By Jan Egeland – Secretary-general of the Norwegian Refugee Council
For years, the Norwegian Refugee Council and other humanitarian actors have called out – too often in vain – to the international community, to the media, the decision makers and the public opinion about the sufferings of millions of civilians fleeing war in Syria.
As the conflict escalated, and the humanitarian disaster with it, creating the biggest refugee crisis in our generation, our appeals for wider media attention, with some notable exceptions, fell on deaf ears with an apparent lack of interest on the part of the vast majority of television and radio companies and major newspapers.
It was arguably only with the tragic death of Aylan Kurdi and the publication of pictures of his body on a beach in Turkey that Western public opinion and global media finally woke up.
Immediately, media lenses focused sharply on the humanitarian crisis in the Mediterranean and both politicians and ordinary people had to respond.
But this incident only raised another question. What about the many other humanitarian crises beyond the media’s radar? In war-torn South Sudan, for example. This country is rarely in the limelight. In 2011, it gained independence from Sudan ending a generation of war.
Two years later, the civil war broke out resulting in massive forced displacement and today the country is one of the world’s impoverished places. Every two minutes another South Sudanese child becomes severely malnourished. But these stories are seldom told.
A South Sudanese colleague told me it was strange to see how things can change from one day to the other only because of international media attention.
“In Europe, it was that boy on the beach. Maybe we need a picture of a boy like that in South Sudan,” she said while preparing to go on a new mission to one of the world’s hardest-to-reach areas where dropping food from World Food Programme airplanes is the only way to provide hungry people with something to eat.
Too often not even stories about children dying of starvation are enough to make headlines on the nine o’clock news. Humanitarian disasters that deserve our attention often go uncovered because there is no photographer or journalist on the ground to tell the story.
Only a couple of conflicts receive our attention at any given time, while most dramas get none at all. Why is that?
What about the many other humanitarian crises beyond the media’s radar? every two minutes another South Sudanese child becomes severely malnourished.
But these stories are seldom told.
The reasons are complex. It is not just a lack of humanity on the news agenda or a matter of luck or a matter of caring more about some people at the expense of others.
We need a broader lens to see what really is going on.
In the Norwegian Refugee Council we annually publish a list of the world’s 10 most neglected displacement crises. This year the Rohingyas have topped the list. This minority Muslim community under pressure in Myanmar is also found in neighbouring Bangladesh where hundreds of thousands have sought protection.
One criterion to be on the neglected crises list is a lack of media attention. Other factors include lack of funding, little humanitarian presence and difficult access to the victims of the conflict. Often, there is a strong correlation between the different factors: access problems can lead to lack of media attention, which again can lead to lack of donor concern, which again leads to even bigger access issues. This completes a vicious circle that is not easily broken.
But there is an important truth in all of this – decision makers pay attention to the media, and independent journalists reporting with care, humanity and professionalism have enormous power to tell stories that create a new path.
But, as this report reveals, mainstream media is currently under pressure with news companies struggling to adapt to a new reality with plummeting revenues and competition from new media. Often media will simply say they cannot afford to cover these stories.
But this should not be an excuse for adopting a herd mentality – where media follow each other to cover a small cluster of the most obvious stories. Media around the world are now reporting on the disastrous humanitarian consequences of the civil war in Syria and the exodus to Europe and they are going beyond the numbers story which has dominated news coverage so far.
Yet as the poignant human tragedies from Syria takes centre stage, where is the coverage of the second largest humanitarian crisis and war on our watch: in Yemen?
Here, around 21 million people are in urgent need of emergency relief. They suffer from external and internal bombardment, blockade and totally inadequate assistance and protection.
Also the journalists themselves need to be protected to be able to report on the atrocities. For journalists reporting from conflict and war 2015 is another deadly year. Like humanitarian workers, journalists are not only at risk of becoming so-called collateral damage during military operations, they are also increasingly targeted.
It is therefore essential that the international community focus on the protection of journalists in armed conflicts to allow for less casualties in the imminent future.
In Europe we talk about a sharing of responsibility in terms of coping with the growing influx of migration. Maybe it is time to talk about a media “burden sharing” where media institutions, rather than chasing the same stories, divide the coverage of the human suffering so that children in grave risk in South Sudan or Gaza do not continue to stay in life-threatening situations without the world knowing.
This EJN report Moving Stories is a welcome step to allow journalists get an overview of the problem areas as well as promoting best practices when it comes to reporting on the wider migration story.
Without media attention, humanitarian crises, with their horrifying impacts, will continue to be learned by the outside world way too late.
Jan Egeland is the Secretary-general of the Norwegian Refugee Council
Main image: “Eastern Chad – Universal Children’s Day” by Frederic NOY for UNHCR licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0