and rob the subjects of their dignity.
Porter said some agencies and journalists went looking for malnourished children in places where the population was healthy, which was very wrong, but pictures of emaciated children in somewhere like Niger simply represented the reality on the ground.
"I have a real problem with this notion that we shouldn&${esc.hash}39;t show pictures of starving children if they are starving," he said.
"The images of children in Niger save the lives of thousands of other children by bringing in money. I don&${esc.hash}39;t understand what the issue is."
Porter said some people in aid agencies were too keen to stick to ethical guidelines. He described how he was once told not to use a picture of a child photographed from above because it was patronising. "(That&${esc.hash}39;s) intellectual claptrap (thought up) by people who have got nothing better to do than attend funny conference...," he said.
But Terry Morel of the U.N. refugee agency&${esc.hash}39;s children&${esc.hash}39;s section said it was vital that journalists remember that the children they film have lives that carry on after the camera crews leave.
"They are people with identities and lives and their lives continue after. There can be consequences as a result of using these images, for example in the case of children who are associated with armed forces," she said, referring to child soldiers.
Changing face of newsThe debate tied in with an AlertNet opinion poll of humanitarian experts and journalists that judged Sudan, Democratic Republic of Congo and Uganda the most dangerous places for children. Yet, the coverage they get compared with, say, Iraq is minimal.
Some of this has to do with the fact that Western powers have troops and financial and political interests in Iraq. But plain old logistics are a significant factor.
"Isolation and sheer danger have made these disasters very difficult to cover," said Gordon Weiss, a communications officer for U.N. children&${esc.hash}39;s fund UNICEF. In Darfur you are working in a desert with scarce water and shelter and inhabited by some of the hardiest people on earth.
Janine di Giovanni, foreign correspondent for The Times and Vanity Fair, agreed. You can be in Baghdad in hours with direct flights from Jordan, she said. By contrast it can take weeks to get to Darfur, and once there you have to carry your own supplies and cooking equipment. Editors managing budgets cannot afford these trips on a regular basis.
Weiss and Morel wondered why journalists did not follow up on crises they had reported on previously and so rarely went back to see how people were faring. Weiss said that landmines littering Bosnian farmland continued to be a humanitarian disaster, yet no one covered it.
"It&${esc.hash}39;s always the aftermath of a war that I find needs the most coverage when the cameras disappear," agreed Giovanni. She said she had been appalled at how swarms of journalists had decamped en masse straight from the Bosnian war to report on Rwanda - chasing headlines.
Leslie agreed that in an ideal world it was desirable to follow up on crises, but pointed to the experience of one British tabloid, The Mirror, that had sent journalists back to Rwanda several years after the genocide. The coverage "was very good - and it was extremely bad for circulation", she said.
The debate was also opened up to bloggers around the globe via a live online feed. One wanted to know why the media did not use local reporters more often. This would introduce a wider range of views and get around the problem of expense and logistics.
But Penketh said it was not as simple as that. "Every paper has its voice. We have a brand. Our readers want to know what (veteran war reporter) Robert Fisk thinks..."
Weiss said that 24-hour news coverage, the Internet and technological advantages that meant anyone could post a video on a website would change the way crises were covered.
Big media organisations would have to start competing with individuals who could travel cheaply to a crisis area and upload pictures that could generate the sort of "news landslide seen in Niger", he said.
Leslie sang the Internet&${esc.hash}39;s praises, saying it used to take her days to get the sort of information she could now get in seconds. But she cautioned against using blogs because they were so unreliable.
This triggered a strong riposte from Rachel Rawlins of the website Global Voices, which aims to redress some of the inequities in the media by posting information and ideas appearing on text, audio and video blogs from around the world.
"Yes, it&${esc.hash}39;s absolutely true: Blogs have a whole lot of crap in them, and they&${esc.hash}39;re unreliable ... So are newspapers," she said.
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