Filming Fun with Cam and Mike

While trolling through my blog archives I found a bunch of posts which I wrote months (in some cases, like this one, years) ago, and never got around to publishing. So I might drop a few of them onto the site from time to time. This one was originally written in September 2010, when I was deployed managing an emergency response program in Niger, and had spent a few days with a TV news team filming a couple of pieces. I thought it would be good to share. Seeing as I wrote it and all.

-MA

If I were to want to tell you about my week filming with a foreign media team and wanted to use pseudonyms, I might flippantly call my reporter ‘Mike’ and my cameraman ‘Cam’.

In a twist of truth being at least as amusing as fiction (and frequently far weirder)’ these are actually their real names. ‘Mike’ is correspondent Mike McRoberts, and ‘Cam’ is news cameraman Cameron Williams, both of TVNZ in New Zealand. They’ve been here in Niger putting together some pieces about the current emergency, and about aid workers, and I’ve had the privilege of keeping them company for the last four days while we’ve bounced around the central Nigerien countryside.

(Here, of course, ‘bouncing’ is not simply a euphemistic reference to the extent to which we travelled across the far reaches of rural Maradi, but has a visceral tangibility best experienced in the back seat of our Land Cruiser troop carrier…)

Over the years I’ve found that the professions of aid work and international journalism (particularly war journalism) tend to attract similar personalities (albeit with certain key differences as well). The contexts and activities to which we’re drawn are similar, the situations we put ourselves into providing a similar kick to the system. They’re high-stress jobs on which driven people with an experientialist bent tend to thrive. They’re drawn by the opportunity to make unique contributions in unique locations, and the added risk factor is often an appeal.

Mike and Cam both fit that bill, and the rugged and frequently confronting context of Niger, the world’s poorest country and in the depths of a tragic nutrition crisis, seemed to excite rather than daunt them. I felt quickly comfortable with them. They were personalities I could identify with. The war-stories they shared were like those I’ve shared with dozens of relief colleagues in bars the world over. And to top it all off, they were consummate professionals.

I’ve dealt with the media a fair bit over the years now. Most of it has been more remote- phone interviews from garbage-strewn streets in central Niger and hotel rooms in Colombo jump to mind. Around the time of the Haiti earthquake I also did a few TV interviews with the Australian press, including a particularly daunting live appearance on a daytime chat show, which I have no desire to repeat. So the chance to watch a couple of experienced hands put together some foreign correspondent pieces was a chance to observe the process from both sides of the camera lens- something which as a photographer I found fascinating.

Mike and Cam were making a couple of news slots, as well as a longer in-depth piece about aid workers, and were in-country for about 5 days. I, with a couple of our media staff, accompanied them to the field, and took the opportunity to combine the story-gathering work with an assessment of how our emergency programs are functioning in the bush.

Reporting on these situations is always a challenge. Article 10 of the Red Cross Code of Conduct insists that in their communications material they present beneficiaries as survivors with dignity, not helpless victims. Media has its own internal guidelines- driven mostly by the integrity of the individual reporters and producers (and I’m happy to say that Mike defines himself as a Humanitarian first, a journalist second). Just like NGOs are wanting to have an emotional impact to encourage people to donate, the media wants to have an emotional impact to encourage people to watch the show or buy the edition. This can lend itself to a tendency to focus on the shocking, at the expense of balance and dignity.

It wasn’t hard to find shocking stories, of course. We were all particularly struck by the plight of a 9-month old boy who weighed roughly what Mike’s own son had weighed at birth, with skeletal limbs and a bulbous head. We spent time returning some women to their village who had walked more than 30km that morning to be at the distribution site. But so too they focused on the positive- the children whose weight can be seen improving over several weeks of treatment, the agricultural work helping farmers diversify their income and food intake, the schools offering children who have fallen through the cracks of the educational system a second chance at building a future for themselves.

I enjoyed watching Cam at work. Like me, he’s a student of light and form, and he’s at the top of his game (shortlisted as he’s been for a cameraman of the year award in New Zealand). He took great care not just composing his frames, but also ensuring that the light worked for the image he wanted to capture. I speak from personal experience when I say this is no mean feat in the Sahel. Sunlight during the middle of the day is harsh and washes out features, burns out backgrounds, and casts unsightly shadows. During the magic hours of dawn and dusk, when the light is soft and warm and beautiful, the angles change rapidly as the sun moves quicker in the tropics, presenting unique challenges for a documentary attempting to capture some stability in the light.

