Professor of Journalism Practice and co Director of the UTS Centre for Media Transition
Prof. Monica Attard OAM
Co-Director, UTS Centre for Media Transition, Professor of Journalism Practice | Australia
Short Bio:
Prof. Monica Attard is Professor of Journalism Practice and Co-Director of the UTS Centre for Media Transition, a cross disciplinary centre researching the impact of digital change on journalism and media more broadly. Prior to this, Prof. Attard was Head of Journalism at UTS, Sydney. Her career in journalism spans 45 years across both broadcast and digital media. Prof. Attard was awarded the Order of Australia for services to journalism and is the winner of 5 Walkley Awards for excellence in journalism, including gold. At the ABC, Prof. Monica Attard anchored PM and Sunday Profile on ABC Radio, and hosted Media Watch on ABC TV. She was the ABC’s Russia correspondent charting the collapse of Soviet communism and the rise of capitalism, covering 8 civil wars across the old Soviet Union.
Event: SDGs Conference 2024 | Date: Sept 25, 2024 |
SPEECH
I am going to talk about the difficulties in covering humanitarian crises, and why good information and trustworthy news coverage of international affairs is important but elusive. I will also refer to some of the structural issues that prevent journalism from being able to be as impactful in delivering good information as most people believe it should be. I am now an academic, but I am also a former foreign correspondent, who covered 8 civil wars and the collapse of both Soviet communism and the Soviet Union. All of that created mini-humanitarian crises. Working journalists are the first to acknowledge the critical role they play in bringing attention to humanitarian crises – whether the result of war, natural disaster, or political abuse. At the onset of a humanitarian crisis, journalists are often the first to arrive and the last to leave. Their role is to bear witness, to question narratives and to ensure that the stories of those affected are heard.
When chaos strikes, journalists break through the noise and bring the reality of the chaos into living rooms, boardrooms, and parliaments around the world. They turn distant tragedies into urgent matters of concern. Journalists will also acknowledge that they are not just passive observers —they have emotions and personal histories. They have views about what they are seeing, they are products of the societies and political systems in which they grew up, all of which the ethics of their professions demand they somehow leave at the door. Some do. Some don’t.
But as a result of the Ethical Codes and Editorial Policies that govern their work, even when they are in far-flung places in the midst of a crisis, they are not meant to be active participants in shaping the course of the humanitarian crisis they are covering. Journalists will also acknowledge the inherent limitations on the impact journalism can have beyond alerting the world to the scale of a humanitarian disaster when events have or are spiraling out of control. One significant limitation is the transient nature of news coverage. Journalism is often driven by the demand for fresh, breaking stories which means attention is usually fleeting. A humanitarian crisis might dominate headlines for a few days, perhaps even weeks, but eventually, the circus moves on to the next big story, and often before the crisis is resolved.
The 2014 Ebola outbreak in West Africa received intense media coverage at its peak, but as soon as the immediate threat subsided, attention fell away, even though the affected countries continued to struggle with the long-term consequences of the epidemic. Journalism did not help, let alone stop the crisis.
Another news cycle impact is story choice – how editors and journalists choose what to cover which, oddly, seems to be entirely uncontroversial for most journalists. There are currently 30 major and minor violent disputes occurring around the world, according to the Council of Foreign Relations Conflict Tracker – why are some covered and others not? Why are we focused on say Gaza or Ukraine when in the Democratic Republic of Congo, conflict has killed some 6 million people? Why not Yemen where 21.6 million need aid, including 11 million children, or Burundi where the death toll from conflict stands at 300,000? What about Sudan?
The way editorial decisions are made is driven by funding limitations, geopolitical considerations, and ultimately, bias, which identifies some people as more valuable and deserving of international outrage and concern than others. Sometimes all three work together, to create a complete picture of partiality, which surely presents a limitation on how journalism can assist in a crisis.
Recently, the coverage of the Russia/Ukraine war is a case study in reporting influenced by political interest, dovetailing with a funding crisis that has seen a diminishing number of foreign correspondents.
- In Australia, the ABC has, over two decades, experienced funding cuts that have disproportionately impacted foreign correspondence.
- As a result, a large Moscow bureau was closed, leaving reporters hubbed in London to fly in and fly out when needed.
- That left Australia with no one in Russia to closely observe years of escalating rhetoric of aggression emanating from the Kremlin towards the United States, particularly about Moscow’s limited role in creating a new security architecture for Europe, including in countries where Moscow was, before the 1991 collapse of the USSR, the dominant power of influence.
