UN under-secretary for humanitarian affairs and emergency relief coordinator Jan Egeland opened the News Xchange conference in Istanbul by challenging the world's broadcasters to report more broadly on the world's humanitarian disasters.
Egeland, who leaves his UN post next month for a role in conflict resolution, described Colombia as one of the world's biggest humanitarian problems. "It's the biggest war of the Western hemisphere, the biggest strategy problem, the biggest humanitarian problem, the biggest human rights problem and the biggest drugs-related problem. It has guerilla armies bigger than the Norwegian army and drama like no other place in the world. Why isn't it covered?"
If the answer is because it is too expensive, too far or too difficult, Egeland says that the UN has its own feed on APTV updated every day. Raw, rights-free footage is available for all news outlets. "If we don't have attention, we fail. We get our resources when we get a lot of attention and if we do not have the attention of the world media, we don't raise enough money to save lives."
Quoting from the Tyndall Report in the US, Egeland said there were 26 minutes of network news were broadcast about Darfur after Bush described the situation as genocide; that was out of a total of 26,000 network news minutes. Martha Stewart being jailed had five times more coverage, Tom Cruise's romance 12 times more and Michael Jackson's trial 50 times more.
When the media does focus on humanitarian crises, he said it seems to only have the attention for one story at a time. "It was the tsunami only for a few months, then Darfur for a few months, and then Gaza for a few months. The reality is we have had 30 major crises unfolding in parallel in recent years."
Egeland did his best to appeal to the news instinct of his audience. He said this is not about being morally right, but about telling compelling stories. He said that in northern Uganda, 20,000 children have been stolen from their families and forced to work as soldiers, and in eastern Congo the accumulated death toll is 6 times that of the Rwandan genocide. That got 6 minutes of network news time in the US in 2005.
He said that broadcasters should think if their audiences would prefer to watch the 6,249th piece on Michael Jackson's court case or the first segment on 20,000 kidnapped children in Northern Uganda.
In March this year Egeland was en route to Darfur on the river Nile, sharing a barge with 400 refugees returning home to the south of the country after 15 years. He was told by satellite phone that he had been denied access to Darfur.
"The technological revolution came to our help. With the satellite phone I did live interviews with the BBC, CNN, Al-Jazeera and all the wire services and was able to argue in real time with the spokesman from the Sudanese government." The spokesman backtracked and said access had been delayed, rather than denied. "Had I not had that opportunity I would have been blocked from going back to Darfur, I think forever."