Like photography, putting together a piece for camera is a blend of science and art. We spent time finding locations and sometimes having to reshoot when circumstances undermined the quality of the work we were doing (one such instance involved a generator ten feet from where I sat giving an interview which, 20 minutes into the piece, decided to roar to life after the main power-grid failed; it took us an hour to find another location, and we had to restart the whole thing from scratch).

The visit captured yet another aspect of why aid work is a fascinating profession to be involved in. I doubt I could have had the experience of being so intimately involved with the creation of current affairs news in many other professions, but aid allows you to cross a lot of different paths. It was an enjoyable learning and fun to be a part of. But most of all, like so often happens in overseas postings, it was just a great opportunity to meet a couple of really good guys, share some fun, unique experiences, and more than one hearty belly-laugh with guys that get it.

Mike, Cam, thanks for good times on the road.

– Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

Location:Maradi, Niger

Triage: News Media and the Disasters that Languish

If I ask you to recall which humanitarian emergencies stand out in your mind, I can pretty well predict the top contenders that will appear.  At the top of the list, the recent Haiti earthquake, most likely followed by the December 2004 Boxing Day Tsunami.  This year’s earthquakes in Chile and Tibet may also be on the list, as they’re fairly recent.  Most of you will probably recall that there’s been a refugee crisis in the Darfur region of Sudan, but you may be a little hazy around the dates and details of what was actually happening out there.  Those of you with a broader understanding of the context may include the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and even Pakistan over the last 9 years in your analysis, while the older among you will recall events such as the eruption of Mt. Pinatubo in 1991, the Kobe earthquake of 1995, the Loma Prieta earthquake of 1989 in California, or maybe the Mexico City earthquake of 1985.

I remember most of those events (except maybe the Mexico City earthquake, as I was a little young to be watching the news at the time, although I studied it at school later).  The more recent ones I have a little more intimate knowledge and memories associated with, given my choice of profession (and a long list of other lower-profile emergencies to boot).  The older ones I have particular images in my mind that relate: A stratospheric plume of grey ash over the Philippines; toppled segments of raised highway in Kobe; cars flattened beneath the Oakland Bridge in San Fransisco.

Disasters such as these stick in our minds for precisely that reason.  The images that get broadcast into our homes via news and media outlets.  The more relatable the image, the more likely it is to have an impact on us.  The Boxing Day Tsunami was a shocking, rapid and overwhelming disaster which both stunned people by its scale, and also struck areas with which western donors were familiar (the beaches of southern Thailand, where many have taken vacations).

This is why natural disasters tend to have a greater pull on the public imagination than war-zones.  They are more easily summed up by a photograph or a thirty-second video clip.  They can be easily communicated.

Because of this, they also continue to captivate for longer.  The shock value lingers.  The fascination with destruction on that scale claws at the insides of our souls, searching for answers.  Why?  How?  Could that happen to me?  Why or why not?

Ultimately, of course, these images reach us because news media outlets choose to broadcast them.  The longer that media outlets continue to broadcast, the more the events are likely to reach us, and have an impact on us (within parameters).

And the more we’re affected, the more likely we are to give to an emergency.

By contrast, there are emegencies that we never hear about, or which don’t have as much impact.  For example, the displacement of Pakistanis following the (western-backed) military offensive into tribal areas in early 2009 was one of the largest and most rapid population displacements in the last century.  However the humanitarian implications of the event, while overwhelming the capacity of NGOs and the UN to manage, got very little screen time compared to the warfighting itself.

The Darfur crisis did get some coverage, but comparitive to the needs, moderately little.  In Darfur in excess of 200,000 people are thought to have died, and over the seven years since the conflict erupted, 3-4 million displaced, and 5-6 million affected.  These numbers, standing alone, are relatable to the scale of the tsunami.  When you examine them qualitatively, in fact, the extent of need and human suffering in Darfur is far greater than that suffered by the survivors of the tsunami.  However Darfur has received just a fraction of the media attention- and just a fraction of the material support.

Similar emergencies that get little attention are things like the war and displacement in eastern DRC (ostensibly the highest death-toll of any conflict since World War II); routine food crises across the Sahel; the ongoing war and humanitarian emergency in Somalia; and a long, long list of other sorry situations where the UN and aid agencies struggle to operate on underfunded program budgets while people wrestle with a range of natural and human-made impediments to a full and healthy life.

The reason you hear little or nothing about these other emergencies is generally the fact that they don’t get much media air-time.  There are in turn reasons for this, which I’ll discuss below.

However, the question which I wrestle with, and which I’ve asked myself many times in the past is, how much is our media accountable for which humanitarian emergencies get funded, and which get forgotten?

And I’d like to suggest, very.

