{"id":197680,"date":"2021-10-18T12:00:21","date_gmt":"2021-10-18T11:00:21","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=197680"},"modified":"2021-10-15T09:00:54","modified_gmt":"2021-10-15T08:00:54","slug":"parting-thoughts-from-a-humanitarian-reporter","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2021\/10\/parting-thoughts-from-a-humanitarian-reporter\/","title":{"rendered":"Parting Thoughts from a Humanitarian Reporter"},"content":{"rendered":"
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8 Oct 2021 – \u2018Reporting on the aid industry can lurch between boosting or bashing \u2013 and not much in between.\u2019<\/em><\/p>\n

Co-founder, former CEO and long-time editor Ben Parker is leaving <\/em>The New Humanitarian. Here are his reflections on years of reporting on the aid industry.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Ben Parker speaks at the Humanitarian Congress, Berlin, October 2017.
(MSF video)<\/p><\/div>\n

You might think that reporting on humanitarian issues is like any other kind of journalism. But after years of being both an aid worker and a reporter at The New Humanitarian, (and before that, IRIN News), I think it has a special set of rewards and difficulties.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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First, the international aid apparatus is messy, opaque and hard to decode.<\/p>\n

I have often tried to argue that the aid industry is particularly hard to report on: Its jargon<\/a> is beyond parody<\/a>; its transparency is uneven at best<\/a>, and the end-customers \u2013 the people who need a bit of help at a rough time in their lives \u2013 have the least power<\/a> in a complex web of institutions and money flows<\/a>.<\/p>\n

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Listen\u00a0\u2192 to Ben Parker\u2019s reflections in a bonus episode<\/a> of the Rethinking Humanitarianism podcast<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Also people are very reluctant to talk. If you were reporting a different beat, in politics and business, for instance, competitors keep each other on their toes: One space rocket company might be happy to spill the beans on another as part of an epic battle of phallic late capitalism<\/a>.<\/p>\n

We don’t get that from aid workers so much. They fear for their jobs, yes, but they also worry about contagion: If they blow the whistle on a bad project, they may bring down the agency or the projects that are doing good work. Where the reporting is about aid from a rich country, there\u2019s often an aid-sceptical press eager to jump in<\/a>. Then \u201ccharities\u201d all get lumped together. The crash in Oxfam\u2019s reputation<\/a> dragged down others, so the argument goes \u2013 best let sleeping dogs lie. This thinking makes fertile ground for impunity.<\/p>\n

Aid bureaucrats too have little to gain from poor projects being exposed in public<\/a> \u2013 donor officials in northern capitals generally want to keep the aid flowing. Admitting aid went missing<\/a> or misconduct was overlooked<\/a> will, they fear, only strengthen the hand of those who want to squeeze aid budgets further, throwing the baby out with the bathwater.<\/p>\n

The aid industry is murky, and tight-lipped. And as well as having limited journalistic scrutiny,\u00a0 it generally lacks the checks and balances that customers, shareholders or voters provide to other sectors of society. Instead, its \u201cstakeholders\u201d \u2013 a favorite bit of aidspeak \u2013 lack power or their incentives to do better are misaligned. A business that fails its customers will go bust. An incompetent government may be voted out or overthrown. But aid projects and aid agencies can be relentlessly mediocre but still survive.<\/p>\n

That makes good humanitarian journalism all the more important \u2013 because other restraints are largely not there. What should it entail?<\/p>\n

We have dragged, kicking and screaming, the failings of some very large institutions into the light<\/a>. But it\u2019s not all hit jobs. Reporting fairly, but critically, on the humanitarian world is what we do at The New Humanitarian. We\u2019ve looked at successes and failures, innovations<\/a>, and reforms<\/a>. We welcome healthy reflections and thoughtful analyses<\/a>.<\/p>\n

We know that how we publish matters, as well as what we produce. We try to maintain a self-critical awareness of what biases, privileges and perspectives we may need to check<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Getting the coverage right requires patience and persistence to make insider-y material accessible to regular readers, but not over-simplify. Crafting every piece is a balancing act.<\/p>\n

The drivers of extreme human suffering are appalling but banal: accounts of humans\u2019 inhumanity to humans can be oddly blah. The subject is naturally depressing and skippable for a reader far away. We do this work all the time and still it is infuriatingly hard to find a way to frame and convey all-too-familiar stories of dispossession and deprivation.<\/p>\n

The subject matter is heavy-going, the surrounding economy and ecosystem is warped, and of course commercial sponsors and advertisers systematically avoid bad news (as we reported<\/a>).<\/p>\n

Humanitarian news feels a particularly important beat to me and yet it\u2019s a strangely lonely one too \u2013 few news organisations dedicate resources to it as a niche.<\/p>\n

While humanitarian crises are literally life and death, the experience of regular people is often a side-bar to political or military journalism.<\/p>\n

Humanitarian issues are not a sidebar to the story when they happen to you. COVID-19 and climate change are a blunt reminder of that. When it hits close to home, of course people do care about vaccines<\/a>, or disaster financing<\/a>, or flood prevention. It may be too often couched in horrible aid-speak but this stuff matters, and is central to navigating the climate emergency and global instability<\/a> in the coming years.<\/p>\n

Done well, journalism about crises can do a lot. It can remove an excuse for inaction; politicians can\u2019t say they didn\u2019t know or weren\u2019t warned. It can arm the public and decision-makers with facts, analysis and context they can use \u2013 in whatever way they choose. It can rekindle some fellow-feeling and solidarity between different people, alienated or languishing<\/a> on opposite sides of the planet. And those whose job it is to save lives can be held to account.<\/p>\n

Done badly, reporting on humanitarian crises can be exploitative and offensive, a fount of lazy and racist tropes; even schadenfreude \u2013 pleasure derived by someone from another person’s misfortune \u2013 dressed up as pity. Reporting on the aid industry can lurch between boosting or bashing: \u201cAI will solve world hunger<\/a>!\u201d or \u201cAid workers caught being wasteful and useless, again\u201d \u2013 and not much in between.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m leaving this job with a sense of pride in what this team has done and continues to achieve, and as convinced as ever of its importance. I\u2019ll miss the pace, wit, snark and memes, brains and integrity of my colleagues. I\u2019ll miss the thrill of investigations<\/a> and data discoveries<\/a> I\u2019ve been lucky enough to work on. I salute and emoji fist-bump all the TNH team and contributors, and especially the sources and whistleblowers who have trusted us with painful and risky but vital material.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m confident the journalism at The New Humanitarian will continue to come up with new framing, new tools, new ways to renew empathy, outrage and critical thinking about the way we deal with crises, and the way we hear about them.<\/p>\n

\u2019ll be cheering you on, and glad you\u2019re keeping watch.<\/p>\n

_____________________________________________________<\/p>\n

Ben Parker <\/a> – Senior Editor Contact: WhatsApp\/Signal\/SMS:\u00a0+44 7808 791 267<\/em><\/p>\n

Go to Original – thenewhumanitarian.org<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

8 Oct 2021 – \u2018Reporting on the aid industry can lurch between boosting or bashing \u2013 and not much in between.\u2019 Co-founder, former CEO and long-time editor Ben Parker is leaving The New Humanitarian. Here are his reflections on years of reporting on the aid industry.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":197682,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[62],"tags":[229,378,234],"class_list":["post-197680","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-media","tag-activism","tag-journalism","tag-media"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/197680","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=197680"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/197680\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/197682"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=197680"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=197680"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=197680"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}