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Journalism as the Fourth Emergency Service: Trauma and Resilience
Inspiring Practice

Lisa Bradley, Emma Heywood (eds.)

New York et al.: Peter Lang (2024), xviii, 257 pp.

"Journalists have often been considered the "fourth emergency service". They are first on the scene, alongside paramedics, fi re and police, running towards danger rather than away, and providing independent, veritable and crucial information in the public interest. And yet, unlike frontline workers ... more

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Aid and the news agenda: Examining the forces shaping NGO-produced humanitarian media

Michael Sunderland

Bournemouth University, Doctoral Thesis (2024), 268 pp.

"This study examines the external influences that shape NGO-produced news content concerning humanitarian crises in East, West and Central Africa. Employing a thematic analysis of semi-structured in-depth interviews with humanitarian communicators and a content analysis of the humanitarian press rel ... eases of four major NGOs, it seeks to establish the types of content NGO communications staff consider most effective for achieving mainstream media coverage, how they access such content, and any forces influencing their eventual production of news. In line with notions of media logic (Altheide and Snow 1979; Cottle and Nolan 2007) and news cloning (Fenton 2010), it uncovers a reliance on hard-hitting humanitarian statistics and powerful first-person testimonies, which are considered essential for achieving news coverage. Statistics are found to be most often sourced from publicly available humanitarian datasets, often managed by the United Nations, and are considered susceptible to politicisation by authorities implicated in certain crises. First-person testimonies are usually gathered in-person by NGO staff and are affected by issues of physical access to crisis zones including monitoring by local authorities and demands for media sign-off. Additionally, a humanitarian NGO’s decision on whether to speak out publicly about a crisis is found to be often weighed up against threats to staff and programme safety. Examining these issues through a lens of agenda building theory (Cobb and Elder 1971), this study introduces the concept of agenda erosion, describing the phenomenon by which powerful actors, including host authorities and western governmental and intergovernmental donors, exert influence to undermine agenda building activities by NGOs in the context of humanitarian crises. Methods of agenda erosion might include demanding sign-off of media content, the control of physical access to crisis zones for communications staff, and the politicisation of humanitarian data. Unlike the traditional view of NGOs being producers of information subsidies (Gandy 1982), this concept recognises that, as news producers, NGOs also accept information subsidies, including humanitarian data, from other actors. These subsidies are used by NGOs to increase their own agenda building effectiveness but can also allow other, potentially conflicting, priorities to influence the media agenda too. NGOs are now widely regarded as important players in the production of international news (Cottle and Nolan, 2007; Cooper, 2011; Powers 2018) and these findings suggest agenda erosion is in-part responsible for the continuing adherence of aid organisations to established patterns of news construction (Cottle & Nolan 2007; Fenton 2010; Waisbord 2011; Powers 2018). Only crises with hard-hitting data or emotive personal stories are likely to achieve mainstream media coverage but exposure to such sources is often closely guarded by the most powerful actors in certain crises. As a result, some crises continue to go underreported and NGOs risk being silenced or, worse, used as proxy mouthpieces by powers implicated in the humanitarian context to which they are attempting to respond." (Abstract) more

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Humanitarian Journalists: Covering Crises from a Boundary Zone

Martin Scott, Kate Wright, Mel Bunce

London; New York: Routledge (2023), xvi, 127 pp.

"Based on a 5-year study, involving over 150 in-depth interviews, this book examines the political, economic and social forces that sustain and influence humanitarian journalists. The authors argue that – by amplifying marginalised voices and providing critical, in-depth explanations of neglected ... more

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Disasters and Indigenous Peoples: A Critical Discourse Analysis of the Expert News Media

A. Mosurska, A. Clark-Ginsberg, S. Sallu, J. D. Ford

Environnment and Planning E: Nature and Space, volume 6, issue 1 (2023), pp. 178-201

"[...] in popular imagination and policy Indigenous peoples often appear to be caricatured and misrepresented, for instance through tropes of Indigenous peoples as custodians of the environment or especially vulnerable to environmental change. These framings matter because they can result in disaste ... more

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Making Humanitarian Crises: Emotions and Images in History

Brenda Lynn Edgar, Valérie Gorin, Dolores Martín-Moruno (eds.)

Cham: Palgrave Macmillan (2022), xii, 186 pp.

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Los medios digitales ante la crisis humanitaria: Haití, Honduras, Venezuela, Rusia-Ucrania y Siria

Ángel Torres Toukoumidis, Andrea De Santis, Diego Vintimilla León (coord.)

Quito: Abya-Yala;Universidad Politécnica Salesiana (2022), 158 pp.

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Maintaining land and life in Vanuatu: Indigenous alternatives of recovery following the Manaro eruption on Ambae, Vanuatu

Foley C. Pfalzgraf

Journal of Environmental Media, volume 2, issue Supplement (2021), pp. 5.1–5.13

"Between 2017 and 2019, the Manaro volcano on the island of Ambae in Vanuatu erupted consistently, leading to two compulsory evacuations of the island’s communities. The eruption was only one of many ecological emergencies unfolding in Vanuatu as climate change continues to affect the islands. Ami ... more

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Media and Disaster Risk Reduction: Advances, Challenges and Potentials

Rajib Shaw, Suvendrini Kakuchi, Miki Yamaji (eds.)

Singapore: Springer (2021), xiii, 249 pp.

"The media is considered to be of utmost importance in all phases of disasters, before, during and after, with different types of media having different proactive roles to play in disaster risk reduction. Before disasters, they play essential roles not only in bringing early warning to people but al ... more

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Trauma Reporting: A Journalist's Guide to Covering Sensitive Stories
Key Guidance

Jo Healey

London; New York: Routledge (2020), xii, 205 pp.