Working part of my career in an NGO office based in a western country which works to raise funds for overseas emergencies, I am acutely aware of the interplay between media coverage and money-through-the-door.  If a story gets headline time, we get cash, phone-calls, offers of assistance.  If it stays in the headlines (Haiti, Tsunami) then we raise millions of dollars.  By contrast, if a story doesn’t make the news much- or at all- we get next to nothing.  The recent earthquakes in Chile and Tibet are good examples.  Both had less than 3 days in the news media here, and we raised very little for either.

DRC, which remains one of the worst crises on the planet, gets almost no media airtime, except on obscure late-night news analysis or foreign correspondant shows.  We get almost no money for it.

The correlation is solid.  Even our own fundraising efforts are limited without the appeal of mass media.  We can run advertisements or send letters asking for funding, but if the request is about something that the public knows nothing about, then we don’t get much back for our investment.  As a rule, it is not financially worthwhile for us to do so, and a poor use of our resources.  We simply don’t have the reach to be able to educate the public about what’s going on out there in the same way that the major news networks do.

In short, if it ain’t in the headlines, it ain’t getting paid.

News agencies, certainly in western countries, are free to run what stories they see fit.  Or at least, what stories Rupert Murdoch sees fit.  So how much should we hold them accountable?  In principle, if news organizations choose to run a humanitarian crisis as a lead story for two weeks (as opposed to, say, a story about Paris Hilton, or the British Prime Minister insulting one of his constituents by accident), they could arguable transform the level of resources raised for that emergency.

By contrast, if they choose to not run a story on a particular crisis, they effectively damn it to obscurity, and can guarantee that it will be nearly impossible for agencies to raise funds from the general public.

And not even the general public.  NGOs and the UN receive large amounts of funding from state governments.  As well as recieving information through their own channels, these governments are influenced themselves by what gets reported in the news media, and also by what their constituents are clamouring about.  If the public gets riled about a crisis, chances are the government will want to be seen to be doing something.  The reverse is equally true.  Will the Australian public be pleased to hear that their government has just contributed twenty million dollars of tax-payer’s money to some obscure war-zone they’ve never heard of?  That’s not the sort of stunt that gets you re-elected.

The influence of news media on raising support for emergencies is hard to knock.

Of course, it’s only partly fair to blame media organizations for this process.  They are responding to public demand.  If stories are run that are not interesting to the public (long, complicated, lacking dynamic images, or uncomfortably confronting), then channels are changed, papers are not sold.  Ratings go down.  Profits go down.

So there’s an extent to which the public themselves, in their appetite for soft, easily-consumable newsertainment is equally guilty.

I’d argue that media itself has helped create this dynamic, in its quest to become ever more about entertaining the lowest common denominator, with fast-changing topics and brief soundbites that communicate a punchy message but little depth to an audience that wants to be stimulated but not challenged.  Pitching to the lowest demoninator, attention-deficit consumerist junkie.

With different expectations about what media should be about, perhaps demand itself would be different?

Realistically, in my mind there’s two levels of responsibility.  There’s what the news media portrays (both in terms of content and in terms of expectation).  And there’s what the public demands.  As a rule, people aren’t interested in educating themselves about world affairs.  That’s not to say there aren’t exceptions.  But let’s face it, if you’re a regular reader of this blog, you’re well aware that there are all sorts of information resources out there about what’s going on in the humanitarian field, some of it listed down the right-hand column of this blog.  Anybody who wants to know what’s going on out there can do so.  They just have to spend a few minutes of their day learning.

But I submit that if the news media were routinely highlighting, in a balanced, intelligent and informative fashion, what was actually happening in humanitarian situations around the world (as opposed to cliched fifteen-second summaries to a dramatic soundtrack), they’d change the way the donor public looks at world affairs, and ideally change both the giving and the living practices of that public to be more geared around global realities and understandings (and not reflexive reactions and cereal-box interpretations).

Yes, there are economic realities.  Yes, there’s donor fatigue.  But I’d like to believe that, on the whole, people do care about the plight of others.  And the more that those ‘others’ in humanitarian crises overseas can be brought perceptively closer to those with the power to give and act, the more we’ll see people and societies making changes and sacrifices for a greater good.

I believe international media has a lot to answer for to the people caught in forgotten emergencies around the world.

Legacy of a Genocide

Of the 17,000 men and women (and several thousand more children) who passed through the Tuol Sleng detention centre (or S-21), just twelve lived to tell the tale. The notorious prison, converted from a Phnom Penh school, became the hub of the Khmer Rouge’s deadly political purification, where people accused of sedition and crimes against the state were interred, interrogated, tortured, and eventually either killed, or transported to one of the nearby Killing Fields and executed alongside hundreds of thousands more. This number would eventually include many high-ranking Khmer Rouge officials and their families, themselves, caught in Pol Pot’s paranoid purges.

