ABSTRACT
Shrinking reporting budgets, distant and disinterested editors, and the sheer size of their patches, all force correspondents into close ties with humanitarian organisations. To varying degrees, correspondents become aid embeds, strongly dependent on humanitarian organisations. The connections benefit both media and the aid sector, but news neutrality suffers no matter how unbiased journalists try to remain. Humanitarian organisations, with their large budgets, have become too useful in terms of information, contacts, logistics, and access for many journalists openly to criticise, for fear of being blacklisted. Surprisingly, hardly any news outfit has solid rules regarding its journalists’ interactions with humanitarian organisations. Instead, what has a bearing is how the journalist sees him or herself, and how they perceive each organisation, a judgement each journalist makes entirely subjectively. Humanitarian public relations have become increasingly professionalised, and as its interests intersect with correspondents’ need for contacts, data, logistics, access and evaluations, reporting becomes compromised. News audiences rarely hear that humanitarian organisations not only ‘do good’, but also chase fundraising and follow agendas, sometimes of their governments. American correspondents are the most independent of humanitarian organisations and have the most rules; freelancers of all nationalities are most at risk of dependency, not least because many moonlight as communications consultants to humanitarian organisations to make ends meet as media wages crash. The line between independent media and humanitarian PR is blurring, but most journalists involved consider this an unpalatable but acceptable trade-off in order to continue to cover events in sub-Saharan Africa. Whether it is considered good or bad, it is the new norm.
