Famine Media: The Politics of Representation, A Roundtable Discussion

On the night of Wednesday, November 30th in the SIS Founders Room, the SIS Global Environmental Politics Program, Eco-Sense, and the Student Organization for African Studies sponsored a roundtable discussion about famine in Africa and how it has been portrayed in the media. Panelists included Halima Barqadle (American Refugee Committee volunteer nurse), Christopher Hillbruner (FEWS NET), Professor Caty Borum Chattoo (American University School of Communication), and Professor Rebecca DeWinter-Schmitt (American University School of International Studies). Only half of the seats were occupied, and prior to starting, there was a hush over the audience. One of the organizers of the event stood to introduce the speakers and provide a brief overview as to the objectives of the roundtable discussion. The idea for the discussion was generated by students who wanted to show solidarity with the crisis in East Africa, moving beyond charity and pity typically associated with the famine. Famine Media was only one of the first in a series on famine that will continue for the rest of the semester and into next year. The catalyst for focusing specifically on how media represented famine was the fact that people who paid attention to the news heard about the crisis and then it abruptly disappeared. The introductory speaker emphasized the idea that the talks were aimed toward being an informative dialogue between the audience and the speakers.

To kick off the discussion, organizers showed a slideshow to define terms that would be used throughout the dialogue. The media was broken down into four different types: self-generated (blogs, documentaries, videos), digital (social media, blogs), corporate (NY Times, Washington Post, profits from advertisements), independent (PBS, NPR, funded by subscriptions and foundations). Each of these types had the potential to overlap with another form of media. When speaking about digital media, the slideshow included this photograph by Reuters journalist Barry Malone, whose blog can be found here: http://blogs.reuters.com/photographers-blog/2011/07/29/me-and-the-man-with-the-ipad/. It brings up the point of the guilt that journalists often feel when reporting on human suffering such as famine. To some, it feels as if they are stealing dignity from the starving men, women, and children who are photographed. In the corporate media realm, Dr. Sanjay Gupta of CNN experienced the theft of dignity from subjects as well. While reporting on famine, the subjects of video footage would often try to hide their faces in hospitals, not wanting to show their emaciated bodies or submit their starving babies to the cameras.

The first panelist, Halima Barquadle, recently volunteered as a nurse in a Mogadishu hospital for the American Refugee Committee. In Somalia, millions are already suffering from famine and millions more are at risk. On a daily basis, Ms. Barquadle witnessed problems with infrastructure, education, and specifically women dealing with violence. The famine mostly affects women and children and in hospitals, ailments such as measles, malaria, diarrhea, and malnutrition are common. Outside of the hospital Ms. Barquadle volunteered at, there would often be a line of one hundred or more people in front of the door. Patients would travel from many miles away and due to limited resources, doctors, and time, the hospital would have to turn away some patients that did not have life-threatening issues. The hospital had 300 permanent beds and would usually treat 100 outpatients every day. When treating patients, there was a lack of screening. Only height and weight would usually be recorded before assessing the patient’s situation. There were also major issues concerning medication -- often vital prescriptions would be missing from the hospital’s pharmacy so that patients would be forced to pay more expensive fees for medications if they chose to make such a purchase. There was a heavy strain on doctors as well, for the education system in Somalia collapsed along with the government twenty years ago. Nurses were commonly using twenty-year old methods of treatment for their patients and practices based upon superstition would also sometimes interfere with the treatment of a patient.

Ms. Barquadle noted that education is key and that communication throughout different parts of the hospitals in Somalia needed to be improved. Outdated medical practices, such as not using sterile gloves or proper masks, needed to be revised. Despite strenuous and sometimes frustrating times at the work, however, she said that she still had hope. She said that it boosted her spirits to see healthy children playing along the beach and that in the media, such positive images are often outweighed by images of malnourished, starving children.

