Engaging the Media: A Rough Guide
Many development professionals want to work with the public media, but very few know how to get it right.
A S PANNEERSELVAN on the need to understand the social, political and cultural dynamics of the media.
Chapter extracted from
Communicating Disasters: An Asia Pacific Resource Book
There are good boys and bad boys out there, in the big world called "Development". Some full-time "developmentalists" consider the media to be the notorious bad-boys. To them, the media are largely obsessed with profit-making, their cardinal principle is to reduce every reader or viewer or listener to being a mere consumer; they cater to the least common denominator; they are sensational; they distort reality; and the media thrive on hyperbole while they also lack sensitivity.
Developmentalists¿ critics whine, they cringe and their dirges reach high decibel levels when they lament about the media¿s alleged lack of conviction and total disregard for the well-being of the society. They often take it on themselves to "build capacity for the media" and draw their attention to the specific issue on which their own development agency is working at that point of time.
On the other hand, journalists have developed a pathological distaste to the development narrative that emerges from the portals of various developmental agencies.
Maybe this is understandable. Journalists consider that their reports are ritualistic, cloaked in the political correctness, but often not backed by enough empirical data. Journalists think that the development agencies are monochromatic in vision and do lack the larger picture in their imagination.
So, this gap grows. There is a popular game prevalent in news-rooms. It involves nick-naming the development agencies in question based on the issue they focus on -- "the HIV- guy", "the development-index guy", "the global-warming guy", "the poverty guy", "the MDG (millennium development goals) guy", all labels referring to one or the other development agency working on the specific theme in question. Rarely have these organisations or their staff members shown an interest in themes or issues which are not directly linked with their own priorities of-the-moment.
It is not very surprising therefore that most journalists consider the development agencies as yet another set of self-serving institutions. Institutions that are craving for media coverage, institutions which shamelessly want a plug for the purpose of their own profile-raising, and institutions that are not above board when it comes to that deadliest of sins — the planting of stories.
The divide is nearly complete. The sole saving grace is that both sides have not started wagging war against each other. At least not yet.
So, how did this chasm come about? Are these two arms of the society mutually exclusive? Is there no space for interaction and mutual benefits? Is it, at all, possible for both to work together for the eventual benefit of their real clientele — the people?
Understanding media
To answer these questions, one must, first of all, understand media dynamics, and, then, the narrative dynamics of the development discourse.
After all, the media is plural term, not a singular one. This implies that the media are not a monolith. Some are excellent; many are mediocre; some are downright bad. Some in the media are also indifferent to some issues but may be outstanding in addressing other issues.
If you rotate the media vibgyor-disk fast enough, all you see are shades of grey. But, the development narrative tries to fit it into a bi-polarity of black and white. In a sense, the development narrative predates George W. Bush Jr. and the perspective that you are either with us or against us.
Fundamentally, this cleavage is due to the developmentalists¿ inability to distinguish between journalism and the media industry.
The media industry, though it claims innumerable privileges, is still an industry with a clear focus on the bottom-line. However, it must be noted that there are any number of journalists who are alive to the crucial issues confronting - humanity. They are constantly on the look-out for a good story that would make some change in people’s lives. They want to record, document, initiate a debate, shake the policy-makers out of either their slumber or rank opportunism, research for alternatives, and open up space for dissent.
How am I so sure of this? Well, journalism was my chosen field for some twenty-odd years, till I moved on to the insular world of development, a couple of years ago.
One never looked at journalism purely as a careerist pursuit. I believed, and still do believe, that the media are a site for the democratic mediation of ideas.
It is important for any politically-sensitive person, but one who is not a politician or merely a partisan in narrow party politics, to reach out to the public directly, to bare open his or her ideas and views through the dynamics of media. This is essential to ensure a place for those ideas to germinate into something more concrete in the domain of the public sphere.
Not for a minute had I any delusions about the media being free from various pressures, ideologies and political-orientations. I believe that anyone who wants a space in the public sphere comes in with a worldview, and with a clear motivation for pursuing that worldview. One argues for that worldview and is constantly engaged in the process of refining, redefining and enriching that worldview based on empirical evidence and sharpened by intellectual input.
Many public spheres
A crucial component of my political belief is that there is not a single public sphere in an Habermasian sense, but multiple public spheres; and a journalist can play the role of a mediator of these public spheres only when he or she operates in more than one public sphere. This thinking influenced my decision to be a bi-lingual journalist.
