Alice Musabende, a producer with the Cable Public Affairs Channel, spoke to journalists and human rights activists about the danger of generalizing war and conflicts to the public ( Photo: Christopher King )
“Conflict is never as simple as who is killing who,” says Alice Musabende. She would know. She was only 14 when she witnessed first hand the destruction of the Rwanda genocide during which she lost her entire family.
But as a graduate of both the school of journalism at the University of Rwanda and the master’s of journalism program at Carleton. She also knows first hand that “who is killing who” is a phrase often used by the media to simplify the story for the public.
“We call it a lead,” says Musabende, who worked as a reporter with CBC radio before signing on as a producer with the Cable Public Affairs Channel.
“It’s a statement that you have to have before you write a story and it [follows the format of] someone doing something for a reason . . . But things are never as simple as that.”
She uses the Rwanda genocide as a prime example. If you didn’t understand the economic, cultural and political context of the initial conflict, she says, a reporter may still be able to write that one ethnic group was killing another, and a million people died, but that would be the entire content of the story.
“And I don’t think the Canadian public deserves to only have that side of the story,” says Musabende. “Trying to understand a conflict by simplifying it to the minimum requirement is wrong.”
Musabende, along with University of Ottawa professor Rita Abrahamsen and media trainer Marie-Jo Proulx, spoke to 20 or so journalists and human rights advocates assembled for a workshop hosted by the All-Party Parliamentary Group for the Prevention of Genocide and Other Crimes Against Humanity on Sept. 1. Ottawa-Centre MP Paul Dewar, the group’s chair, moderated the discussion.
Ottawa-Centre MP Paul Dewar mediated the discussion ( Photo: Christopher King )
The purpose of the workshop was to gain knowledge about the media’s responsibility in reporting international human rights violations to the public and how local journalists can do so from their news desks in Ottawa.
The initiative initially stemmed from the failure of journalists to report the massacres that lead up to the Rwanda genocide in 1994 and the genocide itself.
Abrahamsen, who worked for both the Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation and the British Broadcasting Company long before becoming an associate professor in the School of International Development and Global Studies at the University of Ottawa, says she believes journalists have a responsibility as watchdogs to alert the public to injustice. But she says that can be an incredibly difficult task when that injustice is going on in “faraway places.”
“The temptation is one of exaggeration when reporting on Africa,” says Abrahamsen. “In order to compete with other headlines closer to home we make it appear a little bit worse than it is. And I think if you ask a lot of people now what they most associate with Africa, they’ll simply say violence, death, destruction and dictators.”
For this reason, Abrahamsen says it is important that the media are aware of how they report on Africa and the consequences of that reporting.
As it stands now, most stories get “trapped” in “oversimplifications” that reduce conflict to merely the product of ethnic clashes or economic motives.
“These stories tell us something perhaps of probability, but they don’t tell us anything about why conflicts take the particular dynamics that they do,” says Abrahamsen, adding that journalists are not the only ones getting trapped. “It applies as much to me as a teacher. I have to be aware of the consequences of how I represent Africa to my students.”
Musabende stresses that news and feature stories could be more complete by simply speaking with people from the countries where there is conflict. The people who have lived in those countries have a story and can provide so much understanding to what is going on.
She says Canada is an amazing country because it has every single community from around the world represented by at least one person and she says she doesn’t understand why reporters aren’t talking to those people or, if they are, why they only appear as a single quote in the middle of a story.
She says reporters tend to get fixated on the statistics they get from United Nations reports or non-governmental organizations even though, most of the time, numbers are not what is most important when reporting on human rights issues. The stories behind those numbers are the means by which local people reading foreign news reports will understand and, perhaps, help prevent conflict in the future.
According to Musabende, journalists cannot be afraid to dig deeper.
“People say that Canadians are very nice and they don’t talk about things that are going to make you feel uncomfortable,” says Musabende. “But if you don’t ask people if they are Hutus or Tutsis then how are you going to understand their story? If you shy away from asking the difference between a Shiite and a Sunni there’s no way you can understand these relationships. You can understand it historically from books but not as well as if you were to go beneath the surface.”