Session 8: REPORTING DARFUR AND INTERNATIONAL HUMANITARIAN CRISES: ARE AID AGENCIES THE NEW FRONTLINE JOURNALISTS?

A critical examination of how television news reported on the Darfur genocide in Western Sudan

• Are aid agencies supplanting newsgathering in their increasingly aggressive coverage of humanitarian crises
• Are broadcasters and news agencies labelling the video provided to them by the aid agencies?
• What lessons learned from Darfur for coverage of other on-going humanitarian crises?

Session Chair: Fergal Keane, Special Correspondent, BBC, UK

Confirmed Featured Contributors: Salim Amin, Chief Executive Officer, Camerapix, Kenya; Greg Barrow, World Food Program, Kenya; Carol Bellamy, Executive Director, UNICEF; Dr. Rony Brauman, former president, MSF France; Philip Cox, Freelance Journalist and winner of the Rory Peck Trust Sony Impact Award, UK; Susan Farkas, Director of Television, United Nations; Mia Farrow, UNICEF ambassador, US; Caroline Howie, Head of News, BBC World; Virginie Miranda-Louis, Audio Visual News Producer, ICRC, Switzerland; Patrick Muiruri, Producer/Cameraman, Reuters, Kenya

Produced by Sarah Whitehead, BBC

Fergal Keane: Good afternoon and welcome to a four-star hotel on the Algarve and what better place to discuss the subject of famine in Africa. Can I just point out that despite the bar-stool behind me I'm not going to start singing Irish ballads! Journalists and aid workers are all on the same side, or least that's what it says here, but only up to a point. We have a relationship of mutual dependency especially now that we live in a time of 24 hour rolling news. The demand for images, information and analysis is constant. Without media coverage the world wouldn't be alerted to huge humanitarian crises and therefore aid agencies would find it very hard to raise the funds they need to do the job in places like Darfur.

So ostensibly, we the media (who have the job of going and trying to explain these tragedies to the public) and the aid agencies (whose job it is to resolve them) should be working towards the same goal. Why is it then that so many of us that work in this area, both journalists and aid workers, quite frequently find in the field these days an atmosphere of antagonism, even contempt between us on occasion. What is causing this?

The Darfur crisis in Sudan is just the latest example of how the media and the aid agencies have been working together but also frequently clashing. Now the thing is you don't see many of those clashes on our screens but we all of us who have ever worked in that area know that it's happening. We've got a wonderful panel here today of people bringing a wealth of experience, of passion, of knowledge and idealism. And we also have many senior news executives! I will be hunting them down during the course of the debate there is nowhere for them to run! Just a couple of ground rules a) even though this may look like a Stalinist show trial its not so I do want people to engage and to put their hands up and speak. Secondly whenever you get journalists in one room and then you add to that aid workers, the danger of an explosion of sanctimoniousness should be evident to everybody! So my one ground rule today is no lofty rhetoric no sanctimoniousness, no crass emotionalism, that's my job!

Can I just introduce you to a couple of people: Carol Bellamy here is the executive director of UNICEF probably the most proactive of the agencies in trying to get their story on air, and Carol has been already speaking about that today and about expanding the agenda of UNICEF. Patrick Muiruri is a producer and cameraman with Reuters in Nairobi and one of the most experienced journalists currently working in Africa. Just over here is another Kenyan Salim Amin who has wide experience of conflict in the Continent and in the past year has crossed the line we might say and done work for the International Committee of the Red Cross. Caroline Howie is a senior editor for BBC television and she's not here to take part in a witch trial but she must make on a daily basis many of the decisions about coverage, about what's given priority, what's the agenda and how Africa is treated, many of the issues we will be discussing today. Philip Cox here is a freelance journalist and the first person to bring back images of the Darfur crisis to the world. He did this without the backing of major news organisations, something familiar to many freelancers, and at great personal risk to himself. Greg Barrow is in many ways a poacher turned gamekeeper - he worked for many years as the Africa correspondent for the BBC and the Telegraph but he is now senior information officer with the World Food Programme. And joining us via satellite from Paris is Rony Brauman former president of Medecins Sans Frontieres, who I remember coining the memorable phrase "compassion without understanding" to describe what he felt was the media response to African tragedies. Also here with us in Portugal is Virginie Miranda-Louis of the ICRC who I am told has strong views on the boundaries that should be observed between the work of journalists and the work of aid workers. And finally Susan Farkas of United Nations television who have recently announced an agreement with APTN to show United Nations pictures via the AP server. So the first in joining together if you like an official agreement between journalists and an aid agency. And I am told that at around 3 o'clock today we will be joined by Mia Farrow who is an ambassador for UNICEF and recently visited Darfur. But let's start today by looking at some of the reporting of Darfur in the past 12 months, and first Philip Cox the first images of the crisis for Channel 4.

(Runs tape)

Philip Cox with those groundbreaking images of Darfur. And now we will go to look at some other images of humanitarian crisis from around the world this year from different sources.

(Runs tape)

Some really striking images there and to me what was most striking about it is when you realise that most of those were not shot by major broadcasting organisations, they all come from humanitarian organisations. We've come to that issue of authorship and the kind of crossing of boundaries that it involves, when journalists are seen to do the work of aid workers and vice versa. First I'm going to ask representatives of our panel, from both sides as it were to give us their analysis of what they see is the problem. What is at the root of this growing mistrust, or as I say contempt in some parts, between aid agencies and journalists? First I'm going to go to Greg Barrow. Greg you fought on both sides of the divide, as I believe it's now become, what's your analysis of what's wrong?