Christopher Hillbruner, the next panelist, worked with FEWS NET to help create projections of food security in areas such as Latin America, sub-Saharan Africa, and central Asia. Overall, he said, the media did a bad job of covering the famine. American media was slow on the uptake and European media outlets were only slightly faster. There were predictions about the famine, but the “alarm bells” weren’t loud enough for the media to hear in time. Mr. Hillbruner also mentioned that there was a big disparity between how different crises are covered in different areas of Africa. Since Niger had a better NGO network, there were more advocates pushing for media coverage in that country whereas in southern Somalia, no such network existed after NGOs were pushed out of the country.

Mr. Hillbruner mentioned that with better technology comes speed and the ability of journalist to reach the masses more quickly. Sometimes, journalists are so speedy that they don’t fully understand or fact-check their reports, contributing to misinformation about famine. “There’s a tendency for people in the media to believe everything they’re told by humanitarians,” Mr. Hillbruner said, emphasizing the need for better fact-checking by journalists.

He also introduced one of the main ideas in the panel: compassion fatigue on the part of media-consumers from hearing about African famines and suffering. In the case of famine, there exists the idea that whatever famine is currently occurring has to be “the worst famine ever” in order to gain attention from the media. After the famine in Somalia was officially declared as such, it took two weeks for it to make the front page of the NY Times. It only made the front page the day after the debt crisis was resolved. When covering famine, the media often is unable to distinguish what is “the worst” and what is only “bad.” In this respect, the media needs to be careful in terms of what adjectives they use in their reporting, Mr. Hillbruner cautioned. Political agendas also have been known to interfere with reporting, which further complicates the question of whether or not a high caliber of factual information is being reported.

The third speaker, Professor Caty Borum Chattoo from American University’s School of Communication focused on the differences between the various types of media. The aid organization Oxfam is one of the few organizations that has an in-house media production team. They have a better ability to provide access to reporters and can overcome problems such as funding that many sources of independent media often have to deal with.

Professor Chattoo produced a show about resilience during famine, instead of apathy, in partnership with Oxfam. She said that it’s not a story that’s typically shown. Increasingly in the media, where the business model is changing, expensive investigative, health, or science reporters are the first ones to be laid off, meaning that coverage of relevant issues by highly qualified individuals has diminished. The famine narrative, Chattoo stated, is difficult to endure in mainstream media. Famine eventually increases to the point that it levels off and stays at the same high rate, and “sameness” does not garner much media attention for long. In the past, news wasn’t under the constant pressure of trying to make money. It simply wasn’t expected to make a profit. There was the idea, Chattoo said, to “give people what they need to know not what they want to know, and stick to that.” 60 Minutes was the first news source to actually make a profit, revolutionizing how news was produced after the late 1970’s. Today, media coverage is expected to have nail-biting stories that draw in high-paying advertisers. In the case of famine coverage, few advertisers want to support outlets that continue reporting on a subject that doesn’t always have the ability to entertain or enrapture audiences.

The final speaker at the roundtable, Rebecca DeWinter-Schmitt, a professor within American University’s School of International Service, concluded the discussion before the panel answered questions from the audience. She mentioned the idea of “framing” and how every media story can influence how we think about the world in addition to how a media story can have political influence. The media, humanitarian groups, governments, and political enterprises all rely upon stereotypes in order to frame issues, including famine. DeWinter-Schmitt said that dealing with stereotypes makes sense -- it takes a phenomenon and allows people to see it as an example of something else. It’s how the brain naturally classifies information, she said. In famines, people rely upon easily understood stereotypes such as the simple descriptions of victims, heroes, and villains. Victims are the “brown, starving masses,” heroes are the aid workers and the doctors, and the villains are corrupt government officials and rebels, as she put it. Such metaphors legitimize Western thought and it contributes to the “infantization” of victims. Compassion fatigue sets in quickly in such simplified explanations. DeWinter-Schmitt also noted how the entertainment industry is contributing to the idea of such fatigue. In Blood Diamond, the main character, played by DeCaprio, has a saying of “TIA,” meaning “this Is Africa, for when things go wrong in the film.

Overall, the panelists agreed that depictions of famine in the media definitely influence response and solutions to the problem. The idea of looking into indigenous, local solutions was suggested as having the potential of being very successful. Increasingly, however, social media such as Twitter and Facebook are continuing to redefine how famine is portrayed in the media.