Journalism and charities, the other side

duckrabbit has been having a debate over the last couple of days about the detrimental nature of some charities communications.  A long time ago we labeled it the ‘Africa is f**ked, now give us your money’ approach.  Actually that kind of shallow approach is increasingly rare these days.

What we failed to point out is that the vast majority of humanitarian stories that you both read in newspapers and see on the TV have been facilitated by charities.   When it comes to humanitarian crisis’s many journalists are lost at sea and are utterly dependent on press officers in organizations like MSF, World Food Programme,  The Red Cross and Save The Children, who get us in and out, quickly, safely and with powerful stories. Often they provide transport, food, shelter, translators, briefings and case studies. Truth be told some of them would probably make a better job of the stories. No wonder they get pissed off when their organization gets cut out of the report, or we dumb it down into meaninglessness!

One of the reasons that you’re unlikely to hear duckrabbit’s voice in an any of our work is we believe passionately that people should be able to tell their own stories and our best role is to help them to do that, either through training or production.  We’re happy to admit that most of the time our viewpoint is shallow, but if we listen carefully enough we might be able to represent meaningfully the people whose stories need to be heard.

Journalists pick up the awards but we are no heroes. Mainly we are scavengers picking across the pieces of people’s lives less fortunate then ourselves. Not heartless but often necessarily cold in our approach.

The best press officers are full of the passionate intensity and conviction that many journalists lack. That said the best journalists have a healthy amount of skepticism about the information they are fed. Many have come a cropper with dodgy statistics intended to exasperate the seriousness of a situation. Its an ongoing problem.

Every now and again, working together, we can have a profound effect. Here is perhaps the most famous example:

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