Humanitarianism and Media
Johannes Paulmann2018, Humanitarianism and Media
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Abstract
'Media' is indeed a broad term. Understood very widely, it also covers food parcels or money transfers as media of exchange and power relations between donors and recipients. 4 Th e present investigations follow a more limited defi nition as used in media and communication studies. 5 Media are (1) the material forms in which a content is presented and which carry diff erent sign systems (textual, visual, audio and audiovisual), for example, an illustrated newspaper, a poster, a fi lm or a commemorative plaque. In the sense of technologically based products, media thus form part of the history of technology. Media are (2) organizations that produce those material forms; they are, for example, broadcasting corporations, publishing and marketing companies, or humanitarian agencies themselves. Media as organizations have an institutional history and produce and publish in specifi c economic contexts. Th ey include individual employees and representatives who work as journalists or public relations offi cers. Media comprise (3) an institutionalized system with legal and ethical norms, regulations, and standards that govern production, distribution and reception, and that form a structure with its own logic. All three aspects mentioned play a role in relation to humanitarianism, and when using the term 'media', we should keep in mind that it may refer to a product, a producer or a system of production, distribution and reception. Th e volume refl ects these various dimensions of media. Part I, 'Humanitarian Imagery', focuses primarily on media forms and their content, with a particular interest in visuals, since the late nineteenth century. Humanitarian actors and journalists have since used diff erent technologies from printed texts, illustrations and photographic images to radio, cinematic fi lms, television and internet media. 6 Although technological development has consecutively added new forms
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Book review of Paulmann, J. (Ed.) (2019). Humanitarianism & media: 1900 to the present. Oxford: Berghahn Books. 316 pp.
Communications The European Journal of Communication Research, 2020
Recently, major political, economic, socio-cultural, and technological developments in the fields of humanitarianism and of media have resulted in challenges and opportunities for both domains and their intersections in particular. Existing research on the interactions between these fields, however, focuses primarily on contemporary cases and considers these challenges and opportunities, partly due to these recent developments, often too quickly as completely new. A historical perspective that acknowledges precedents and continuities is thus often missing. Responding to this academic gap, editor Johannes Paulmann investigates in the interdisciplinary volume Humanitarianism & media: 1900 to the present if and how humanitarian imagery can be situated within the broader, intertwined history of humanitarianism and media, and this from a text, production and institutional perspective. The book demonstrates to be a highly relevant and wide-ranging contribution to the literature and debate on this theme. Drawing on different types of empirical research and theoretical strands of research, various historians, anthropologists, and media and communication scholars offer relevant insights into cases dating from the 19 th to the 21 st century. Paulmann essentially argues that it is important to examine media in a multidimensional (and not only textual) manner and to contextualize and historicize the interwoven relationship between humanitarian-ism and media. By doing so, he and the other contributors question and nuance assumptions about established key theories and concepts such as 'compassion fatigue', 'mediatization', 'denial', and 'ironic spectatorship', and investigate if and how humanitarian imagery and humanitarian and media organizations and systems are part of wider ideological and power relations. Looking closer, the edited volume consists of an introductory chapter and twelve empirical case studies. As the latter are thematically, geographically, and temporally quite diverse, the book initially seems to be somewhat fragmentary. However, several intra-chapter references and structuring common threads such as patterns, professionalization, and the (non-)political character of humanitarian imagery, the politics of aid and media, and the mediatization and mediation
Humanitarianism Communications and Change: Final Reflections
2015
When Michael Buerk revealed to the world the extent of famine in Korem, Ethiopia, in 1984, his startling report became perhaps the biggest story that the BBC did in the 1980s until the fall of the Berlin Wall (Simpson, 1998). His seven minute report contained only his own voice and that of a white doctor (Cooper, 2007); the video rushes were carried back to London, as Buerk wrote and rewrote his script on the night flight from Kenya. The result however was astonishing. As Franks writes: "In an era before satellite, social media and YouTube, the BBC report went viral-being transmitted by more than 400 television stations worldwide" (Franks, 2013). The iconic imagery of the Buerk report still overshadows humanitarian reporting today. But the world in which one man told an amazing story, able to keep it as an exclusive as he travelled back across the world, has changed. Today, as this collection shows