What if international humanitarian aid was no good? Imagine the supposedly 'non-ideological' ideology of humanitarian engagement and charity would in fact aggravate the misery it is supposed to redress and relieve.
According to the article 'Alms Dealers – Can You Provide Humanitarian Aid Without Facilitating Conflict?' written by Philip Gourevitch and published in the New Yorker in 2010 the modern-day humanitarian aid business came into being as a consequence of the Nigerian civil war, the first war ever to be televised (2010:102). Being broadcasted into people's homes all around the globe, the images of dying people and a country struck by war raised sympathy, leading people abroad to raise and donate money. But did this also lead to the prolongation of war and misery wherever humanitarian missions and the media had come to help and inform, shed light on certain events respectively?
Recalling what happened in Nigeria, one could argue that the media were complicit in the outbreak and spread of cholera in Haiti in the aftermath of the earthquake that struck the country early in 2010. Stressing the point that cholera was brought to Haiti by foreign humanitarian aid workers – people who only decided to go to Haiti because of what they had seen on TV, who were influenced by the mediated images that reached their native countries – many now believe that it is the media that are to be blamed. On the other hand, one might say that nobody would have noticed anything about the earthquake in the first place if it had not been for the media's coverage. The media introduced the world to what had happened in Haiti and by virtue of their very own characteristics such as temporal as well as spatial 'immediacy' or the capability to facilitate extensive surveillance, laid the foundation for future engagement. According to the World Health Organization (WHO)
“a multidisciplinary approach based on prevention, preparedness and response, along with an efficient surveillance system, is key for mitigating cholera outbreaks, controlling cholera in endemic areas and reducing deaths” (WHO, Fact Sheet No. 107).
This implies that in fact a media-led approach – an approach thus largely dependent on what many believe to have created the plague in the first place – is key to mitigating the tragedy, for only they could possibly provide the infrastructure needed to raise awareness and to start taking action.
But what exactly are we referring to when talking about 'the media'? Do we mean the big broadcasting companies? Are we talking TV and radio coverage? Should we not be thinking about the mediated quality of life itself and be dealing with the fact that mediation is an integral part of what we are, of our very existence? How could we, facing this truth, still legitimately try and track back everything that has happened in Haiti to the CNN's or BBC's coverage? This is not to say that I am of the opinion that the media should not concern themselves with solving larger problems in society, for it is these that generate the need for and condition the development of any new medium in the first place. Media cannot not be dealing with social issues. Literally mediating between people they are genuinely social. As Canadian media theorist Marshall McLuhan notes: Nothing can be communicated outside of media (1994:7). Consequently, an approach that disregards or questions, even condemns any kind of media involvement in social interaction, can be nothing but false and short-sighted. McLuhan's famous phrase 'the medium is the message' further implies that the characteristics of our perception and imagination become the characteristics of our reality. From this one can infer that there are multiple realties depending on which media exactly one refers to.
Admittedly, one might argue that McLuhan refers to different media, as in 'TV', 'radio', 'print' etc. analyzing how the specific characteristics of such media influence the message they are trying to convey. Nevertheless, what we are looking at in terms of the Haitian cholera epidemic are to a great extent exactly these influences of television and how this relatively young medium determines and shapes the worldview of those making use of it. Being aware of the fact that the medium itself is a mere construct, it is just another medium impacting on the way we see things, we still have to admit that its implications are rather real. In my opinion, it is this prevailing uncertainty in how to approach and understand the media coverage and the media in the Haitian case that leads people to either idolize or condemn them and that, interestingly enough, by means of either of these puts a great deal of agency into the hands of a small 'subdivision' of media overlooking the fact that there is much more to the 'media', than just the evening news and failing to think about other and larger processes of mediation that might have led to the outbreak or determined the way it was reported on.
Since I am of the opinion that it is just too easy to either idolize or condemn 'the media' for their approach to the cholera epidemic and since I also believe that there is no such thing as a monolithic entity that is 'the media', a dark and evil 'other', I propose a view that first of all and before trying to judge media activity learns to acknowledge and recognize the mediated character of everyday life itself, to truly 'see' the “collide-oscope of interfaced situation” (McLuhan 1967:10) we are part of. If it was not for the media we would not know anything about Haiti or the earthquake. Neither would we know about the subsequent spread of cholera. If it was not for the 'New Yorker' and Gourevitch's article we would not know anything about the emergence of the humanitarian aid either. What if we, inspired by Gourevitch's article, put an end to the humanitarian aid business, to news coverage focussing on war and natural disasters abroad? Would he be blamed for it?
References Cited
Gourevitch, Philip
2010 Alms Dealers: Can You Provide Humanitarian Aid Without Facilitating Conflicts? The New Yorker, October 11: 102–109.
McLuhan, Marshall
1967 The Medium is the Message. New York: Bantam Books.
McLuhan, Marshall
1994 Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.
World Health Organization, Cholera Fact Sheet No. 107, accessed January 16 2011, http://www.who.int/mediacentre/factsheets/fs107/en/.
No comments:
Post a Comment