Director’s Blog

Essays

This is an edited version of an essay by Polis Summer School student Victoria Yates.

The idea of globalization is not new, despite many of the modern connotations attached to the term. The creation of the printing press created much the same revolution in communication, connecting people for the first time in a wide manner beyond traditional dialogical contact. (more…)

By Chrysostomos Agapitos (Polis Summer School student, 2010)

Some years ago, I came up with this naïve idea for a short story. The plot revolved around a group of people being locked up in a room whose walls consist of millions of distorting lenses. I never actually wrote that story down. But, thinking it over through the years, I kept asking the same question over and over again: Could our world be similar to this?

Over the years the globe has become smaller, forcing people like Marshal McLuhan admit that we are all living in a “global village”[1]. The new techniques that have emerged to serve the needs of market economy have affected our perception of two significant dimensions: Time and space compression, is, according to David Harvey, one of the major traits of this era[2].

Telecommunications and media played a major part in this outcome. In their attempt to facilitate capitalistic endeavors, it was media technologies that promoted the transition towards the overcoming of spatial barriers in the first place[3]. As history has shown, changes in technology might result in outcomes  no one could ever have predicted beforehand. (more…)

I asked the Polis Summer School students to finish their 12 day course by giving me a code for the road. Tell me, I said, what should be the guiding principles for journalism about people who are suffering or are from other countries. Here are the ideas from different groups of students  for some ethical guidelines. For what it’s worth, my suggestion was that ‘there must always be a local narrator of any story’. (more…)

“My son was nearly nineteen years old,” Mohammed said. “He wanted to be a doctor. There’s a photograph of him”-he waved his hand vaguely-“somewhere, wearing a stethoscope.” He made no move to get it, as though already discouraged by the effort. His wife begun to cry again.

“Mysterious are the ways of God,” he said. There had been no warning that his son would join the militants. “He willed it. He did it. That is all. He was a good, silent, obedient boy. He was my son, but, more than that, he was my friend. He was here, dawn to dusk, every day, day and night.”

(The New Yorker, Letter from Kashmir: Between the Mountains, March 11 2002)

This sort of story is sadly not a novel one in journalistic discourse. It is the sort of vivid and humanising picture that the best journalists strive to create. Yet, in all its familiarity, if we are honest with ourselves it can be hard to truly recognise that this prose was written about someone. Nor do most genuinely connect with the idea that it was written by a reporter who sat looking into the eyes of grieving parents in a way none of the consumers ever do. (more…)

The new CEO of Save The Children UK , Justin Forsyth has tweeted this appeal:

400,000 children face starvation in #Niger over the summer. Any ideas v welcome on how to get this hidden emergency some attention?

This was the subject for today’s session of the Polis Summer School,  looking at Representations of Suffering.

First, a lecture on how journalism portrays poverty, injustice and deprivation as well as emergencies such as the haiti Earthquake.

Then we had a very good guest speaker, Elizabeth Ford, from the Guardian Katine project who explained how they tried to bring complex African development issues to life through their multi-media platform.

Then I got the students to try to answer Justin’s question. They role-played as tabloid hacks, serious online journalists and NGO communications officers. (more…)

The Haitian earthquake was a terrifying TV tableau of human misery, pain, and fear. Emotions of hope, despair and disbelief swept around the island with the seismic shocks. So its hardly surprising that witnesses  to the aftermath also felt swamped by human feelings. How can journalists show that emotion without succumbing to it? How involved should a journalist get in helping those she watches?

There is a real set of dilemmas here that say a lot about journalism today and its struggle to report on humanitarian crises. But it goes deeper than that to touch upon the core problem of how journalists manage what I call the Cycle of Sensitivity. As journalists we witness hugely emotional events. We then package them using professional skills that exclude emotions from the production process: we have to get the job done. But then we re-introduce the emotions into the report because we have to convey to the public the full humanity of the story. It’s how we do it that decides the ethical value of the journalism. (more…)

An AP photographer snaps other photographers (AP)

It now appears that the Haiti Earthquake was a disaster on the scale of the 2004 Asian Tsunami in terms of loss of life. This is less important, of course, but it was/is also a media event on the same scale. But what questions does it raise about how journalism deals with humanitarian crises?  What’s changed in six years?

We are just starting to digest the lessons from Haiti, so I can only raise some questions. At Polis and elsewhere, researchers are sifting through the data and discussing the siginificance, but here are some tentative thoughts. I’d welcome any information on others who are looking at these issues and your thoughts on how we should be researching them.

1. Attention Surplus? (more…)

A view of the world

Travelling around New York City at the weekend with my two teenage boys was a reminder of just how globalised our culture has become with shops, music and even art looking distinctly familiar to my young Londoners.

An all-day seminar today on world media seemed to suggest that global journalism has some trans-national trends, too. But as ever, look closer and the cracks appear. (more…)

Haiti pic from @firesideint

Across the world editors in TV studios and newspaper offices are looking for something else to lead on apart from Haiti. I know, I’ve been there. It’s the biggest story in the world, but it’s been around for a few days and it is starting to fit into the pattern of all disaster stories. If we want the viewers/reader/listener to pay attention we’re going to have to headline something without the words ‘Haiti’ ‘Aid’ or ‘Death’.

So the big US TV networks will be the first to leave, while everyone else will scale down their presence and perhaps rely on the agencies. The story will slip down the running order or the page. This is how news works and it’s not wrong. (more…)

Here are my notes from a session of a symposium hosted by the Red Cross on how humanitarian crises are mediated by journalism. This session is called Communicating With Disaster Affected Communities. [Previous session is reported here]

Jon Bugge Save The Children

We talk about giving people a voice but it can be a bit scary for an NGO to do that. New Media is a wonderful tool but we should also think about the simple steps to giving people more control over their communications. (more…)