there are many more channels for such stories to be told through, and many different types of storytellers. Journalists and aid agencies are no longer the sole gatekeepers to such information. Instead we have seen how citizens have taken on the role of witness, how NGOs have transformed themselves into storytellers, and how journalists such as CNN's Anderson Cooper have abandoned traditional approaches of objectivity in order to intervene themselves. Edited highlights of Cooper's career on YouTube (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aosNAGt3AxQ) show him rescuing a small boy from a mob in Haiti, taking on a US senator during Hurricane Katrina, and being attacked on the streets in Egypt; Cooper himself wrote in a blog about his actions in Haiti of stepping outside the journalist role: "No one else seemed to be helping him [the boy]" (http://ac360.blogs.cnn.com/2010/01/18/ anderson-in-the-midst-of-looting-chaos/). These arguments are nothing new: the debate about journalists as objective onlookers (or not) was discussed at the time of Buerk, and reach back to Frederick Forsyth's coverage of Biafra in the 1960s. User-generated content-that most current of media obsessions-can be traced back to events such as the Kennedy assassination or even letters to the editor. But what differs today is the volume and the speed of information that can be relayed to a globalized audience. How does that affect the kind of story told-and crucial for humanitarian issues, how does that affect help given or donations made to those in the most desperate of conditions? The increased use of innovation and innovative partnerships between technology companies and humanitarians offers a real chance to reveal to the rest of the world who needs relief and when. So the widespread cover up of the Bengal famine of 1943-1944, in which 10 million are believed to have died is almost unthinkable in an interconnected world like today's-although not quite. Many of the chapters in this collection focus on the breakthroughs that such technology has achieved. In this new media ecology, significant new players have been introduced. Some of the most exciting developments, analysis of tweets, and other social media information help accelerate the assessment of disaster damage and needs during real time (Meier, chapter 15), while a simple mobile phone message can be a fast, cheap, effective way to convey the most vital of basic information (Wall and Reid, chapter 18). For those whose role is to help tell the stories of those caught up in humanitarian crises, the consequence of such changes in the NGO-journalist space have opened potential access to international news (Sambrook, chapter 3; Conneally, chapter 4; Abbott, chapter 13); the use of wide-ranging tools such as Pinterest, Instagram, and Storify have helped explain to more diverse audiences the issues at stake (Wardle, chapter 17). Start-ups such as Radar (Klein, chapter 16) have made real efforts to put the power of storytelling in the hands of citizens rather than 'fireman' reporters or even NGOs with their own agendas, empowering ordinary people to describe what is important to them. At the other end of the scale, WITNESS, with its celebrity backers such as Peter Gabriel and VH1, and YouTube channel can challenge social injustice on a worldwide stage (Allan, chapter 14). Yet it would be wrong to write off traditional journalism, which has evolved and adapted to this new media ecology. Journalists, too, have learned to use social media to their advantage; like NGOs, smartphones and Twitter are increasingly used in the field to send back instantaneous reports, while more sophisticated verification methods and use of social media news agencies have given journalists access to more material that they can use as part of their role to explain and set information in context (Wardle, chapter 17). For many NGOs and citizen
Introduction: The past and present of humanitarian communication
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General Humanitarian Disciplines As A Tool Of The Journalist's Professional Competence Universalization
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This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 4.0 Unported License, permitting all non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Chernobrov, D. (2018) Digital Volunteer Networks and Humanitarian Crisis Reporting. Digital Journalism, 6(7): 928-944.
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Digital technologies and big data are rapidly transforming humanitarian crisis response and changing the traditional roles and powers of its actors. This article looks at a particular aspect of this transformation—the appearance of digital volunteer networks—and explores their potential to act as a new source for media coverage, in addition to their already established role as emergency response supporters. I argue that digital humanitarians can offer a unique combination of speed and safe access, while escaping some of the traditional constraints of the aid-media relationship and exceeding the conventional conceptualizations of citizen journalism. Journalists can find both challenges and opportunities in the environment where multiple crisis actors are assuming some of the media roles. The article draws on interviews with humanitarian organizations, journalists, and digital volunteer networks about their understanding of digital humanitarian communication and its significance for media coverage of crises.
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