Greg Barrow: I was just in Darfur a few weeks ago for a month and thus saw a gradual reduction of what was, at one point, a great army of the international media covering the story diminish down to two stills photographers by the beginning of October this year. This for a crisis that in some quarters was being described as the worst humanitarian crisis in the world indeed is still described by some people as such. I tried to think why this was, as somebody who worked in journalism. I suppose my conclusion was that occasionally there was what can only be described as a fatal convergence between journalists who are so used to covering these kinds of crisis and now suffering what can be described as, for want of a better word, compassion fatigue and editors or senior executives in London who perhaps have never set foot in a refugee camp or a camp for displaced people and so can't always grasp the complexity of these kinds of emergencies. They can't always grasp that it isn't something they should only cover when there is a child starving or literally dying in front of their screen. There are other elements to this, the fact that people are hungry and may not eat more than once or twice a week, that their families have historically suffered from malnutrition is a story in itself that merits attention. So you have this convergence of views, the journalist who wants to get it on struggling to get it on and persuade people that they should get it on to programmes and I wondered whether maybe in the same way that politicians, parliamentary groups, donor nations and celebrities periodically visit Africa, maybe there's a reason for senior news executives to go and actually experience it for a couple of days. We as an organisation would facilitate it, we wouldn't pay for it, but if anybody here was willing to go, we'd be more than happy to take them. Perhaps if they went, they might understand a little bit more why these stories need to get on.

Fergal Keane: You've raised a lot there that we'll be dealing with as the discussion progresses. Patrick Muiruri is somebody who deals with aid agencies probably on a weekly basis, and has been doing so for many years in Africa. How do you feel about the way they treat the media and regard it?

Patrick Muiruri: I think there is no set way that you can say it is being done generally. I think it's all individual. For example I would say that I relate in this way to UNICEF, I would relate in a different way to WFP and the ICRC. With most of them, you get a feeling that if it's not sensational enough, if it's not comparable to the genocide in Rwanda, the 1984 famine in Ethiopia then maybe suddenly there is not going to be much feeling I think from the aid agencies themselves.

Fergal Keane: Are you saying that the aid agencies hype things to get you interested?

Patrick Muiruri: No not really, I've been on the ground long enough to know the situation in a set area I guess sometimes before the aid agencies other times, we work together very well and come to the decision that yes it's bad but let's get it out as it is, let's not overdo it or underdo it.

Fergal Keane: Can I go to Paris and Rony Brauman and take you back to your phrase, compassion without understanding? I hope I've remembered it correctly! Give me your critique of how the media is dealing with humanitarian crises at the moment.

Rony Brauman: My first critique would be the phrase itself, I don't think there's such a thing as a humanitarian crisis. Would you consider the First World War as a humanitarian crisis, or as a war? I mean, a famine is a famine and a relocation crisis is a relocation crisis a murder is a murder and it's not a humanitarian crisis and maybe a humanitarian organisation is involved in response to a major crisis but that doesn't mean that there is a humanitarian crisis. That may seem to be a detail but I think it's quite important because it's what frames the general approach of what we are doing and for instance it stars full of confusion for the various actors and I don't think a journalist is a humanitarian player. It's not a complaint in my mind, it's just a specific status. A journalist is to report what's going on whether it's good or bad for humanitarian purposes not whether it serves the humanitarian organisation. On the contrary, what matters is the fairness of the report of the journalist and I don't think we should try to make coincide the work of the journalist and the work of the humanitarian players.

Fergal Keane: Hang on a second, MSF has for years worked with journalists, I've known it myself in the field and I've been very co-operative with them. Why do you co-operate if you don't think that journalists have some kind of role in raising humanitarian consciousness?

Rony Brauman: Well, we play our own game, we want the journalists to speak of the work of MSF, to speak of the situation in humanitarian terms but we would be really scared if this approach was to fill the whole vacuum. We serve our own interests and I assume it fully but I would be the last one to claim that this position is a truth position. This position should represent the whole scope of the reality.

Fergal Keane: Carol Bellamy do you believe at UNICEF that we are all in the same boat? I mentioned it in my introduction this idea of working towards some grand humanitarian aim, do you think that journalists and, as it were, aid workers should be on the same side?

Carol Bellamy: I'm not sure I think we're all in the same boat, I was thinking to myself and I don't know the field that well but you guys are looking for sources and we are one of the sources. I assume that maybe you can make some choices about whether you want to use those sources then maybe we are sources for different things we can be sources for stories we can be sources for images, we may be sources because we are there often in fact before you are there, it seems to me that the judgment call is still on the part of the journalist. Yes I do think we hype sometimes but the Kenyans press corps is a very tough press corps you not going to get away with a lot of hyping with the Nairobi press corps. At the end of the day I think the judgment call is with you to decide whether you can go with something or not go with something and the substance of the story it seems to me remains in the hands of the journalists; whether the aid agencies are pushing or not at the end of the day it's your call. I don't think there has to be a huge division between us, I just think there has to be a respecting of some lines.

Fergal Keane: Susan Farkas, some lines. You crossed the line, you and APTN crossed the line by signing an agreement whereby your footage is available on APTN. Do you think that's proper, do you think that's your job to act as journalists?

Susan Farkas: I don't think we've crossed the line at all. We are the UN, we and some of the other agencies will be offering some material, sound bites to journalists to use, maybe that will be one part of a story, maybe it will spark an idea for a story, maybe you'll see a video that you didn't know existed and it will give you an idea of a different way to cover a story. Or perhaps in the developing world they will run it in its entirety without labelling it as you guys do. Basically we want to get people's attention we want to offer them stuff that they will be able to use to tell stories about things that we think are important, that might be ignored by editors in the day-to-day course of events.

