by Jean-Paul Marthoz
The major aid organisations have developed powerful information arms, says Jean-Paul Marthoz, yet they also have their own political agendas. What sort of relationship should there be between NGOs and journalists?Should we define the changed new relationship between the media and NGOs? It’s not so much a question about the NGOs' communication policies as about their approach to information. For several years now a number of NGOs have become “information producers” almost on a par with the international press, and at times with greater means of investigation and distribution.
Who, for example, revealed the use of torture in American prisons in Afghanistan in 2003? Human Rights Watch. Who has been tracking down the multinationals’ pillaging of resources in Africa? Global Witness.
Although there are more and more media outlets, there is less and less old-style journalism. There are greater technological tools available for investigation and reporting, but fewer major investigations and less real reporting in the mass media.
The retreat of journalism as we knew it, combined with the revolution in satellite communications and online media, has seen both the public at large and the NGOs and think tanks invading the terrain of journalism by becoming purveyors of information and interpretation.
It’s not that recent a phenomenon. Over the past 20 years or so, when humanitarian aid was becoming so newsworthy, NGOs became information agents by bringing so many journalists to the frontline during humanitarian crises. These NGOs acquired greater credibility than most governments. And they did not merely supply information because they also determined its importance. To some extent the crises that would be talked about and those that would quickly be forgotten were selected by information-savvy NGOs in a process akin to medical triage.
The NGOs also supplied alternative “narratives” through the interpretations they offered of international events. When hundreds of millions of Hutus fled to Zaire in 1994, a number of humanitarian NGOs and UN organisations chose to describe this stampede in humanitarian terms, “forgetting” the fact that thousands of those refugees had themselves committed atrocities in the genocide.
This whole development has created a new set of risks. Among these, the grey area that now connects humanitarian and military affairs can easily lead to confusion and even collusion, with serious consequences for information.
In the world of francophone journalism the catch-phrase is “news paras”; meaning journalists who are parachuted in to cover a crisis without knowing much about the background to the events they are covering. And then, by contrast, there are the “para-journalists” who are not reporters as such but are investigators and researchers who appear to be journalists when not really part of the profession.
Organisations like Human Rights Watch, Human Rights First and Global Witness have become “news wholesalers”; they are on the ground like special correspondents and supplying their information to journalists. At the height of the second Intifada for instance, a researcher for Human Rights Watch was relaying information live from the embattled Palestinian refugee camp at Jenin.
Modern information technology is giving NGOs and other research organisations much more power to both obtain information and broadcast it. This has given them a new kind of media independence – every day thousands of people now visit the Human Rights Watch website just as if it were a specialised press agency.
So should we view these NGOs in much the same way as we see the press? Not if we look at their aims; for NGOs, information is a tool for influencing and even changing government or inter-governmental policies. Yet the way the NGOs process information clearly places them in much the same “sphere” as journalism. These organisations’ credibility depends on the quality of the information and opinions they disseminate. And their claim to impartiality also brings the NGOs close to the world of journalism. Even if they have a stated aim and are often “subjective”, they can only achieve their goals through demonstrating news impartiality. This means keeping a cool head when faced with the welter of facts submitted by various regimes or groups and subjecting them to the same evaluation criteria.
NGOs also share journalism’s acute awareness of the importance of accurate description and terminology. Calling a situation a massacre or a genocide has clear-cut consequences. Such an assessment can determine the international community’s reaction, define the reputations of those involved in a conflict and even settle the fate of many victims.
What all this means is that it’s essential for NGOs to put in place information collection, processing, interpretation and broadcasting systems that enable them to be reliable sources in the information chain. Their closeness to journalism doesn’t mean that NGOs are neutral, as they have their own priorities, calculations and reflexes. But these constraints do not in any way diminish their importance or legitimacy in the global newsgathering and dissemination process.
But this means that the NGOs and others must respect the fundamental principles of journalism by providing in-depth information without exaggeration or manipulation. Wherever possible they must contribute to improving journalism by making up for what it misses or ignores, by offering details from their own investigations which too often may have been overlooked by overly-rapid media scrutiny. Some NGOs do indeed see themselves as structurally part of journalism. Kimberly Abbott, a communications officer in the U.S. for the International Crisis Group (ICG) wrote not long ago in favour of a voluntary partnership policy between NGOs and journalists to improve international journalism. Her idea is that NGOs could offer their experience, logistics and knowledge to journalists, while for NGOs the media offers a way to reach a much larger audience for subjects so often ignored by the press.
Partnerships of this sort could lead to better reporting, but they also carry the risk of a conflict of interests. Quite aside from any experiments like these, journalism must also try to win back its lost ground and rediscover its complete independence and its will to cover international news. Whether it will do so depends not only on major decisions by media organisations but also on the implementation of new economic models for collecting and processing information. Leonard Downie, a former Editor of the Washington Post, and Michael Schudson of Columbia University have pointed out that the future of journalism involves finding new ways to financially support its activities. They envisage a number of different finance models, but it’s a topic on which debate will clearly rage for some time to come.
Technology and financial pressures are bringing about a large redeployment of the media, and that means the legitimacy of the press is in question. The role and the credibility of public information in the 21st century is increasingly at stake, and no doubt the media could make a difference if it were to take on the role of information steward and referee. So journalists should not scorn the new information players because they could make a positive contribution. But giving too much room to non-journalists, both as individuals and groups, would be a mistake. If the press were to do so it would be digging its own grave, and democracy would be the loser. Democratic societies need a free press that operates without fear or favour on its own conditions and according to its own rules. Journalism is, more than ever, the future of journalism.
Source - Europe's World
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