Journal of Humanitarian Medicine - vol. IV - n. 3 - July/September 2004

The critical news stories you never read

Shashi Tharoor

Under-Secretary-General for Communications and Public Information, United Nations, New York, USA

While in Addis Ababa for the African Union summit meeting, UN Secretary General Kofi Annan had dozens of conversations and meetings with the region’s leaders. He observed a strange thing: “Iraq didn’t come up, terrorism didn’t come up, weapons of mass destruction didn’t come up. There were subjects on people’s minds other than the ones dominating the media’s attention.
“Iraq,” Annan noted ruefully, “has sucked out all the oxygen and distorted the international agenda”. This has been true, of course, for some time - at least since January 2003, when Annan held a press conference to cover 16 different issues on his global agenda and every question addressed to him was about Iraq.
In response to the gap between what we at the United Nations thought the world should care about and what the media covering our work preferred to focus on, my colleagues and I came up with a list last May of the top 10 stories we felt were not getting enough media attention.
The objective was not to point a finger at the reporters. We understood the pressures that drove the world’s news agenda, and we didn’t deny that Iraq was an important story.
We felt, however, that there were other important stories that were falling off the radar screen because the media didn’t have the space or time for them. And what the world had not heard about, it would not be willing to do anything about. So we wanted to say to our friends in the press: “Would you please consider reporting these stories too?”
My team consulted every UN department and agency to find out what they thought the world needed to know more about. A list of over 60 issues emerged, which we whittled down to a more media-friendly 10.
For a while the crisis in Darfur led the list, but as our deadline approached the media woke up to the sufferings of the people there. Other tragedies bubbled up to the top, but we were alert to the risk of crisis-fatigue. So we also tried to choose human interest stories and good-news stories, offbeat stories, and early-warning stories.
The result was a mix of stories no one could plausibly claim were yawn-inducing: the brutal lives of child soldiers in northwestern Uganda, where kids are killers (often of other kids); the tragedy of the AIDS orphans of southern Africa, where children are being brought up by grandparents, and sometimes by other children, because their parents’ generation has been wiped out by AIDS; the simmering cauldron of the Central African Republic, where an explosive combination of rich resources, acute poverty (95 per cent of the people live on less than $2 a day), political tension, population displacement, and widespread insecurity cries out for outside help.
We knew the old cliché must be stood on its head: all too often, good news is no news. So we came up with positive stories that had been neglected: the steady building of a viable peace in Tajikistan on the ruins of a long civil war; the war that never happened as Nigeria and Cameroon peacefully worked out their differences over the resource-rich Bakassi Peninsula; the role of women in Rwanda - as 49 per cent of the Parliament - in leading their society away from the ashes of genocide.
There were more (for the full list, see www.un.org/ events/tenstories). But why go on? None of the top-flight international journalists who turned up at my press conference to launch the list actually wrote about our list. I got a lot of air-time on the U.S. public broadcasting system and one interview on CNN International (not domestic), and a lot of silence. We are persisting, though: in recent weeks, newspapers as far afield as Egypt and Hong Kong have carried the list.
We know we are making the smallest of dents in the public consciousness, but we could not forgive ourselves if we didn’t try.
Four decades ago the newsman Edward Behr came across a TV cameraman in a camp of violated Belgian nuns in the Congo calling out, “anybody here been raped and speak English?”
It’s never enough to have suffered; you must be able to convey your suffering in the language the media wants to hear. That’s where we at the UN will try to help - to give a voice to those who remain voiceless in the world media. Next year, on World Press Freedom Day 2005, we will launch another Top 10 list. Maybe this paper, at least, will cover it.