Fergal Keane: Rodney Pinder formerly of Reuters television, I know has a question on this issue, feels passionate about it.

Rodney Pinder: Yes well it's quite a straightforward journalistic question, if I may, I'm not casting any doubt on the material that is put out. I would like to ask the broadcasters whether they would go straight to air with material they got from aid agencies, or if not how would they would handle it? How would they check it? How would they follow the normal journalistic procedures with what is after all a hand out? How would they check it out and indeed if it was dramatic enough would they be put it straight on air?

Fergal Keane: Caroline Howie that is a decision you're going to have to make.

Caroline Howie: Yes I think I agree with Carol that journalism is all about sources and this is difficult but it is not the first time we've faced this issue about receiving material shot or provided by another agency. Would I go straight to air with something I wasn't a hundred per cent sure of? No I wouldn't. I think a lot depends on the labelling of that material and sometimes that material would undoubtedly be useful. I wouldn't feel comfortable about using that material as the sole way of covering a major story but it may be very useful in alerting us to a story.

Fergal Keane: Virginie do you think that journalists and aid workers should have links there are that close?

Virginie Miranda-Louis: We are close anyway in the fact that we share the same field of conflict but our roles have to be very separate. We at ICRC, as a source, are very useful to journalists to give good background briefings, because we have a continuity there, we can help journalists to focus and point out to them the different challenges they will face.

Fergal Keane: Would you take footage of your own that you have paid for that you have sent a cameraman out to do and then market that to other outlets in the media?

Virginie Miranda-Louis: We do we have regular productions where we take pictures in the places that only the ICRC has access to, in the places we are working and where we know people. This footage is there to alert, maybe I shouldn't use the word alert but to show people the reality of what we are doing and facing and show people's living conditions.

Fergal Keane: Let's just show people a little bit of the footage you commissioned, you sent Catherine Bond a great Africa reporter off to do in Africa.

(Runs tape)

Rodney Pinder you watched that, what's wrong with that? Why are you annoyed at aid agencies going out, shooting their own pictures and sending them to us?

Rodney Pinder: I'm not annoyed I just think that aid agencies are aid agencies, they are not journalists they haven't got a professional training, they haven't got the background of professional journalists. They have a job to do and they do it extremely well. But we have to draw the line there how do we check, how do we look at it. You talked earlier about how stories are hyped, undoubtedly they are and how do you check this out, these pictures can be very powerful. The other question of course is even if they are used are they properly labelled and are they probably identified?

Fergal Keane: But you are still not going to know how they were shot, you can't talk to the cameraman or the producer.

Rodney Pinder: No, and that's my problem.

Greg Barrow: I would say that we should be treated like any other source that you use and if you trust us then you should run our pictures. I know at the World Food Agency we have never had people come back six weeks later and say that the pictures we showed them were wrong.

Fergal Keane: Ah come off it Greg that's a bit naive, we don't trust anybody.

Greg Barrow: We are one of your sources in the field, we can get to places that you can't and we can provide you with this material, if we do wrong then you have to punish us for that. But wait until we do that, if we are providing you with good material then I don't see what's wrong.

Fergal Keane: Salim Amin you actually worked on this ICRC project.

Salim Amin: Yes we shot the material and I think our credibility is pretty good. I don't think we would actually go out and do stories that we thought were being set up by aid agencies in order to exaggerate the crisis but there has to be co-operation between aid agencies and independent production houses. There is no way that we as Camerapix would have been able to get into Darfur We wouldn't have been able to afford it. None of the broadcasters would have commissioned it, as Phil found out for himself. We need the aid agencies and I don't think we've crossed the line. Let me go back to the famine in 1984 in Ethiopia, the plane that took my father and Michael Burke to Ethiopia was a World Vision plane, World Vision didn't have the permits he did and it was a collaboration that everybody knows it ended up being. That is where it can be very helpful.

George Hoff CBC: On the UN pictures we haven't seen them yet so I don't think we should judge the material. I certainly would be very reluctant to use it without attributing it so my instinct at the beginning would be, as Rodney said, to have it signposted as to who took it and why. Often the co-operation between and the working together to get to places is something that I think we do regularly in these situations and we can't get there without the help and support of these agencies.

Fergal Keane: I think there's a word floating around here that nobody has used yet and that is trust. And one thing I pick up along the road on both sides is a lack of trust about what our motives are and about what agenda we are trying to push. Carol Bellamy what have you taken from what you've heard in the last few minutes particularly from the journalists who seem to be very wary?

Carol Bellamy: I'm a little bit concerned about that actually. I know you mentioned it a few times but I hadn't noticed it and I'm going to go with some of what Greg said; if we do something, any of us, that ultimately you conclude had mislead you then we are dead meat from then on. So certainly we would have to avoid doing that report.

Fergal Keane: But it's happened you saw that yourself in the Great Lakes where aid agencies inflated statistics. It happens and I'm just putting it out there that there are unprecedented levels of mistrust at the moment.

Greg Barrow: I think you're right to put it out there, a thing we learn from experience and learn from mistakes and we try to make sure that it doesn't happen again. There are a couple of other issues I would like to raise, one is the labelling issue, we would be delighted if our material was labelled more...

Fergal Keane: You were pretty annoyed at MSF material not being labelled properly am I right?

