News You Can Use or News That Moves?

Abstract

This study investigates how journalists covering international humanitarian crises make decisions regarding what types of information to include in stories. Specifically, the inclusion/exclusion of solutions-oriented information is addressed, since crises represent a key time during which the potential for international engagement is discussed in the mainstream media. Interviews with journalists covering hunger crises in Africa reveal an internal tension between maintaining a neutral, unbiased position and writing in a way that supports engagement and action. Ironically, perhaps, journalists find that including solutions-oriented information amounts to unethical and biased coverage, despite the fact that inclusion of solutions to social problems is an accepted and institutionalized aspect of the US news media’s mandate to the public. Reasons for this seeming contradiction are discussed, and I argue that solutions-oriented information not only can be included without demonstrating bias, but that it ought to be included to support ethical coverage that properly informs citizens about potential paths for political engagement.

KEYWORDS:

• Africa
• communication about development
• distant suffering
• interviews
• marketplace of ideas
• news coverage
• solutions

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The author would like to thank Marwan Kraidy, Monroe Price, Devra Moehler, and Michael X. Delli Carpini for their thoughtful comments on an earlier version of this work.

DISCLOSURE STATEMENT

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 “Famine” is a technical term defined as meeting particular requirements determined by the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification system (“Guidelines for IPC Famine Classification” 2016). Regions that are experiencing extreme food insecurity and malnutrition but which do not meet the official requirements of a famine are variously referred to as experiencing extreme food insecurity, extreme hunger, hunger crises, food crises, etc. All types of food insecurity events were included in the analysis.

2 Keywords (and their variants) were: hunger, starvation, malnutrition, undernourished, famine AND (Africa! or algeria or angola or benin or burundi or burkina or botswana or comoros or cameroon or congo or chad or djibouti or eritrea or ethiopia or gabon or gambia or guinea or ghana or kenya or liberia or libya or lesotho or malawi or mauritius or madagascar or mali or morocco or mozambique or namibia or niger! or rwanda or sao tome or somali! or sudan or sierra leone or senegal or seychelles or swaziland or tunisia or tanzania or togo or uganda or zambia or zimbabwe).

3 PressDisplay was used because the dates required were not available on LexisNexis at the time of the investigation. Newspapers searched in PressDisplay included The Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, The Los Angeles Times, The Denver Post, The Orlando Sentinel, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, The Chicago Sun-Times, The Baltimore Sun, Detroit News, The Minneapolis Star-Tribune, The Las Vegas Review-Journal, The New York Times, The Columbus Dispatch, The Philadelphia Inquirer, The Houston Chronicle, The Richmond Times-Dispatch, and The Washington Post. Because PressDisplay provides full color images of newspapers, rather than text-based records, these papers were searched manually for articles on the crisis.

4 The project was reviewed by the Institutional Review Board (IRB) at the University of Pennsylvania, and it was determined that it met the eligibility criteria for IRB review exemption.