Trauma Reporting provides vital information on developing a healthy, professional and respectful relationship with those who choose to tell their stories during times of trauma, distress or grief. Amid a growing demand and need for guidance, this fascinating book is refreshingly simple, engaging and ... more

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Reporting Human Rights, Conflicts, and Peacebuilding: Critical and Global Perspectives

Ibrahim Seaga Shaw, Senthan Selvarajah (eds.)

Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan (2019), xxi, 280 pp.

"This book focuses on the reporting of human rights in broadly defined times of conflict. It brings together scholarly and professional perspectives on the role of the media in constructing human rights and peacebuilding options in conflict and post-conflict environments, drawing on case studies fro ... more

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Humanitarian Journalism

Mel Bunce, Martin Scott, Kate Wright

In: Oxford Research Encyclopedias: Communication

Oxford: Oxford University Press (2019), 22 pp.

"Humanitarian journalism can be defined, very broadly, as the production of factual accounts about crises and issues that affect human welfare. This can be broken down into two broad approaches: “traditional” reporting about humanitarian crises and issues, and advocacy journalism that aims to im ... more

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Journalism on Darfur Between Social Fields: Global and National Forces

Joachim J. Savelsberg

In: Media and Mass Atrocity: The Rwanda Genocide and Beyond

Allan Thompson (ed.)

Waterloo, Ontario: Centre for International Governance Innovation (2019), pp. 237-252

"In presenting some of the findings from an analysis of 3,387 media reports and from interviews with Africa correspondents and other journalists from eight countries, this chapter provides several insights on patterns of media representations of the conflict in Darfur. After initial neglect, peaks i ... more

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Humanitarianism and Media: 1900 to the Present

Johannes Paulmann (ed.)

New York; Oxford: Berghahn (2019), viii, 305 pp.

"From Christian missionary publications to the media strategies employed by today’s NGOs, this interdisciplinary collection explores the entangled histories of humanitarianism and media. It traces the emergence of humanitarian imagery in the West and investigates how the meanings of suffering and ... more

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Precarity and Risk in Myanmar's Media: A Longitudinal Analysis of Natural Disaster Coverage by 'The Irrawaddy'

Susan Banki, Ja Seng Ing

In: Myanmar Media in Transition: Legacies, Challenges and Change

Lisa Brooten; Jane Madlyn McElhone; Gayathry Venkiteswaran (eds.)

Singapore: ISEAS (2019), pp. 177-200

"In this chapter we use the twin concepts of precarity and mobilization to explore the tensions associated with media reporting about Myanmar over time, analysing the reporting of the (formerly) exiled media publication The Irrawaddy. The chapter explores coverage through an examination of the sourc ... more

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Ethical Reporting of Sensitive Topics
Key Guidance

Ann Luce (ed.)

London; New York: Routledge (2019), xiv, 294 pp.

"Reporting on issues such as suicide, sexual abuse, or migration is a skill that is often glossed over in a journalist’s education. By combining theory and practice, this collection will correct this oversight and give journalists the expertise and understanding to report on these subjects respons ... more

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Marketplace of Ideas or Little Shop of Horrors? Comparing US News Coverage of Local and Distant Suffering

Lauren Kogen

In: Media and Mass Atrocity: The Rwanda Genocide and Beyond

Allan Thompson (ed.)

Waterloo, Ontario: Centre for International Governance Innovation (2019), pp. 393-412

"While we might blame news audiences for their short-lived engagement with foreign crises, their reactions are far less surprising when we look carefully at what news stories truly communicate to readers. As illustrated above, the subtle lessons the news media teach audiences about foreign crises wo ... more

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Communicating During Humanitarian Medical Crises: The Consequences of Silence or "Témoignage"

Marouf Arif Hasian

Lanham; Boulder; New York: Lexington Books (2019), ix, 294 pp.

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Attitudes Towards Media Coverage of Humanitarian Issues Within the Aid Sector

Martin Scott

Humanitarian-journalism.net;University of East Anglia (2018), 9 pp.

"There is widespread dissatisfaction within the aid industry with the quantity and quality of mainstream news coverage of humanitarian issues and crises. 73% of respondents agreed that mainstream news media does not produce enough coverage of humanitarian issues. Mainstream news coverage was also re ... more

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The State of Humanitarian Journalism

Martin Scott, Kate Wright, Mel Bunce

Humanitarian-journalism.net;University of East Anglia (2018), 36 pp.

"Very few international news organisations routinely cover humanitarian affairs. Only 12 news outlets reported on all four of the humanitarian events we analysed in 2016. Because of the high costs of producing regular, original journalism on humanitarian issues, commercial news organisations do not ... more

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Media and Development
Top Insights

Richard Vokes

London; New York: Routledge (2018), xv, 300 pp.

"Drawing on case studies from all over the world – including: ‘hate radio’ in Rwanda; theatre for development in India; telenovelas in Latin America; mobile banking and money in Africa, and; GIS and humanitarianism in Haiti – thsi book will be of interest to all undergraduate and postgraduat ... more

Journalism as the Fourth Emergency Service: Trauma and Resilience Inspiring Practice

Trauma Reporting: A Journalist's Guide to Covering Sensitive Stories Key Guidance

Ethical Reporting of Sensitive Topics Key Guidance

Media and Development Top Insights

Journalism as the Fourth Emergency Service: Trauma and Resilience
Inspiring Practice

Trauma Reporting: A Journalist's Guide to Covering Sensitive Stories
Key Guidance

Ethical Reporting of Sensitive Topics
Key Guidance

Media and Development
Top Insights