Rony Brauman: There is no general approach to this, sometimes it is labelled, sometimes the source is clear and sometimes it is not. And when it's not labelled it is a real problem to the media CEO's and the journalists themselves. I think that all this discussion shows that there is a problematic vacuum and it refers us to the problems of the media today. The lack of coverage that was underlined at the beginning of this conversation shows that despite a major crisis unfolding in Africa it raises hardly any interest in international media. So do they still deserve the title international media? Or are we just condemned to watch local affairs and issues on TV news programmes? If there is a vacuum than the World Food Programme, MSF, ICRC, the UN and the other humanitarian players are trying to fill it at their own interest. We try to communicate that that is the case and I don't think anybody can criticise us for doing so.

Fergal Keane: I think definitely the war in Iraq is sucking up so much media oxygen.

Mohamed Gohar: We have an outfit providing news and broadcast information in Darfur now. That job has two phases one is telling the truth and the second is getting evidence for that; anybody can get the truth and transfer it but the skill is in getting the evidence. So it is all right for humanitarian organisations to film the truth, you can get the truth from anybody but you need a good journalist to give the evidence.

Fergal Keane: And what about the lies of silence, we've been talking about exaggeration and things being hyped up but what about a situation and we all know they exist, exists in Darfur now, where aid agencies keep shtum because they don't want to get thrown out of the country. The reasons I had given to me are very sound credible reasons, that if we speak out to the media and highlight what is happening then we won't be able to continue our humanitarian work. Is that valid, is that proper?


Philip Cox: I think what people are discussing here is a major change. What are the aid agencies actually doing? Are they there to provide aid or are they there to become the news service? Because my experience in Darfur for example staying with MSF. MSF were shut down in 1989 I believe it was because they spoke out about the government and they were very much with journalists, "be careful when you are around us, I don't really want you in this camp", and of course we have to respect that and yes we do need each other but this is a major role change from the aid agencies and I wonder how they feel about their own positions in these countries because they will then be seen very differently by the governments. We as journalists understand that and have to find our own integral line in that.

Fergal Keane: What you believe aid agencies are not speaking out, not all of them but most of them are not speaking out, are not saying what's happening?

Philip Cox: No and they definitely hype it up because they need to.

Fergal Keane: But in terms of how the Sudanese government is mistreating its civilians, ethnic cleansing, killing? Someone speaking on-camera giving evidence.

Philip Cox: I think in some cases for example Save the Children they have bases deep in Darfur and they don't want the risk of being kicked out. And we understand that when they walk a tightrope but if they are now going to become a media organisation, and I believe firmly in the power of the image I have worked with Amnesty, the images from Abu Ghraib, we know from Darfur years before documentation what was going on in these places, as soon as you get the images the news organisations can work with it. It's a very precarious line that you are taking and I'm for it and the consequences of what you're doing that I have been told by yourselves. I'm just surprised that I'm hearing it so fervently.

Greg Barrow: First of all I don't think any aid agency or NGO is trying to become a news organisation of any sort and we would all share that. But I think like any big organisation we have to communicate. So your contact with these organisations is a tiny part of the work that they do: being dedicated to looking after children or feeding people in these camps. Secondly I don't think that any of us think that we have to hype the situation to make it appear worse than it is, you yourself have been to Chad and to Darfur. It is not a situation that needs hyping. A thing that what we need to do and why we are doing it is to persuade people that this wretched situation is enough on its own and we need to find ways of enticing people to get there and cover it.

Hosam El Sokkari BBC Arabic Service: There was a time when we found it difficult to co-operate with aid agencies and their representatives because they didn't want to jeopardise their job on the ground. Now we can see quite a dramatic shift in the sense that they are taking an almost proactive approach in covering it. Would they be able to be consistent in doing that and would that only be applicable where the political forces on the ground are weak enough to allow this to happen and at the same time you won't be able to do this in parts of the world where you may be worried?

Fergal Keane: So do you mean that they are talking loud and filming things in the Sudan because they can get away with it there?

Hosam El Sokkari: Yes.

Carol Bellamy: I was trying to think, why the shift and let me come back to that. First of all, 99 per cent of the work we do is not out there providing feeds for people it is trying to do what ever our work is and hopefully we are doing it well. But we are confronting a couple of things. Talking about NGOs ICRC and the UN, a dramatic explosion of humanitarian crises around the world, that fact that we're so self reliant, we're all reliant on resources coming in with a great amount of aid fatigue, and you said it yourself, Iraq is just sucking up everybody's attention at the moment and so the pressure of humanitarian work is the pressure to try and get more information out there. I don't think that any of us, yes we have a communication capacity but it's one of about 80 people we have in the country and I don't think that any of us want to turn ourselves into communications machines.

Philip Cox: But the government then sees you with cameras and that changes the whole thing it doesn't matter whether it's one person out of 200, if images of this atrocity come out and it's got Red Cross on it.

Carol Bellamy: I think it's a challenge we have and we have to measure that challenge, if we're too noisy we get kicked out and we're useless and if we're too quiet and we stay in we're useless.

Fergal Keane: You get accused of being complicit by not speaking out.

Caroline Howie: My level of discomfort is slightly raised and I think this relates back to some of the conversation we had earlier to problems for news organisations covering these sort of stories. Often the scarcer the resources become the greater the danger. What worries me is that it will be only too easy to rely on this sort of material, even if we are uncomfortable with it. So I'm interested to hear other people's comments on that.

Fergal Keane: So do you really believe that if you label something it is going to make much of a difference to the person who's watching the screen, they are really going to make the difference?

Caroline Howie: No I think that's a very good point and I think it's one that we need to think about very closely because in Iraq at the moment we have a lot of material that's coming to us all which is not first-hand material to us.

Fergal Keane: So the labelling becomes a fig leaf really

Caroline Howie: Well no not a fig leaf but I do think you need to explain to audiences that actually your people might not been on the ground and have witnessed the event that you are reporting on.