Phnom Penh was liberated by the Vietnamese army in January 1979. Thirty years on, and yesterday the very first trial of a Khmer Rouge leader opened in a special UN-backed tribunal in Cambodia. Kaing Guak Eav, known to most as ‘Duch’, headed Tuol Sleng prison, also called S-21. A third of the Cambodian population are said to have perished during the brief but genocidal reign of Pol Pot and his Khmer Rouge, in the four years from 1975 to 1979. It’s hard to believe that the country has held itself together for so long, while these crimes go unpunished and families are left without reconciliation or answers. Pol Pot himself died in 1998, under uncertain circumstances while under house arrest by a Khmer Rouge faction.

Tuol Sleng is now a museum honoring the victims of the prison camp, a memorial in much the same vein that the death camps of Nazi Germany remember those who perished in the holocaust. The place itself is a quiet and reflective location, with the stark pre-communist school-blocks surrrounding an open courtyard filled with benches and frangipani trees, and the bustle of Phnom Penh feels strangely distant. The cells have been left largely as they were found. When the Vietnamese liberators were drawn to the prison by the stench of rotting flesh, they found a dozen corpses still shackled to their beds, executed as their captors fled. The photographs they took as evidence are graphic displays of the coarse brutality, still mounted in the cells they were taken in.

Like many places where evil has blossomed, there remains a lingering disquiet over the compound. The mementos and photographs hail back a chilling time in history. Subdued voices of visitors passing through echo in hallways where screams and cries must once have thrived. Barred windows and barbed wire lend only the briefest taste of what the inmates must have seen, day after day, as they awaited their turn with the interrogators.

Like the death camps of Germany and eastern France, Tuol Sleng is an important place. Not only does it honor those who died innocently and needlessly before a vicious gang of thugs, but it allows us the space to remember, and on a very shallow level, to connect to the events that took place, in the Orwellian hope that we won’t come back to this place again. Although it’s not my first time visiting a place of atrocities, I found it left a mark on my soul, and stands out as one of the most significant memories of my month travelling in south-east Asia. I would strongly recommend that anybody who passes through Phnom Penh makes a visit to Tuol Sleng a priority. Too much of what we do when we travel is frivolous and petty, but the gravity of remembering the experiences and circumstances our fellow humans have been through is both important, and our responsibility.

 

Photographs:

1. Cell.  Detention cell in Tuol Sleng.

2. A Quiet Place.  View of one of the detention blocks, formerly a school building, and the courtyard at Tuol Sleng.

3. Resting Place.  An interrogation chamber upstairs in Tuol Sleng.

4. Razor.  Coiled wire and, beyond, flowers outside the prison.

Victoria Burning

Many of you will have heard about the ferocious fires that have been devastating the state of Victoria over the last thirty-six hours.  They come on the heels of a record-breaking heatwave, in the midst of a decade of drought that has seen the landscape here become drier, and drier, and drier.  The media and the emergency services have been preparing people for several days for the extreme fire hazard that came to a climax yesterday.  Yesterday saw temperatures in central Melbourne hit 46.4 degrees centigrade (115F), and just outside Melbourne, 48 (118F), with powerful gale-force winds, gusting up to 120kph (75mph).  As one who loves extreme weather, this was the hottest I have experienced outside of Saharan Africa.

I didn’t go out photographing the fires yesterday.  Frankly, I’m not that stupid- although I confess that the photojournalist in me was sorely tempted, particularly when driving home in the afternoon the highway I was driving down was engulfed in a plume of smoke from a fresh grassfire just erupting at the roadside.  But the last thing the emergency service folk need is bystanders gawking, getting in the way, and possibly putting themselves at risk.  Even bystanders with lots of expensive camera gear.

The weather was scary.  The heat made your eyeballs shrivel back in your head.  You could see great clouds of dust and smoke blowing overhead.  The wind was animal in nature, gusting wildlybackwards and forwards, bending the crowns of the eucalyptus trees and swirling debris down streets.  Around two in the afternoon, when the day was at its most intense, I found myself on a sidewalk in a normally-bustling suburban commercial centre.  The heat battered down from above and radiated back up from the street, making me wither.  The wind was tearing at my clothes and burning my eyes.  It was the sort of weather you don’t seem to sweat in- any perspiration is evaporated straight off the body before it can wet your skin.  If you’re out long enough, you’ll find little salt deposits left behind on your clothing.

