ReliefSource

If you live in the UK, perhaps you were watching Newsnight two weeks ago. Sir Nicholas Young of the British Red Cross was roasted and fried by Martha Kearney, on the basis that the response to the tsunami of the DEC member agencies wasn’t all that and a bag of chips. I watched with an increasing sense of horror as the picture was painted - we were greedy, incompetent and secretive.

Last week, John Mitchell of ALNAP posted a well-thought out response to the Newsnight incident on the ODI blog, the thrust of which is that the media is behind the times. In his words, “by all accounts the evaluation report simply says what one would expect, painting as it does, a mixed picture of what went well and what did not go so well… So, why has old news suddenly become a mini-scandal?”

John argues that the public climate has changed since the 1980s - in particular, the media no longer views us all as saints. I’d like to suggest another, deeper cause behind the Newsnight incident. In this connected world, the revolution in global communication has changed everything - and, as a community, we have comprehensively failed to realise the potential that this brings for our work, or to identify the traps that this new world keeps in wait for us.

The Newsnight incident is another reminder that the patronising attitude that we adopt towards our public will always come back to haunt us. If the public does not have a clear understanding of the reality of relief operations, or of the improvements we have made in accountability in recent years, whose fault is that? Trapped in our ‘traditional’ fundraising strategies, we rely on the public to continue supporting us in emergencies without making much effort to engage them in the issues.

Fundraising for disasters still presents helpless victims waiting for international organisations to rescue them - even though we all acknowledge that the critical actors in emergency response are local people, communities and organisations. But the rush of communications that we have access to now - not just the mainstream media, but the ‘citizen journalism’ of blogging - means that our stakeholders on all sides have access to better information about our work than ever before - and more of a sense that their stake is an active one.

Sir Nicholas acquitted himself well in the face of persistent adversarial questioning, but Newsnight framed their coverage in a such a way that he was unable to broaden the discussion beyond the very basic points that John identifies in his post. Rather than seeing this as an example of how an antagonistic media doesn’t play fair, perhaps we should take this as a wake-up call, a clear indicator that we need to improve our currently inadequate communications strategies?

Read John’s post in full here, with an interesting supplement from Maurice Herson.

[UPDATE: John’s blog post seems to have generated more comments than any previous post on the ODI blog - why not join in and make them happy?]