Greg Barrow: Where do you stop, how many members of the public know that we rely on APTN and Reuters for their material? People don't understand that.

Fergal Keane: The next section that I have written on this piece of paper is "I'm a celebrity get me into there". One of the tactics that is used increasingly by aid agencies and I have to say by the BBC through comic relief is of getting celebrities or well known people to go to disaster areas to raise the profile of that area, and somehow relate it to people back home. And we are now joined by one of the people who has done that recently in Darfur. Mia Farrow what was it that prompted you or inspired you to go to Darfur?

Mia Farrow: Well, I am a mother of 14 children and a grand mother of three and UNICEF is goodwill ambassador so when they asked me to go I leapt at the chance because I think all of us are trying to do something to help knowing the situation there.

Fergal Keane: We are just going to look at some of the video of you in Darfur now.

(Runs tape)

Mia Farrow, in going to Darfur what was it you hoped to achieve?

Mia Farrow: It is an over-simplification to say I'm a celebrity get me there. It is two-fold, I think, the role of a goodwill UNICEF ambassador. One, to meet with higher ups in government there: in Khartoum we met with several ministers and several people from the American administration there. And then travelling through the Darfur region we met local governors and in each case we raised the concerns of the international community and the humanitarian community; what is being done for the protection of women for example? That was a question that I asked of everyone. It would be presumptuous to say that we were putting pressure on a government but one is hoping to make a government feel more responsible and perhaps every little bit that comes in underlines that and I was also very curious as to what is being done. So across Darfur where ever we were able to travel - almost half of the camps as you know are inaccessible - everywhere I went I spoke to women and heard them talk of the inability of the women to go and get their daily firewood, used not only for the cooking but also as a currency in the camps. I learned a great deal about the condition of women there. I met with the general from the African Union, this is a case where I think that any celebrity I have is being put to good use, and I asked the general what he was doing towards the protection of the women in the IDP camps. I said we were all aware of the new African union mandate and that it had been expanded to include the word protection. He told me that he didn't have the capacity, there were only 800 troops on the ground the amount expected was 3200 and even with that full capacity he said it was impossible to implement that part of the mandate. So I was able to come back here and speak to people and ask who do we go to to get the wording in the mandate made stronger? I was able to come back here and talk to various news networks, good morning shows all across the country and in London too and tell them about the conditions in the camps, tells them about the conditions these women face on a daily basis having zero protection with these rapes ongoing and the camps already filled, swelling past capacity with villages being burned on a daily basis. And I saw with my own eyes flying over the camps and the villages and I lost count of the amount of burning villages as I was coming in. So without any hype and I brought my video camera because we were unsure whether there would be any press accompanying us, there was a Reuters person and we were grateful to have him there. I came back with two hours of my own footage and I am proud and happy to put my name to it, I turned it over to UNICEF they can use it or not, so I hope I will have served a purpose.

Fergal Keane: Mia Farrow thank you very much, there is another source of pictures for you in the future! Carol Bellamy are the press being lazy; do they need the lure of celebrities? The power of a celebrity name to get the news on to the front page?

Carol Bellamy: I don't think the press is lazy at all.

Fergal Keane: Some people in UNICEF do think that. I have spoken to them and they have said that to me. Particularly in America they think there is an idleness an addiction to celebrity which means that no major story in the world except Iraq is ever going to get on air unless you have somebody who is famous mediating it.

Carol Bellamy: I was going to say, I think there is an addiction, I don't think it is only in the US maybe it's more in the US, it is awfully bad there but I do think that celebrity plays a role in a world which is a very noisy world, you don't even have your fifteen seconds of fame any more you have your five seconds and celebrity sometimes gives you an opportunity to focus on something. I think that for most of us and a number of organisations use celebrity now and we take care and we really ask of our celebrities they can't just go, come and stand there, they've got to learn something about it,

Fergal Keane: Because we've had this week the whole Band Aid thing and Live Aid thing, 20 years on being kicked off again. Is anyone uncomfortable with the fact that here they are and let's just talk about Live Aid for a second, raising money for famine relief in Sudan. Is famine the problem at the moment in Sudan?

Carol Bellamy: No!

Fergal Keane: What do you think of the whole Live Aid thing?

Carol Bellamy: I think Live Aid is good because it focuses on an issue that's in the news again, it creates more interest in it.

Fergal Keane: But if you said anything else you'd bee eaten alive by the moral majority, the sanctimonious majority!

Greg Barrow: I think there's a degree if you think this through to which the bar has been set really high in terms of what sparks public interest in issues in Africa. You can look back 20 years to those pictures that Salim's father shot, in a sense that's the bar and anything below that doesn't quite make the grade doesn't interest people. At the WFP we're always saying that 800 million people around the world know what it's like to go to bed hungry, they're not starving they're not involved in any famines they just lead wretched lives where they're malnourished and they suffer from the diseases associated with it. But it's very difficult to persuade people that that's something worth covering.

Fergal Keane: Why's that so difficult?

Greg Barrow: Because it doesn't present the dramatic image. I get calls at my office in London from journalists who say if I get there will I see a skeleton? It's not something that makes me feel good, it's unpleasant, the answer is no you won't but maybe you will see something else that might surprise you and maybe you're coming at this story from the wrong direction?

Jim Bittermann: I hate to be cynical about this but you said you didn't want sanctimonious so let's be cynical and I'm very happy to hear you mention the money word because I know Rony Brauman's organisation very well, I live and work in Paris, I use his archives and I've made stories from his archives but also MSF is fantastic at fundraising connected to journalism within a week of stories hitting the front page they'll have letters and I know this because I contribute to these organisations and I get the letters. They'll have 100,000 letters going out saying, you've seen this on the TV, you've seen it in the headlines, send in your money. There's an awful lot of this goes on in connection with the news that we do. And one more thing my colleague...

