Media and Disasters: How News Coverage Influence Relief Aid

A sidebar in the 1996 World Disasters Report pointed out media’s role in galvanizing support from the international donor community whenever disaster strikes. It narrated how television reporters and news cameramen captured images of despair and devastation in such areas as Sudan, northern Iraq and Bosnia in the 90s and how these powerful images catalyzed international relief efforts. On the eastern Zaire context, the sidebar said that “[t]he international community’s response to the influx was exceptional, involving a large airlift, the arrival of up to 100 NGOs and deployment of military units. Before the influx, aid agencies found it hard to find funds to help people waiting across the border in northwest Rwanda or preparedness work in Goma itself.”

The case illustrated how the media are largely driven by events that revolve around intense human suffering and large-scale devastation such as wars and conflict, often deflecting attention from other human suffering that is not as “media attractive”. But not all disasters are endowed with intense drama so beloved of journalists in search of captivating news. People’s lives and properties everywhere are put at risk by natural and man-made disasters but receive scant media attention and are therefore less likely to get relief aid and support.

The media have been assiduously covering the military campaign against the Abu Sayyaf bandit group and efforts to rescue its hostages in the jungles of Basilan in Mindanao. Largely ignored was the continuing displacement of the civilian population simply because the movement of people was not “a flood of humanity” but was rather a trickle of families and clans into other villages. In Mindanao, groups of journalists wrote with context by enlarging the frame of coverage and getting people’s voices into their stories. They were experimenting with the concept of public journalism as a way of helping communities and citizens solve their own problems, in this instance, how to cope with continuing displacement. The Center for Community Journalism and Development, a non-profit organization working for social change through the media, spearheads the public journalism movement in the Philippines.

It serves humanitarian aid agencies well to understand the inner workings of media and their appetite for the extraordinary and sensational. The challenge to relief agencies is not how much aid should be poured into an area but where it will have an impact on people’s lives. Journalists frame their coverage of unfolding events as a dramatization of people’s lives gone awry; it is to the benefit of aid agencies to enlarge that frame so as to determine where their efforts and resources will be most effectively put to use.

Mr Red Batario is a freelance journalist based in Manila. He is also the Executive Director of the Center for Community Journalism and Development, a facility for journalists working for social change with citizens, communities and institutions. He may be contacted at redbatario@pacific.net.ph