The disaster—media—relief nexus

Abstract

This guest editorial reviews the now well recognized interdependence of aid and journalism, especially television, and the ubiquity of marketing considerations for humanitarian agencies in their drive for profile and funds. The potentially democratizing technologies of the internet and the mobile phone, as well as noticeable advances in non‐Western communications media, have been hailed by some commentators as heralding a radical change. It is argued here, however, that the tensions exposed in the 1970s by the Unesco‐sponsored MacBride Report, and in the associated campaign for a‘New World Information Order’, were never resolved and remain deep‐seated. The article draws on Sidney Mintz's classic historical study of the production and consumption of sugar to propose that, in the political economy of disasters and relief aid, a continuous export flow of disaster imagery is processed by media organizations for consumption in the North, which reciprocates through the Southwards provision of aid. The banana industry, a market‐led oligopoly, is adduced as a provocative metaphor. Finally it is suggested that transnational NGOs and their anthropological advisers could now have a major role in challenging the dominant market‐oriented model of a global information society.