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A Tragedy of the Commons in Selling Tragedy
March 23, 2011
This recent Columbia Journalism Review article on Hiding the Real Africa reports:
And now for some good news out of Africa. Poverty rates throughout the continent have been falling steadily and much faster than previously thought… The death rate of children under five years of age is dropping… Africa is “among the world’s most rapidly growing economic regions,” according to the McKinsey Quarterly… Yet US journalism continues to portray a continent of unending horrors…
Karen Rothmyer, the author, suggests that:
the main reason for the continued dominance of such negative stereotypes, I have come to believe, may well be the influence of Western-based non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and international aid groups like United Nations agencies. These organizations understandably tend to focus not on what has been accomplished but on convincing people how much remains to be done. As a practical matter, they also need to attract funding. Together, these pressures create incentives to present as gloomy a picture of Africa as possible in order to keep attention and money flowing, and to enlist journalists in disseminating that picture.
(HT Good intentions are Not Enough).
Rothmyer is surely right that aid agencies and NGOs have incentives to accentuate the negative. As she suggests, that’s partly for the good reason that there’s a lot of negative still around which we ought to be doing something about –urgently. But it is also because tragedy sells.
A question I get asked a lot as I talk about Getting Better and the global progress in quality of life is ‘why don’t we hear this more often?’ My first reply is that development progress is largely about less exciting stuff going on –fewer people shot, or felled by disease, or intimidated by the police or army. Things not happening is hard to write a compelling story about –there are only so many times a newspaper will run a story about nine million infants not dying this year thanks to reduced mortality over the last half century. Remember Tolstoy’s maxim: “happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”
If it is much easier to communicate tragedy than success, it clearly makes sense for each individual agency or NGO to get their message out by trumpeting catastrophe. But there are real negatives to that approach. Rothmyer mentions that it skews policymaking towards disaster management, deters investment and is dispiriting to people in Africa working for change.
Beyond that, if every agency continually cries crisis, it reduces the incentive to give assistance to any of them. If, after fifty years of working to improve conditions in Africa by NGOs, aid agencies and governments, everyone agrees we’re still in a crisis, that surely suggests it is pointless to try to help. We’ve failed to lift a crisis for fifty years –what’s different now? Aid fatigue (despair at “pouring money down foreign rat-holes”, in Senator Jesse Helms’ impassioned complaint a decade-plus ago) seems eminently logical.
The tragedy of continually calling tragedy is that NGOs, aid agencies and governments have in fact been part of the immense progress in quality of life we’ve seen in Africa and elsewhere over those fifty years. And that’s why it makes sense to provide continuing assistance. But you wouldn’t know it from the average agency press release.
The General Assembly of European NGOs has developed a code of conduct which covers communications and commits signatories to “avoid approaches that potentially stereotype or sensationalise people, situations or places” and “truthfully represent the particular situation both in its immediate and in its wider context.” A broader commitment to those principles would be a great first step –and potential donors might want to ensure that the organizations they support adhere to them.
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6 Responses to “A Tragedy of the Commons in Selling Tragedy”
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March 24th, 2011 at 10:54 am
Hi Charles,
A code of conduct is a step, but it isn’t a very effective one. Most of the major NGOs signed a pact to stop peddling stereotypes nearly 20 years ago (http://aidthoughts.org/?p=1932), and very little changed. The incentives are just too strong to ignore it.
March 29th, 2011 at 9:44 am
Matt –thanks and point taken… I’d welcome other suggestions! Maybe major donors could agree a code of conduct?
March 29th, 2011 at 1:02 pm
I recommend reading the blog, “Lessons I Learned: NGOs, Voluntourism, Cambodia & Life Lessons” by Daniela Papi. She’s covered this very topic of a code of conduct very recently in a blog post called “The Would-Be-Donor and Budding-Do-Gooder’s Code of Conduct.” (http://lessonsilearned.org/201.....f-conduct/)
April 3rd, 2011 at 4:37 pm
Hello Charles,
I have just finished reading your book. Very well done indeed. I believe that the story told in your book and in the latest U.N. Human Development Report, if it became better known, could change many people’s view of the world and even could change their view of human nature itself. It seems to me that the vast progress made over the last decades validates Anne Frank’s statement that people are good.
In any case, I think it is a weak excuse for the media to suggest that the reduction in bad outcomes is harder to write about than disasters and calamities. Every improvement in living conditions or reduction or elimination of problems, is the result many good things done by individuals, governments, NGOs and other groups. With a reasonable amount. Those good things can and should be reported. There is no reason why inspiration, based on reality, cannot be as compelling as calamity.
April 5th, 2011 at 3:37 pm
Thx for the links. Will def check out your book, too. I agree, it’d be wonderful to hear about the successes. But as with domestic coverage, typically with journos, if it bleeds it leads. There are publications that focus on good news however and some group may want to target those, i.e. Sojourners, GOOD, Yes! Magazine.
May 29th, 2011 at 3:30 pm
Dear Ms. Murphy,
Thanks for your recommendations. Now that I have belatedly checked out their websits, my take is that these outlets too are more negative than positive. I could roughly describe their storyline as, “the world may be ending but there’s a chance we could save it”. I think some smart jouranlistic entrepreneur could do very well by telling the good news stories (40 or more years’ worth) behind the good news statistics of Mr. Kenny’s book and the 2010 U.N. human development report.