About two weeks ago I was out for a drive with my camera about ten minutes from my parent’s place in south-eastern Melbourne.  I had noticed a plume of smoke and had swung past to investigate it.  It was another fiercely hot day- we’ve had a few this summer- and I found myself in a queue of stalled traffic.  Up ahead, police were directing traffic.  Through the windshield I could see the smoke rising.  Flames were shooting up into the sky.  I snapped off a couple of shots through the windshield.

I parked my car some distance away and walked over.  There were crowds of people standing around watching the smoke plume above a residential neighbourhood.  I kept my distance and watched for a few minutes, conflicted over the desire to get a closer look and the desire not to get in the way- or worse, put myself at risk.  There was a thick stand of trees running down the edge of this neighbourhood, and a wide access track along which people were still moving fairly freely.  There was no sign of emergency workers, so I eventually decided I’d get a little closer.  Five or six choppers were circling overhead by this time, and a Huey was doing water-bombing runs.  I edged forward, but was very mindful of the bush to the side of me, and the fact that fire runs a lot quicker than I do.

I didn’t get too far.  Quite frankly, aside from being very concious of not disrupting any emergency work, the bushland made me nervous.  Although I could locate the fire ahead of me by the plume of smoke, that didn’t mean it couldn’t change direction and leap through the scrubland very quickly, and I couldn’t see the front itself, except when the flames leapt especially high.  The wind was gusting and the air was hot, and it was an unnerving feeling.

I stopped about halfway down this track.  Ahead of me, the track rose to a crest, and the fire was on the other side of that.  There was a group of people standing on the crest looking down onto the fire, and emergency workers in yellow vests with them.  I figured as long as the emergency workers weren’t telling people to run, I was okay.  I was a good two or three hundred yards back from that group, and as close as I wanted to get.  In all honesty, I couldn’t believe that they were standing there- or that the emergency workers hadn’t told them to move back.

A teenage girl with a push-bike was coming down the track towards me from the crest.  When she saw me with my camera taking shots of the swooping chopper she assumed I was with the press and we got chatting.  She had been just below the ridge, not far from the fire front, and was evidently scared.  She told me she’d been trying to tell her friend to come back down away from the fire, but her friend hadn’t listened, enjoying the excitement presumably.  Something of the girl’s fear was rubbing off on me.  Her voice was trembling a little.  The flames were so powerful, and even at the distance at which I stood I could sense that they were something wild which none of us could predict or control.  The girl with her bike was doubtless the smartest person out there that afternoon, and after another minute or two both of us turned and headed back to the main road.  I was thoroughly humbled by the experience.  It was as close to a bushfire as I’d ever gotten, and certainly as close as I’d ever hope to be in the future.  Halfway back to the road, and we saw that the yellow vests were getting people to evacuate.

In the event, this fire burned through a few hectares of bushland and damaged one house.  Nobody was hurt.  As I write this passage, it’s midnight on the 8th of February.  Since midday yesterday, bushfires around Melbourne and parts of country Victoria have claimed 84 lives, with more bodies expected to be found as emergency workers comb through wreckage.  More than 650 homes have so far been lost, and at least a dozen big fires are still burning out of control.  The picturesque town of Marysville, a place I have visited on a number of occasions (as have many Melbournians) and always enjoyed, has been razed to the ground.  Several other towns have equally been devastated, some with extensive loss of life.  The fires are not out, and already they are being billed as the worst in this country’s history.

Getting close to the relatively small fire-front that burned outside of Seaford two weeks ago gave me just enough of a sense of the fire’s ferocity to be awed by what we’re seeing out in the bush this weekend.  I take my hat off to the emergency workers who are fighting the blazes, and my heart goes out to those who have lost homes, friends and loved ones.  My house and my family are safe, but there are many people even this evening whose future hangs in the balance.

Photos:

1-3: A CFA Huey on a bombing run.

4: View of the fire plume from Oliver’s Hill, Frankston.  I took this shot and didn’t realise until later that the fire plume was in it.  Oliver’s Hill is one of my favourite viewpoints in all of Melbourne- it invariably gives fantastic views of the bay.  The plume is visible starting behind and just to the right of the tall building on the right hand side of the shot.

5: Flames visible above the suburbs, just outside Seaford.

6-7: Smoke above bushland and houses.

8: Onlookers gather just beyond the fire-front.

9: The chopper’s water-bombing run shows just how close they’re standing to the flames.

10: Farmland a couple of minutes outside of Marysville, taken in 2004.

Note: All photos taken with Canon EOS 5D and Canon EF 24-105 f/2.8 L, except final photograph, taken with a Canon T-70 on 35mm slide film.