- The information field was left open to influence by political and geopolitical narratives.
- By ignoring the factors contributing to the illegal invasion of Ukraine, it gave permission for journalism to serve geopolitical interests rather than to report in context and therefore in the public interest.
This is not a mere assertion: research we are currently undertaking at the Centre for Media Transition indicates that Western news media organizations have had a strong propensity to report Western frames of reference for the current Russia/Ukraine war, leaving Russian frames (excluding propaganda) to be pilloried as non-existent or ridiculous. The nature of the conflict was couched in terms of “a return to the USSR” desired by a ‘deranged and authoritarian’ leader. That allowed knowledgeable voices, whose eyes were firmly focused on the region, to be ignored – and indeed, condemned. None of this is to excuse the appalling breach of international law by Russia in its invasion of its neighbor. I am talking only about how it is reported and what impact that has.
There is also an issue of accessing crisis zones.
- Journalists are often barred from entering them or face severe restrictions on their movement and reporting in conflict areas.
- This can lead to a reliance on second-hand information, which can be incomplete or worse, biased. This was evident in the early stages of the Syrian civil war for example, when journalists had limited access to conflict zones. As a result, much of the reporting relied on information provided by activist groups, which, though valuable, did not always present a complete and contextualized picture of the situation.
We are seeing the same situation play out in Gaza where access to the territory has been denied, though there, information on the conflict between Hamas and Israel has come largely from the two combatants – and led to a crisis within journalism over which side is to be “more” believed and whether the journalistic norm of impartiality is up to the task of determining the truth. The argument goes – that journalists should be allowed to surmise that extraordinary numbers of deaths reveal a truth that the processes of impartial reporting cannot. When the weight of evidence is clear, is it wrong to conceal the truth? Clearly, yes it would be wrong.
Was the balance missing in the first weeks of coverage? Our research shows Israeli vs Gazan frames in that period used in journalism from Guardian Australia, ABC (Australia), 9News, and News Corp’s The Australian. 71% of journalism pieces reflected Israeli frames and 29.1% reflected Palestinian frames. That balance of reporting changed over time.
But the wave of pro-Israel reporting in the immediate aftermath of the attack led younger journalists, in the main, to claim that striving for impartiality is false equivalence – when for them, there is only one story that needs to be platformed in order not to dehumanize the Palestinians and to avoid ‘biased’ reporting.
In Australia, a petition was signed to demand that when reporting the conflict, reporters must reference the 1948 nakbhaas the beginning point of the conflict, but not necessarily October 7th, 2023. They demanded – before the ICJ rulings – that they be permitted to declare genocide. Implicit in this was that the inter-generational trauma of the Jews be relegated to history because it is being used to excuse the horrific death and destruction caused by Israel. I am not convinced that this formula delivers either truth or balance.
Even when journalists can access crisis zones, there are safety concerns. Humanitarian crises and conflict zones are inherently dangerous, which limits the scope of reporting. In Gaza, more than 100 Palestinian journalists have been killed covering the latest outbreak of conflict. There is also audience fatigue. The public’s capacity to absorb stories of suffering and injustice is limited. When faced with a constant barrage of awful news, people become desensitized or overwhelmed. They tune out. This “compassion fatigue,” can limit the impact of even the most powerful journalism, leaving journalists struggling to maintain public interest, particularly in protracted crises where the situation on the ground changes slowly, if at all.
While journalism can bring attention to humanitarian crises and human rights abuses, it is not equipped to solve these problems.
- Journalists can report on atrocities, expose abuse, question narratives, and raise awareness—but they cannot intervene.
- Bearing witness doesn’t make journalists ‘actors’.
- Their reporting has been used to bring perpetrators to justice as they did during the conflict in Darfur and in Myanmar.
- But activism should be and usually is uncomfortable for journalists.
In the fog of war or humanitarian crisis, the truth can be obscured – when the truth is the one value add that journalists can offer. Despite these challenges, journalists continue to do this work.
- It has always been the case that people entering journalism do so because they want to shine a light in dark corners, and right wrongs.
- Correct the record.
- Platform the voices of the oppressed, of victims of violence and conflict, of people who have no recourse to the public square other than through the intermediaries of journalism.
Whereas they will be quick to add that they do all of this within an ethical framework and editorial policies that emphasize the need for objectivity, and telling contextualized stories, underpinned by an overriding imperative to “do no harm”.