Irish Aid gets 'almost no coverage'

IRISH NEWSPAPER coverage of developing countries tends to focus on conflict and humanitarian crises rather than development issues, according to a new report.

The State’s overseas aid programme, Irish Aid, gets almost no media coverage despite the large amounts of money it spends, the report by DCU’s school of communications shows.

“The coups-and-earthquakes syndrome is very much alive and well” in newspaper reporting on the developing world, report author Marguerite Barry said. Poor countries were often described as “basket cases” or being mired in “conflict culture”, she added.

More positively, the overall tone of newspaper coverage was neutral and nuanced, and there was significant coverage of arts, culture, business and sport.

Ms Barry presented the report, which was commissioned by Irish Aid, at the launch of a new round of the Simon Cumbers Media Fund. Under the fund, journalists are invited to apply for financial support for media projects in the developing world.

Minister of State for Overseas Development Peter Power said the current round would encourage applications focusing on the hunger crisis in the world. He pledged that 20 per cent of the Irish Aid budget would be spent on reversing the situation which sees one in six of the world’s population go to bed hungry each night.

Mr Power acknowledged there was very little media coverage of the areas where Irish Aid works. “To simply focus on conflict in developing countries is to give audiences just a fragment of the story, and to neglect the long-term causes and systemic problems underlying a situation.”

In Haiti, for example, the effects of the earthquake were magnified a thousand-fold by a history of poor government, he said.

The report shows that just 1.5 per cent of coverage was devoted to Irish Aid priority or partner countries. Mr Power commented: “Irish Aid’s work isn’t sexy. When you focus on crisis, it’s an easier story to tell, and much more graphic.”

According to Ms Barry, developing countries get little or no attention from newspaper editorials, suggesting that a low value is attached to coverage of these countries.

Even in cases where developing countries are in the news, it is often because of purely western concerns. Most stories about Malawi, for example, concerned Madonna’s attempts to adopt children from that African country. Ms Barry said Vietnam was frequently covered “as an event in US history rather than a country in its own right”.

Africa dominates coverage of developing countries, the research shows, and overall the countries that receive the most attention are anglophone.

The report examined almost 1,000 articles printed in 32 national and regional newspapers in the first half of 2008. The Irish Times accounted for over half the daily newspaper coverage.

Applications for the Simon Cumbers Media Fund are invited by May 7th and further information is available on simoncumbersmediafund.ie. The fund was established in memory of Irish journalist Simon Cumbers, who was killed in Saudi Arabia while working with the BBC in 2004.