Avoiding oversimplification
- 3 Aug 07, 03:48 PM
On The World Tonight this week we've been looking at Darfur and Iraq - both subjects that came up during the new prime minister, Gordon Brown's trip to the US and the UN.
On Monday, in his press conference with President Bush, Mr Brown, said:
- “Darfur is the greatest humanitarian disaster the world faces today and I've agreed with the president that we step up our pressure to end the violence that has displaced two million people, made four million hungry and reliant on food aid and murdered 200,000 people.â€
On Tuesday, Sir John ÃÛÑ¿´«Ã½s, the head of the UN's Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, , suggested Iraq may qualify for world's worst humanitarian situation with eight million Iraqis now dependent on humanitarian aid:
- “One of the world's largest and fastest-growing humanitarian crises is also among the least known: Iraq. More than four million people, one out of every seven Iraqis, have fled their homes in what is the largest population displacement in the recent history of the Middle East.â€
There are also an unknown number of civilian dead with estimates ranging from President Bush's 30,000 to the of more than 600,000.
Covering both these conflicts in broadcast journalism can be difficult, because in a radio or TV programme you have a limited amount of time to explain complex situations to audiences who may not be very familiar with the details. Hence the need to simplify, the art of this is simplify without distorting the picture - something we take pains to try to avoid.
On Darfur, earlier this week, we spoke to the Sudan specialist, Julie Flint, who said the new resolution backed by a threat of further sanctions is unlikely to work unless the rebel groups are brought together and there is a cohesive peacekeeping effort.
Tonight (Friday), we are planning to lead on Darfur because the rebel groups are meeting in Tanzania which gives us an opportunity to assess how likely it is the competing factions will sign up to a peace agreement so the newly agreed UN force will have a peace to keep.
We'll also talk to some veterans of the UN force in Bosnia because there are concerns the mandate of the new force for Darfur may suffer from the same weaknesses and ambiguities as the Bosnian force, which struggled for three years to deliver aid and was unable to stop the killing of thousands of civilians, let alone keep the peace.
We will also analyse how complex the Darfur conflict is - a mixture of competition over increasingly scarce water resources between settled agriculturalists and nomadic herdsmen, as well as among other things, an attempt by the Sudanese government to put down a regional revolt and a conflict between ethnic Arabs and Africans. We'll also ask whether the coverage by some Western journalists and the rhetoric of some Western leaders and pressure groups that say the Sudanese government is carrying out genocide in Darfur is an oversimplification that has impeded attempts to reach a political solution to end the fighting.
On Iraq, we heard on Wednesday from our correspondent in Baghdad, Nicholas Witchell, that there are signs the American-led 'surge' is making progress in military terms. But on the same day the main Sunni party in the governing coalition announced it was leaving so we turned to Yahia Said, an Iraqi specialist at the London School of Economics, who told us there has been no progress on achieving political progress there between the Sunni and Shia political groups.
Again - not a simple picture and difficult to report without, on the one hand confusing the audience, and on the other presenting a misleading picture through oversimplification.
It would be interesting know what you make of our efforts.
Alistair Burnett is editor of the World Tonight
