IFPRI Forum

March 2007

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Climate change poses a hydra-headed threat. Migration from poor countries to wealthy ones, while expansive of human freedom and economic growth, raises new challenges to notions of tolerance and community. The widening gap between rich and poor, both within nations and across the planet, threatens stability and mocks civic initiatives to promote equality of opportunity and effective public service. Differences in race, gender, and ethnicity, while recognized as never before, remain markers for discrimination all too often.

With so many problems threatening equitable development around the world, frank talk, fair information, and revealing analyses are essential. The role of professional media—of newspapers, radio and television broadcasts, and the Internet—would seem to be as important as ever. Yet journalists around the world suffer from a range of new threats and old limitations that raise troubling questions about whether mass media can respond effectively to the great global challenges of our time.

To be sure, many journalists have greater ambitions to make a difference—and the means to achieve those ambitions—than ever. More people than ever are literate, globally aware, and free to express their true views and even vigorously dissent. Around the world, there are more radio and television stations than ever before. New electronic tools, from computers to the Internet, make obtaining and re-presenting information easier and less expensive than ever.

There's also a new appreciation for the value of media as a tool for promoting democratic change, especially in poorer countries. From Mali to China and Peru to India, growing numbers of ordinary people expect and indeed hope that the media will keep a careful eye on government, take wayward officials to task, and identify emerging solutions. Indeed, in covering development, media in poor countries may well be on the verge of a golden age of great reporting. In India, enterprising journalists are exposing the plight of poor farmers. In most African countries, journalists are challenging government power in ways unthinkable a mere 10 years ago. In China, while censorship and repression of journalists are widespread and the development story remains tightly controlled by government officials, consumers of media nevertheless receive a daily diet of reports on social protest and poverty. All over the world, media empathy with the "losers" of development—the poor, the uneducated, the sick, the discarded—has never been greater.

Despite media attention to grinding poverty and the perils of unequal development, powerful forces are undermining more sophisticated coverage. Some of these are economic. Western media, which are largely in the hands of private owners, are undergoing a wrenching revaluation in which traditional models for wringing out profits are being supplanted by a new calculus that appears to place a lower value on original content. Expensive efforts to gather information, such as international reporting, are increasingly at risk. In the United States for instance, the number of foreign correspondents is dramatically declining. As recently as 2000, U.S. newspapers supported 282 foreign correspondents around the world. By 2006, the number had fallen by 20 percent. At the start of 2007, three American newspapers with distinguished traditions of international reporting (Newsday, the Baltimore Sun, and the Boston Globe) permanently shuttered their overseas bureaus.

Fewer journalists on the ground will worsen the habit of international media to chase after crises, ignoring or underplaying less dramatic but more significant or complex stories in favor of high-profile "causes" and celebrity watching. For instance, the visit of the pop-diva Madonna last fall to Malawi, where she adopted a child, attracted more media attention for this impoverished African country than all of its famines, government corruption, and foreign-aid programs attracted in the previous 10 years.

Even local journalists in poor countries tend to pander to the obsession with celebrities (both home-grown and imported), and hard-luck stories are often a substitute for trenchant analyses of social and economic failures. While sympathy is important, the media too often turns the disadvantaged into objects of pity that are more easily "consumed" by wealthy readers. The manner in which poverty co-evolves with wealth is rarely explored by journalists. Private business activity is often ignored, misrepresented, or trivialized. The activities of foreign-aid agencies rarely merit sustained coverage, either.

Journalists from poor countries are often fixated on the role of government leaders and their policies; they tend to rely too heavily on official statistics, especially when writing about poverty and development. Too often, they present these numbers out of context and lack sufficient skepticism about their accuracy and origins.

Even when journalists identify and describe structural problems, their coverage often fails to influence government behavior. Governments are increasingly sophisticated at both deflecting and managing critical press coverage. But as journalists face troubling institutional and political challenges, they remain central actors in the struggle to achieve more equitable societies.

For journalists committed to social uplift, the path is clear: Dedicate themselves to giving voice to the voiceless, decoding the self-serving statements of the powerful, and encouraging their societies to recognize, however fitfully, that inequitable growth and persistent poverty ultimately threaten all of us.