Fergal Keane: What's wrong with that?

Jim Bittermannn: Then there's a reason to make sure that there are headlines about this in the news.

Fergal Keane: But that's quite a serious allegation!

Jim Bittermann: Well the situation in the Great lakes where we were mislead about the camp with 100,000 people in it and 100 people a day dying and when we got there there was no such activity going on.

Fergal Keane: Rony Brauman in Paris did you hear that?

Rony Brauman: I don't agree with that. We have a programme of fundraising campaigns that are set at the beginning of each year and it doesn't depend on what's in the headlines. Of course like any organisation we try to be in the news, we try to have reports on what we do but we're not so powerful that we can explore it straight away, the images of our doctors whether in Darfur or the Great Lakes or wherever. So we use the photographs and the footage of us to prove that we are active.

Jim Bittermann: I've seen the fundraising letters go out, I've been a recipient of the fundraising letters and they come out whenever there is a story in the headlines, whether it be Darfur or Chechnya, whatever story you manage to synchronise with the news the fundraising letters go out. It's not just your organisation I'm sure others do it as well.

Fergal Keane: Rony Brauman I just want to bring you back to the matter we were discussing and that was the matter of celebrity and humanitarian tragedies. What do you feel when you see the Live Aid single being recorded and we're being asked to give money for famine and while I would argue that while hunger is a problem it is patently obvious in the Sudan that the real problem is a political one.

Rony Brauman: We had been trying to raise awareness about Darfur for months and months so it wasn't a coincidence when our fundraising letters went out it's just that our efforts were achieved and our efforts formed the agenda. When it comes to Live Aid, I am not a friend of Live Aid or of celebrities going into the field, because of what happened with Band Aid and Live Aid in Ethiopia, the celebration of the 20^th anniversary of Band Aid isn't a source of joy for me, it is a reason to mourn. Live Aid helped the Menghistu regime the Ethiopian government to mislead the public and hide what was being done with the relief, and the food aid, and the massive logistical effort was helping the government falsely relocate hundreds of thousands of people. In 1985 this false relocation called 'resettlement and villagisation' was the first cause of death, it wasn't famine or war. And we as part of the relief community were part of this terrible drive against the population, so aid can be turned against the so-called beneficiaries. Sometimes we enter into a conflict of interests and then it's difficult to explain or give our analysis of what the situation is and I don't think that celebrities or rock stars are there to shed light on the situation, it is for the field players themselves to explain what the stakes are, what the responsibilities are and what the situation is.

Fergal Keane: Mia Farrow, celebrities shouldn't be there they don't do any good?

Mia Farrow: I understand where he is coming from but I have been known to the public for over 40 years since I was 17 years old, so I have a base of people who are happy to listen to me and if that can be used to raise awareness and financial support for UNICEFs aims and objectives in a country that badly needs it I can't see any harm in that.

Fergal Keane: Is it proper for news organisations, and we all do it, it's not just the BBC, to become part effectively of giant fundraising machines? Recently BBC News took part in a Darfur day which was organised by the Disasters Emergency Committee. Is that a proper thing for a journalist to do? We've been giving the aid agencies a hard time but what about what may get out of it and how we may be used?

Helen Boaden BBC: I think you have to separate journalism from the rest of the BBC. The BBC has two official charities which it supports, one is Children in Need, which is happening this weekend which is mainly for UK-based fundraising but not exclusively and the other is Comic Relief, which is about 3^rd and 4^th World issues. And the organisation is good at separating out the journalism from the broader commitment of a publicly funded organisation. We think pretty hard about where those two things might overlap but I don't see it as a major issue. One of the things that really interests me about this discussion is the sense that we are somehow casting the journalists as somehow victims and I wonder how we've managed to get ourselves in that position?

Carol Bellamy: I'm sitting here thinking we're doing what we should be doing, we're trying to do our work, we're trying to raise money and send out pictures to call attention to what's going on but I mean it's a two-way street. How are the news agencies reacting I think it isn't appropriate to take pictures of something without checking it out, it seems to me and I keep coming back to 50/50 maybe it's 45/55 but I think we're doing what we're supposed to be doing as long as we're out there doing good work in the field. And then you've got to do what you're doing which is you've got to make judgements, you've got to be clear headed, you've got to make sure you are unbiased, I'm not trying to tell you your business! I think there's a burden on your shoulders.

Helen Boaden: I genuinely don't know the background to the Great Lakes story, unfortunately I came in slightly late to this session, but there's an onus on us to check things out before we go somewhere and it seems to me quite so punitive about what seems to be quite a serious error in terms of aid agencies potentially misleading us but every single day that's our job, to check out the accuracy of what we're being told whether it be by an aid agency, a politician or the woman down the road.

Margaret Ward RTE: I think as editors it behoves all of us to think about how we educate the people that we send to cover these stories. I know that the first story I went to of this nature I was parachuted in and probably was quite gullible to a lot of the lines fed to me by aid agencies and so on. Since then I've developed a healthy working relationship with those agencies and I think we've all learned things over the years. There was an Irish incident in Somalia a few years ago that became known as the battle of the T-shirts where there were all these aid workers in their T-shirts trying to be photographed beside our president when she arrived in Baldoa. I think they've learned from that and so have we. Now when we travel with aid agencies, we are there to look at the wider story, the humanitarian thing may only be a part of that. I'm not trying to be sanctimonious.

