Abstract
This article aims to establish whether the news media adopt a responsibility to report when covering humanitarian crises. It explores British press coverage of the genocide in Darfur and finds that the British press maintains traditional and ethnocentric frameworks that undermine the need for responsible reporting. Ultimately, the news values of negativity, elite people and elite nations have determined coverage of the Darfur crisis, and official and Western sources have been used to maintain credibility and a sense of identification with the domestic setting. Geopolitical biases continue to determine what stories are newsworthy, and political context remains scant. Sparse use of foreign correspondents and meagre inclusion of personal experiences suggest that journalists remain detached from the crisis, urging political rather than humanitarian intervention. This article concludes that the British press maintains institutionalised approaches to reporting humanitarian crises by avoiding attachment.
Highlights
Humanitarian crises vary in nature; they can be manmade or natural and can happen overnight or over a long period of time
In the 60 articles identified through LexisNexis, coverage of Darfur was relatively episodic, giving credibility to Girardet’s (2006: 57) theory that news media can only deal with one crisis at a time
The situation in Darfur was no different. This has led to growing calls for journalism to evolve from a passive and neutral profession to a craft of reporting that can strike a balance between conveying sheer horror and emotional reactions and conveying the political, social, economic, military, cultural and relief/development issues underlying crises (Shiras, 1996: 94)
Summary
Humanitarian crises vary in nature; they can be manmade or natural and can happen overnight or over a long period of time. There has long been a broadly acknowledged need for international responsibility and activism in order to counter humanitarian crises. This led to a global agreement in the aftermath of World War II that humankind should never again bear witness to humanitarian crimes. Eleven years after the slaughter of the Tutsi population in Rwanda in 1994, the 1948 Convention was revived and the Responsibility to Protect agreement was signed at the 2005 UN World Summit.2 According to this agreement, the signatories (i.e. states and the international community as a whole) are responsible for protecting groups identified as victims of genocide and for preventing atrocities Eleven years after the slaughter of the Tutsi population in Rwanda in 1994, the 1948 Convention was revived and the Responsibility to Protect agreement was signed at the 2005 UN World Summit. According to this agreement, the signatories (i.e. states and the international community as a whole) are responsible for protecting groups identified as victims of genocide and for preventing atrocities
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