The trick in bringing the two sectors – development and the media -- closer lies not just in creating an institutional framework, but in generating a vibrant human network between development practitioners and journalists who work on developmental issues.
Publications, channels or radio stations may or may not share the concerns of the developmental agencies; but individual journalists do. They use three creative tools to get their stories published or broadcast.
First, journalists always create a contemporary peg to hang their stories onto. They know that stories when presented with no sense of immediacy -- and those having a shelf-life beyond the periodicity of the publication -- seem fit for the story-bank, from which they are rarely if ever retrieved.
This is an essential difference between the perception of developmental agencies and that of the media. Developmental agencies always believe they have generated a body of information that has relevance for at least a decade. And the media looks at everything from a perspective of the here and now. The media always seeks a contemporary peg in order to help its reader relate to the story by providing a recent grounding. And that¿s the reason the media remains the best communication platform, while developmental work remains mainly on the shelves of the bookshop.
Second, people working the media are masters of subtle subversion. They know how to mask a story without losing its power or potency in overcoming various forms of censorships to which the mainstream media is often subject.
Censorship comes from the ownership, from the state, from the market and at times there is even self-censorship to tide over a current crisis within the organisation or to cope with the Spirit of the Times. Developmental agencies should therefore leave the narrative grid of the story and form to the journalist, and not to try and impose a politically correct, sanitised version which fails to work, especially with the readers.
Third, journalists also deploy their excursions in erudition to bring forth a point closer to the reader, by drawing parallels or hinting at similarities.
For this, they will obviously not be prepared to use verbatim the developmental agencies¿ findings, recommendations, research and writings. Journalists need to counterpose these with other claims, research and writings in order to contextualise them.
One of the usual complaints against journalists coming in from development agencies is that "we gave them so much material but they used so little". There is a need here for the development agencies to reflect why this happens ever so often.
Engaging media all the way
Development agencies rarely bring journalists into their universe at a stage which can be called ‘work-in-progress’. They usually just come to the media with a finished product. There is hardly any joint exploration. When presented with a finished product, there is just one alternative for a reporter — that is, to review the product that is already done.
Imagine a scenario where journalists are brought into the process right from the word go. There would have been a series of stories, and when the final report of the development agencies is realised, that may well serve as the winding-up story tracking the entire trajectory.
A journalist is expected to report and not just reproduce. Development agencies like their versions to be reproduced to a large extent. This becomes an assault on the journalists’ work-pride. He or she would like to do a field report, taking a cue or two from the work of the development agency. But, to merely reproduce a report is seen only as providing a free plug, an unpaid advertisement, and doing a stenographer’s job.
Let’s look at one story which had a massive impact. In
This is true on many fronts. Whether in terms of countering the government’s claim over proposed dam projects, or in terms of generating details of the area or mass of land that was to be lost due to the raising water levels, or the question of displacement, or on the lack of rehabilitation. On all these issues, the NBA managed to keep the media informed from the word go. In the process, it managed to generate much debate, raise voices of concern over many institutions, including the apex judicial body, the Supreme Court of India.
Never once, did the NBA come to the media with a final text and ask them merely to reproduce it. Journalists, on the other hand, were informed of the NBA’s activities, they were given details of the villages that are getting submerged, and they were taken into confidence even about the nature of protests that were being planned.
NBA shared with journalists its own doubts, vulnerabilities, and anxieties and often voiced their fear that all their efforts may be futile. In many a sense, it was a partnership between the NBA and the journalists.
Though the NBA¿s struggle may have ultimately not yielded the desired results in its entirety – the contentious dams were built, finally -- what resulted from this fruitful partnership was many a useful by-product. This included the debate on the desirability of big dams in
Not just a publicity tool
UN agencies, donor agencies and international development organisations should keep in mind that media is not merely a conveyor of messages handed to them by press officers.
The prose of the development agencies often has no people in it... it¿s just numbers. They retain their sense of critical distance; and journalists feel slighted by the press releases that land on their tables mostly without any scope whatsoever for verification, counter-checking and illustrative examples.
A good journalist always strives to a give a human face to his or her reports. There are names, faces, families, friends, and depictions of the local society in their stories. By focusing on one individual, the media makes the suffering of that individual a metaphor of larger malady. It helps the readers to understand the pain, hope and frustrations of the victims.
In that sense, journalism helps people to retain their dignity and not get reduced to becoming mere statistics. If developmental agencies understand this dynamics about the working of journalists, then there is nothing that prevents a most beneficial partnership from flourishing sometime in the future. But that goal is some understanding away, still.
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