Feast, famine and freedom

In my PR days, clients were usually good for three things: paying salaries, paying expenses, and paying for lunch. Choosing the life of a journalist meant losing access to these coffers, but also losing the constraints that come with being shackled to someone else’s agenda. Or so I thought.

However, if what I learned this week is anything to go by, the demands on us journalists may be far harder to reconcile than any client conflicts I ever encountered.

On Thursday night, I found myself at a discussion at the House of Commons, organised by Muslim Aid. In the incongruous setting of an opulent room piled with platters of canapes, the BBC’s George Alagiah chaired a debate about the international food crisis, attended by journalists, NGOs and a small group of us City students.

Sir Iqbal Sacranie calls the world food shortage a “silent tsunami” for a reason. It’s the quiet kind of devastation: the hardest to photograph, the hardest to film, and the hardest to sell. As a result, it is going under-reported. One international Guardian correspondent recounted a telephone call she made to her editor where she was told: “We’ve done a food price story already this week. I don’t want another one”.

Journalists are at the mercy of their editor’s commercial agenda, and suffering simply isn’t sexy. George Alagiah challenged us to find “a way of telling the story that doesn’t involve a starving child or fly-ridden baby”. One option, he hypothesised, is to “make the causes the news rather than the effect”: for example, by scrutinising the part that the arms trade played in the Somalian famine. “I regret that I told people the crisis in Somalia was just about food,” he added. “I did plenty of stories about war, but I never analysed it enough.”

John Mitchell, director of ALNAP, suggested shifting our minds and our money away from our own news outlets, and instead “building the capacity” of regional news outlets across the world so that their “empathy” with what happens on their home turf can “inform our ways of reporting”. Another idea posited by George Alagiah was a system of “twinning” British journalists with their counterparts overseas in order to create stories borne out of conversation rather than consolidation.

There is no easy way to reconcile what the reporter wants to write with what their editor can sell, and certainly none that could be defined in one evening. But the fact that my colleagues Alison, Nathan and Josie have all chosen to blog about the ethical dilemmas we grappled with that night suggests that it left us with food for thought that lasted long after we had wolfed down the canapes (well, we are students after all).