Collateral coverage: media images of Afghan refugees, 2001

Abstract

The paper is concerned with media coverage of the on-going refugee crisis in Afghanistan. It begins by looking at how the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center of 11 September 2001 had the result of stimulating renewed media interest in Afghan refugees. Paying special regard to the role of visual images in the reporting of disasters, the paper reviews the narrative strategies adopted by television news. It considers the factors that have instigated media response by examining some general issues arising from the media coverage of disasters. While the central focus of the study is BBC Television News Special Reports on the Afghan refugee crisis, selective comparisons are made with other television broadcast channels, Sky News and Euronews.

Based on the Afghan case study, I propose three main constituent factors contributing to the likelihood of effective media coverage of a refugee crisis. Firstly, in order to attract Western press coverage it is necessary for the crisis to be of such a magnitude that it cannot be ignored; or else it is necessary for it to be perceived as having some obvious connection with Western concerns. Secondly, the story will gain airtime if the nature of the crisis is such that it produces dramatic imagery – pictures with impact. Finally, if the style of the media coverage is sufficiently innovative it will stimulate interest in the viewers. The paper concludes with a critical review of media examples that break away from conventional news formulae.

Notes

Terence Wright is Reader in Theoretical Studies in Visual Art at the School of Art and Design, University of Ulster and Visiting Tutor in Visual Anthropology at the University of Cambridge. Formerly he worked as a photographer for BBC Television News and Current Affairs.

¹One such example is the opening sequence of Brian de Palma's feature film Carlito's Way (U.S.A., 1993, 141 minutes, colour).

²So dramatic were the images that avant-garde composer Karlheinz Stockhausen was tempted to describe the World Trade Center attacks as ‘the greatest work of art imaginable for the whole cosmos' and consequently brought about a media outrage. See Carter and Barringer (2001) and Sorkin (2002).

³There are a catalogue of aqueous metaphors: a ‘trickle’ of refugees who ‘stream’ over the border; ‘floods' of refugees that ‘swamp’ neighbouring countries; and this is only ‘the tip of the iceberg’!

⁴In the previous decade William C. Adams (1986: 122) had come up with a different set of figures: ‘The globe is prioritized so that the death of one Western European equaled three Eastern Europeans equaled 9 Latin Americans equaled 11 Middle Easterners equaled 12 Asians’.

⁵It is estimated that running without adverts post-September 11 cost the U.S. commercial TV stations $300 million in lost revenue (Randall 2001).

⁶This is part of a general trend in British terrestrial broadcasting. In monitoring non-news/current affairs factual programmes in 1989–90 there were 1037 hours, in 1998–99 there were only 728.6 hours (Stone 2000: 31).

⁷Looking back over the last 10 years, there was an extreme cold wave, which coincided with an earthquake in February 2001. This was preceded by a drought in April 2000 following earthquakes in 1991, 1994, 1996, 1998, 1999, 2000 and flash floods in 1992. In addition, mudslides have caused further damage and destruction to homes and have contributed to the spread of disease.

⁸Maximizing resources, CNN made two Special Reports documenting the difficulties they experienced in getting their news crews to remote areas of Afghanistan once military action had started.

⁹According to the National Hurricane Center, ‘Andrew’ was the most expensive disaster in U.S. history causing $25 billion of damage. Such was the scale of the hurricane that the following year it became the subject of a low-budget feature film Triumph Over Disaster (1993). The story, based on ‘real events’, employed actual news footage of the aftermath to support a tediously wooden account of the human struggle against forces of nature.

¹⁰The overall effect is similar to the pictures of the World Trade Center attack with the near perpetual repetition of the same shots of the planes hitting the towers.

¹¹‘…if the Iranian crisis is regularly rendered by television pictures of chanting “Islamic” mobs accompanied by commentary about “anti-Americanism,” the distance, unfamiliarity, and threatening quality of the spectacle limit “Islam” to those characteristics; this in turn gives rise to a feeling that something basically unattractive and negative confronts us. Since Islam is “against” us and “out there”, the necessity of adopting a confrontational response of our own towards it will not be doubted’ (Said 1981: 44).

¹²This also highlights a characteristic of film as a medium of cultural representation. When using the written word one can generalize, as in Evans-Pritchard's (1956) ‘classic’ ethnography: ‘Nuer are very largely dependent on the milk of their herds … Their carcasses also furnish Nuer with meat, tools, ornaments … Women are more interested in the cows … Men's interest in the cow is, apart from their value for breeding, rather for their use in obtaining wives’. In contrast a photograph or a film has to deal with specifics and the shot has to concentrate on the individual: not the Nuer, but this Nuer, whose name is x. We can see his photograph representing a ‘class' of people in Evans-Pritchard's ethnography on Plate XIV titled ‘Leopard-skin priest’: certainly an individual, yet in this context he remains un-named.

¹³There are resonances here with Aristotle's notion of anagnorisis the moment when a character moves from ignorance to knowledge, realizes their tragic error, hamartia – ignorance or mistaken judgement: the ‘tragic flaw’.

¹⁴Michael Burke's Special Report from Ethiopia stimulated the massive Live Aid public response. Live Aid was watched by 1.4 billion people worldwide in over 170 countries. The event raised donations of £70 million.

¹⁵A more comprehensive discussion of television documentaries is out of the scope of this paper, but it will form the subject of future research in recognition of the importance of the ‘media mix’ in which television news, newspapers and magazines, documentaries, feature films and art works all contribute to the public image of ‘the refugee’ (see Wright 2002).

¹⁶In the attempts of visual anthropologists to document ‘other’ cultures, the logistical and ethical issues encountered by the more general documentary film-maker become considerably exaggerated (Wright 2002).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Terence Wright

Terence Wright is Reader in Theoretical Studies in Visual Art at the School of Art and Design, University of Ulster and Visiting Tutor in Visual Anthropology at the University of Cambridge. Formerly he worked as a photographer for BBC Television News and Current Affairs.