Date: Thu, 23 Oct 2014 23:34:03 +0200
Ethiopian famine: how landmark BBC report influenced modern coverage
Thirty years on, Michael Buerk’s broadcast remains a watershed moment in
crisis reporting, but what is its lasting legacy?
Posted by
Suzanne Franks
Wednesday 22 October 2014 15.02 BST
The 30th anniversary of a key moment in modern TV journalism will be marked
on 23 October: Michael Buerk’s broadcast of a “biblical famine”, filmed in a
remote part of northern Ethiopia. The images shot by Kenyan cameraman
Mohammed Amin, together with Buerk’s powerful words, produced one of the
most famous television reports of the late 20th century.
Long before satellite, social media and YouTube, the BBC news item from
Ethiopia went viral – transmitted by 425 television stations worldwide. It
was even broadcast on a major US news channel, without revoicing Buerk’s
original English commentary – something that was almost unheard of. Bob
Geldof viewed the news that day and, as a result, that famine report
eventually became the focus of a new style of celebrity fundraising. This
produced another key television memory, the Live Aid extravaganza in July
1985, which itself became a transforming moment in modern media history.
In the aftermath of Buerk’s news story there were handwringing postmortems
within aid agencies and governments. Why had no one been able to focus
crucial media attention much earlier, when the widespread food shortages
were first becoming evident? The conclusion was that often a famine is only
judged to be newsworthy once horrible images are present. But, worryingly,
after
<http://www.theguardian.com/global-development/poverty-matters/2011/sep/30/e
ast-africa-crisis-soul-searching> the famine in east Africa in 2011, similar
criticism of media interest coming too late was still being made.
Today, the same thing is happening elsewhere in Africa. BBC correspondent
<https://twitter.com/Doylebytes/status/484589170468618240> Mark Doyle
tweeted in July 2014 that “famines are sexy, predicting them is not,”
drawing attention to a report on
<http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-africa-28143584> the approaching disaster
in South Sudan. Just as in 1980s Ethiopia and 2011 Somalia, the conclusions
of <http://www.theguardian.com/books/2001/mar/31/society.politics> Amartya
Sen are being played out: famine is not a natural disaster but a result of
<http://www.spectator.co.uk/features/7141183/drought-didnt-cause-somalias-fa
mine/> social and political factors, where vulnerable groups lose their
entitlement to food.
The preference for keeping the story simple omits the crucial social and
political context of famine. In 1984 the authoritarian Ethiopian regime of
Mengistu Haile Mariam was fighting a civil war against Tigrayan and Eritrean
insurgents. It is no accident that these were the areas starving because, to
a large extent, the government was deliberately causing the famine. It was
bombing markets and trade convoys to disrupt food supply chains. Defence
spending accounted for half of Ethiopia’s GDP and the Soviet-backed army was
the largest in sub-Saharan Africa.
Yet this story of man-made misery was sidestepped. Instead, the reporting
was about failing rains, which kept things simple for both journalists and
aid agencies. This also suited an authoritarian government that did not want
foreign journalists nosing around. The UK government also stuck to the
simple narrative. The urgent departmental response group, which met daily to
brief senior ministers in reaction to the BBC news reports, called itself
the Ethiopian drought group – in the belief that this was what the problem
was all about.
It was not only the simplification that impaired the reporting but crucial
omissions and a misunderstanding of much of the aid effort. The Tigrayan
guerilla leader, Meles Zenawi, later Ethiopia’s prime minister, admitted
<http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/africa/8535189.stm> how easily the rebels
could fool the western agencies and use the aid for military purposes.
The Ethiopian government also had deliberate strategies to manipulate
donations in pursuit of its brutal resettlement policies. Victims of famine
were lured into feeding camps only to be forced on to planes and
<https://www.culturalsurvival.org/ourpublications/csq/article/the-politics-f
amine-ethiopia> transported far away from their homes.
<http://www.theguardian.com/world/2005/jun/24/g8.debtrelief> Some estimate
the number of deaths from this policy to be higher than those from famine.
And again, the secrecy and brutality of Mengistu’s regime made it relatively
straightforward to divert aid and deceive outsiders. Some aid agencies,
including Médecins sans Frontières, realised what was happening and
protested – leading to their expulsion from Ethiopia. Others preferred to
keep quiet and stay. The minutes of the Band Aid Charitable Trust reveal
inklings of misuse and misappropriation of aid, but indicate a view was
taken that it was better not to object.
Little of this messy complexity was conveyed by the media at the time to
audiences who had empathised with the victims, donated generously and wanted
to see suffering relieved. Aid agencies know that straightforward natural
disasters are much easier to communicate than trickier man-made crises.
Fundraising for the humanitarian disaster in Syria has been difficult – a
complex story without clear goodies and baddies is not an easy one to
convey, either for journalists or NGOs.
So how much has changed since Buerk reported from Ethiopia? In 1984 the only
voices were from a white reporter and a European aid worker. A contemporary
news report would be more inclusive. But much is the same. Not only has the
problem of the media ignoring famine until it is a catastrophe and then
simplifying the explanation recurred many times, but
<http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/jul/06/britain-supporting-dictatorshi
p-in-ethiopia> also some of the same abuses associated with resettlement are
still taking place in Ethiopia.
There is also the vexed question of stereotypical depictions of Africa.
After 1984 there was much examination and criticism of “African-pessimism”
and negative framing of the continent. But many images used in fundraising
and reporting Africa still rely on those same tropes. Even today, the nexus
of politics, media and aid are influenced by the coverage of a famine 30
years ago.
• Suzanne Franks, a former BBC journalist, is a professor of journalism at
City University, London, and author of
<http://www.hurstpublishers.com/book/reporting-disasters/> Reporting
Disasters: Famine, Aid, Politics and the Media
Bob Geldof with Ethiopian children Bob Geldof was at the forefront of a new
celebrity fundraising effort, sparked by the BBC’s report on Ethiopia’s
famine. Photograph: Today/Rex Features
(image/jpeg attachment: image001.jpg)