Fergal Keane: How often have journalists, and let's not exclude ourselves, critically examined how aid agencies work? Surely there's a reason for us not doing that and it's that we depend on them.

Margaret Ward: I think journalists have a genuine goodwill toward aid agencies and don't examine things in the way they should. And I have seen some very bad examples particularly in Afghanistan of aid agencies and how they work and we have done a story where after the fall of the Taliban there was a flood of agencies into Kabul with all sorts of projects, particularly women who set up sewing courses that lasted 12 weeks and left town and hadn't even researched the market, those women who were taught sewing couldn't get work doing it anyway because of the cheap stuff coming from Pakistan and China anyway. Certainly the Irish agencies don't come to us as much asking us to come and see their new nutrition programme where we are weighing children and feeding them? They come to us with policy issues and say next year is the year of Africa are you interested can we find you some interesting stories to do and I think that we both have to learn that this is the way to go.

Fergal Keane: One of the complaints that I hear all the time travelling in Africa from African journalists, commentators and ordinary Africans is that we the western media treat their continent as some kind of vast theme park of horror, that the only people who can speak for Africans is white aid workers, at least they're the only people that we are interested in interviewing and the only people who can mediate their stories are white reporters like myself. And so for this closing part I want to look at something that I think is probably quite important and that is how we represent Africa and what are we going to do to change the way we represent Africa. Patrick can I just ask you what you think about a situation where more than 90% of the coverage of Africa is done by people like me and not by Africans?

Patrick Muiruri: Part of the problem with that is that you have people basically like she said, parachuting in from out there they've just seen that there's people dying and they want to find them, half the time it's the big names and what that will do to the people on the ground the local journalists, if you're going in with an aid agency the news will get round that Christiane Amanpour is coming in and suddenly they don't really care about the rest of the story, it's 'Christane Amanpour is coming in, we'll take her, we'll take her there' and suddenly she's gone and the story dies.

Fergal Keane: What about the 'white angel of mercy' syndrome which all of us have had a part in from time to time? Greg Barrow as a journalist you covered Sudan and now as an aid worker you're involved in interesting journalists in what's happening there, do you accept there is a major crisis in the way Africa is represented?

Greg Barrow: Yes I think it is an issue that challenges broadcasters, newspapers and humanitarian agencies like the one I work for.

Fergal Keane: How many African spokespeople do you have?

Greg Barrow: I couldn't give you a number right now but I can say that in Sudan at the moment we have 65 international staff and 300 Sudanese. We're there to feed people not to communicate.

Fergal Keane: Be realistic how often is an African going to be speaking for your organisation on international channels about Sudan?

Greg Barrow: Not as often as it should and I'd be the first person to admit that it's something that we're examining and looking for ways around it but we haven't got there yet.

Salim Amin: We've all been in this business long enough to know that economics dictates how stories are going to be told and how much time is going to be spent on them. We try relentlessly to push stories and it doesn't become a big story until someone like you Fergal comes in and then all of a sudden it's big. In terms of white aid workers being shown against African aid workers, in the early days and I doubt it's the same now but the BBC had a policy whereby if you didn't speak English you weren't going to be interviewed. That's changed. There are subtitles and things like that now but perhaps people at home can relate more to a white aid worker on screen, I don't know what the psyche of an American or European audience is on that but we are badly represented.

Fergal Keane: If anybody goes back and looks at how the Congo was covered in the 1960s, one of the first great televised humanitarian problems, the language has changed a little bit but not that much and you don't really see a great change in how Africa is represented on the TV news in particular.

Carol Bellamy: I think for some of the UN agencies we have a pretty diverse staff, I don't have the numbers but I would say that 1/3 of our reps in Africa are African. But I think that journalists have got to do better. I just wanted to throw another issue in because I want to be provocative. One of the problems we're having particularly with local staff who are spokespeople at humanitarian emergencies that are the results of actions within a country is that very often they become victims themselves. And as good as they are as human beings they aren't always able to see beyond it, whether it's an ethnic or religious or tribal conflict.

Fergal Keane: Caroline Howie, I put George Barrow on the spot a moment ago asking him about the number of African spokespeople he had talking about Africa's problems, how many African reporters have popped up on BBC World to talk about Africa?

Caroline Howie: I can't think of any.

Fergal Keane: Full marks for honesty, do you think that tells anything about the way that Africa is being represented?

Caroline Howie: We do have African reporters on the World Service radio who largely work for the African language service and they often don't broadcast in English. Whereas the BBC has made great strides in South Asia for example where two of the best correspondents on the region are from the region, we haven't achieved the same in Africa, I can't answer why and it's obviously something we have to make headway on.

Fergal Keane: Adrian van Klaveren, head of news gathering for the BBC and also responsible for recruitment, why don't we, and I'm not singling out the BBC, it's just that it's an issue that I feel passionate about unapologetically. So why on earth 40 years after Congo, through Biafra, through Ethiopia, through Somalia is it still white faces almost all the time?

Adrian van Klaveren: It's still a huge issue for us and as you know Fergal one of the people running our Africa coverage is an African called Milton Nkozi and that's important for us to have an African making the key decisions, what stories we cover and how we cover them, that's a big step forward for us. On air clearly there is a very long way to go. It's one of the things about international news reporting in terms of the mix we've actually got, in most parts of the world the people reporting on that part of the world are not from that part of the world originally and there are some disadvantages as well as advantages out of that. But what we have to do is to identify the best people to report on those places, we have to look at those roles and develop people through, I think one of the issues for the BBC as Caroline was saying is what we can do with the African service and try and bring people through, we're not in position yet.

