Disir
Platinum Member
- Sep 30, 2011
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The shuttering of foreign bureaus has given freelancers a bigger role in covering international news, but when it comes to negotiating ethical gray areas like this, they are largely on their own. And though these relationships with NGOs and the UN are often restrictive, they are also potentially profitable and entirely necessary to safely and affordably report important stories. By working closely with these organizations, journalists may cede too much control to the humanitarian community. But if they refuse any humanitarian support, vital stories will go untold.
The situation is not dissimilar to a military embed, but usually without the explicit agreements that govern those relationships. And the compromises that come with hitching onto a humanitarian organization rarely make it into the final copy: the limitations to access and sources, the potentially problematic commitment—sometimes explicit, but often unspoken—to either report on or overlook some of the realities journalists find. Offer a criticism and, along with the discomfort that comes with critiquing an organization that is trying to do good, you might also lose future access. The same goes if you fail to mention their work at all.
When it came to my Bentiu story, UNMISS says that wasn’t the case. “There are absolutely no expectations that journalists assisted by us report on a certain issue and/or in a certain way,” the communications team wrote in response to emailed questions from CJR.
But I was friendly with much of the UNMISS communications team, many of whom were former journalists, themselves, and I knew they were not afraid to apply pressure when they thought the mission was being unfairly represented. Journalists have even written about UNMISS’s threats to cut off access.
Muddying the situation even further, freelancers regularly moonlight as writers and editors for some of the very same humanitarian organizations they cover. From an aid agency’s perspective, the thinking is straightforward: Here’s a pool of skilled professionals with an obvious interest in humanitarian work. For the freelancer, these often-lucrative assignments can be a financial lifeline. An assignment I took to write a handful of feature stories for South Sudan’s UNAIDS office in late 2014 subsidized three months of reporting in that overpriced and under-supplied country. It also meant that I stopped covering HIV in South Sudan, because I worried my stories would be seen as biased.
The thorny ethics of embedding with do-gooders
When foreign bureaus were utilized then one was faced with the inability to present what was happening if it did not gel with what a subsidiary was doing. And this is no better.
The situation is not dissimilar to a military embed, but usually without the explicit agreements that govern those relationships. And the compromises that come with hitching onto a humanitarian organization rarely make it into the final copy: the limitations to access and sources, the potentially problematic commitment—sometimes explicit, but often unspoken—to either report on or overlook some of the realities journalists find. Offer a criticism and, along with the discomfort that comes with critiquing an organization that is trying to do good, you might also lose future access. The same goes if you fail to mention their work at all.
When it came to my Bentiu story, UNMISS says that wasn’t the case. “There are absolutely no expectations that journalists assisted by us report on a certain issue and/or in a certain way,” the communications team wrote in response to emailed questions from CJR.
But I was friendly with much of the UNMISS communications team, many of whom were former journalists, themselves, and I knew they were not afraid to apply pressure when they thought the mission was being unfairly represented. Journalists have even written about UNMISS’s threats to cut off access.
Muddying the situation even further, freelancers regularly moonlight as writers and editors for some of the very same humanitarian organizations they cover. From an aid agency’s perspective, the thinking is straightforward: Here’s a pool of skilled professionals with an obvious interest in humanitarian work. For the freelancer, these often-lucrative assignments can be a financial lifeline. An assignment I took to write a handful of feature stories for South Sudan’s UNAIDS office in late 2014 subsidized three months of reporting in that overpriced and under-supplied country. It also meant that I stopped covering HIV in South Sudan, because I worried my stories would be seen as biased.
The thorny ethics of embedding with do-gooders
When foreign bureaus were utilized then one was faced with the inability to present what was happening if it did not gel with what a subsidiary was doing. And this is no better.
