"The crucial interaction between humanitarian agencies and the media has been researched in the past but today it continues to evolve and change—and not for the better. This article, drawing on accounts from communications managers working inside the world's major aid agencies (Red Cross, Oxfam, S...ave the Children, World Vision, CARE and Médecins sans Frontières), examines how communication strategies designed to raise awareness, funds and support have assimilated to today's pervasive “media logic”. In the increasingly crowded and competitive field of humanitarian agencies, non-governmental organizations (NGOs) now seek to “brand” themselves in the media; they purposefully use celebrities and produce regionalized and personalized “media packages” to court media attention; and they reflexively expend time and resources warding off increased risks of mediated scandals. In such ways, aid agencies have become increasingly embroiled in the practices and predilections of the global media and can find their organizational integrity impugned and communication aims compromised. These developments imperil the very ethics and project of global humanitarianism that aid agencies historically have done so much to promote." (Abstract)
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"Global Crisis Reporting: Journalism in the Global Age sets out to better understand the media’s role in the circulation and communication of these global challenges to humanity as well as the conflicts and contentions that surround them. Concerned as we are with crises that transcend national bor...ders, whether in terms of impact or intervention, this book seeks to move beyond narrow national frameworks and nationally focused methodologies. In today’s globalizing world, where crises can be transnational in scope and impact, involve supranational levels of governance and become communicated in real time via global media, so national frames of reference and earlier research preoccupations are being superseded. The study of global crisis reporting, necessarily, needs to be situated and theorized in the context of journalism practised in the global age. As we shall explore, contemporary news media occupy a key position in the public definition and elaboration of global crises and are often far more than just conduits for their wider public recognition. In exercising their symbolic and communicative power, the media today can variously exert pressure and influence on processes of public understanding and political response or, equally, serve to dissimulate and distance the nature of the threats that confront us and dampen down pressures for change. In such ways, global crises become variously constituted within the news media as much as communicated by them." (p.2)
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"The book includes an extensive section on the echoes of Rwanda, which looks at the cases of Darfur, the Central African Republic, Myanmar, and South Sudan, while the impact of social media as a new actor is examined through chapters on social media use by the Islamic State and in Syria and in other... contexts across the developing world. It also looks at the aftermath of the genocide: the shifting narrative of the genocide itself, the evolving debate over the role and impact of hate media in Rwanda, the challenge of digitizing archival records of the genocide, and the fostering of free and independent media in atrocity's wake. The volume also probes how journalists themselves confront mass atrocity and examines the preventive function of media through the use of advanced digital technology as well as radio programming in the Lake Chad Basin and the Democratic Republic of Congo." (Publisher)
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