Fergal Keane: But are you committed to doing more?

Adrian van Klaveren: We are working much more closely with the African service than we ever have before to try and bring people through. You've heard people talk about on the BBC, one of the ways that that becomes a reality is by helping people come through the system and that means making it on the major network news programmes in a way that has not happened so far certainly.

Fergal Keane: As we go into the final stages I want to ask our key participants for one point that they think will make an agenda for change. But before that I want to show you a piece that I and some colleagues shot last week in Sudan and to me this is a piece that could not have happened without the help of aid agencies.

(Runs tape)

The thing about that piece as I said before is that it would never have made air without the help, and I won't name the agency in case the Sudanese are listening, of aid workers who took great risks to get the tape out of the place, to get us to a safe location in the town and who provided us with the facilities to do our work. It struck me as a brilliant example of how we can cooperate best. It wasn't institutionalised, it happened on the spur of the moment between two sets of people who realised that something important had happened and should be brought to the world. Before I come to our panellists I want to speak to Jim from CNN: would you accept that in broad terms the relationship works?

Jim Bittermann: Absolutely, I've been in the field in Sudan and been with aid agencies, ridden in their transport, I've depended on aid agencies to cover stories too. One thing I'd just like to bring up is what my former colleague Susan Farkas is up to with this APTN feed. Not only is there a journalistic risk of not labelling things in an era when news room budgets are being cut back, there are fewer foreign correspondents working for the national broadcast outlets in the US, the temptation to use this footage with Andrea Mitchell standing in front of the State Department using footage from an agency and maybe not identifying it after a while presents us with another problem and that's something the aid agencies should consider and that is do you want to have compassion fatigue on a 24/7 level? If you're going to be constantly feeding out pictures that show the world suffering, don't you run the risk of having networks and local stations dipping in to this material all the time?

Susan Farkas: A couple of things: not all the footage you're going to see on the APTN/UN feed is going to be humanitarian crises and people starving there are a lot of other issues that interest the UN some of them quite mundane, some agricultural issues, some environmental issues that we're going to try and get people interested in but the fundamental thing is that we don't get people on the news unless it's really dramatic footage or unless there's a celebrity involved, the reason we use celebrities is because it works.

Fergal Keane: If I could begin to wrap up, Virginie what do you think the media could do better?

Virginie Miranda-Louis: I think what we could work better on is to strive together for an independent space for humanitarian workers to do their job independently and for journalists to do their job, reporting.

Carol Bellamy: First of all I don't think we should criticise this new effort before we see if it works, secondly I don't know if this is better but we probably need a way of resolving these issues, better communication to deal with that mistrust, it may only create more mistrust.

Patrick Muiruri: I think the answer is simple, get your facts straight, get your background right, get it all cleared up and if you do have to work with aid agencies to get in as Jim said we do it.

Fergal Keane: Stop being precious about it?

Patrick Muiruri: Just make sure you aren't doing any propaganda, just cover the story.

Salim Amin: I take Susan's point, our job is to get as much stuff out as possible. We've got to make sure that people can't say they didn't know, whether they do anything about it is not our problem, that's the aid agency's problem.

Caroline Howie: I think, if we're accepting a bit of personal responsibility it's the job of people like myself to have a commitment to these stories not just conflict and conflict resolution, more diverse stories on the continent altogether.

Fergal Keane: So when the cameras go away from Darfur we've got to keep going back?

Caroline Howie: We do have to follow up. We followed up in Darfur, we followed up in Rwanda this year and various other places where I'm sure we should be.

Fergal Keane: Rony Brauman what would you say the media could do as someone who has watched them for so many years, what could we do to improve?

Rony Brauman: For me the key word there was follow-up, for the viewer is also a humanitarian player. That's what's lacking. We know what's happening in Darfur. I hope that in 6 months from now new reports whether printed or video inform us as viewers what is going on not only from a relief point of view but also from a political and human point of view. Besides this I think that as a humanitarian actor everyone should be committed to their own work, the humanitarian workers to their actions and the reporters to their reporting.

Fergal Keane: Listening to all this patiently is Mia Farrow in New York, Mia one final word from you.

Mia Farrow: Here in the US a Californian murder case has gotten more media hours than the issue of Darfur so I would wish for a clearer sense of priority from the national and international press. And the word follow-up has been used, that it wasn't just a sensation of the moment and soon forgotten. Humanitarian workers need ongoing support and I think we all have a shared responsibility to support that whatever the kinks in the relationship are, they are minor to the larger responsibility that we all share.

Fergal Keane: Greg Barrow finally to you, you've worked as an aid worker and a journalist before that. Can I just ask you because you and I have been to many discussions and listened to many hours of pious rhetoric about the role of journalists and aid workers, there was a great deal of frankness today which was wonderful even a little cynicism but is there do you believe some way of taking this forward? Is there an institutional framework we should be thinking about as journalists and aid workers for a continuing discussion for evolving some set of ground rules?

Greg Barrow: I think we have to recognise that we are two different beasts. I think there's been an attempt today to say that we're together somehow in this and the relationship's slightly awkward, we are different, we do different things but we work in the same area and I would just like to say what I set out saying that just as important as it is to come to meetings like this and exchange ideas and learn new things I think it's important for some of the people in this room to go out and see where their reporters are. We as agencies would be more than delighted to take them and show them these places. There is maybe mistrust but mistrust can be overcome by a better understanding and that's one straightforward and easy way of doing it.

Fergal Keane: Tickets for those tours to Darfur are available from the reception outside. Many thanks to everybody for the challenging insights and contributions, many thanks.