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Training needed before disasters strike

“It is too late to address longstanding barriers and weaknesses at the onset of an emergency,” said Mark Frohardt of Internews Network, the co-moderator of the workshop on disasters and emergencies: the role of communication. He was joined by Imogen Wall of the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) World Service Trust.
Other afternoon workshops included: protecting journalists reporting crime, communication and gender, improving election coverage in developing and emerging countries, partnership between international media and local organizations and monitoring and evaluation.
The thrust of the disaster and emergencies workshop was: The role of the media in humanitarian responses is generally only considered in relation to international coverage of disasters.
The discussion was an effort to create greater awareness among media development organizations, joined up advocacy around the issues targeted at humanitarian agencies and those that support them and increased cohesion and coordination of responses.
Frohardt said there is a need to explore new technologies and potentials to strengthen local media engagement.
Members of the audience agreed tat more must b done to engage local media at disaster sites. One participant said the media can play a great role in reassuring the population after a disaster.
Frohardt said the population at the scene of a disaster “is not an audience looking for scandal” but is a place where “life or death decisions are taking place” and “what we would consider information, they consider news.”
“In these types of situations,” Frohardt said, “it is very important to work with the local media.”
Audience members brought up several instances in which the government was a roadblock rather than a source of information.
Rachel Mugarura-Mutana, editor-in-chief of Uganda Radio Network, said that during the outbreak of Ebola in Uganda the humanitarian agencies would not talk o the media, but went through the state government. She said the international media had access to the health officials, but their information did not get to the people who needed it.
“A lot of people died who should not have,” she said.
Frohardt said that any disaster is an opportunity for intervention that had the potential to foster some change.
Wall gave an example from the tsunami in Aceh. She said con artists were convincing people that they were there to build new homes for the victims who lost their homes and they told them they needed to pay up front when, in fact, the new homes were to be free. She said that doing the story and reporting that fact gave the people the information they needed.
Mugarura-Mutana said that a year after the Ebola crisis in Uganda “we still do not have access with health officials.”
In the workshop on protecting journalists covering crime, moderator Drew Sullivan, editor of Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project, said that organized crime “works effortlessly across borders and therefore, journalists covering crime also had to cross borders.”
He said the profession must take “a holistic approach to safety,” adding that “journalists are cowboys … macho and this is dangerous.”
Sullivan showed figures that said in 1992 713 journalists were killed, 72 percent of them targeted and 62 percent of them by political groups, officials or criminal groups.
Most organized crime figures, Sullivan said, have lawyers and there is a growing tendency to “aggressively sue” journalists. He added that should a journalist publish on the Internet, “he can be sued anywhere in the world” and it is feasible that a journalist who published on the Internet could be sued simultaneously in 30 places.
“Journalism is more dangerous today than ever before,” Sullivan said. The result, he added, is that journalists tend toward self-censorship, timid or harmful reporting and a decline in journalists.
When a journalist is murdered n the line of duty, Sullivan said, the response is to praise or canonize the journalist, but seldom is there an examination of what the journalist did and newsrooms seldom change their procedures.
Sullivan said editors have a responsibility to protect their journalists with a number of safeguards and actions such as knowing at all times where the reporter is, not allowing reporters to take documents home with them, be aware of suspicious people, using surveillance cameras around the office, providing secure parking places, escorting all visitors into the newsroom and, in potentially dangerous situations even monitoring calls and conversations.

Dave Rosso
USA journalist