Dear Bono....

In June of 2007, something almost remarkable happened. In Singapore, at the 16^th Asian Media Information and Communication Centre (AMIC) Annual Conference, AMIC hosted the first ever World Journalism Education Congress. For the first time, the notion that there was a desperate need for social responsibility to outrank press freedom had been addressed. Asian Media Association member and former Pakistani Cabinet Minister, Javed Jabbar, spoke on the media’s responsibility to look after the "rights of many," with Jabbar highlighting that the strength of public opinion and the power of civil society had been grossly underestimated. Jabbar said there was a need for balance to go beyond the protocols of illustrating two sides of a story; but more so there was a need for social responsibility to surpass the freedom of the press.

To put rhetoric temporarily aside, here we had a media expert from the third world nation of Pakistan, speaking at an Asian media conference in Singapore, telling us that the world’s media must trade in the press freedom that allows it to pick and choose news, in exchange for a ‘the-party’s-over’ approach and adopt some social responsibility. To read between the lines even further, what Jabbar was ever so politely saying was, "what the frig was Paris Hilton’s jail sentence doing on the news three nights in a row when the people in my hometown are dying from having nothing to eat." And perhaps if he had phrased it this way, we might have read about such an opinion in the "entertain me or I’ll go crazy" news pages of the western media. But having said that, we are only human, and certain words do tend to bore us no matter what importance they bring to the table. Words such as: ‘conferences’, ‘councils’, ‘responsibility’ and ‘protocols’ were all invented to help us switch off and go nigh nigh. The message Jabbar was trying to get across though, was important indeed.

Conferences like AMIC are important mediums of discussion for an ever-changing media industry, but their frequent talk, alongside the press councils’ infrequent acts of initiative, result in the same anachronistic content. Excellence in journalism isn’t about being the first and smartest anymore. With evolving technology among the arenas of the internet, podcasting, digital television and globalised news agencies rampant nowadays, the notion of the ‘exclusive’ story is no longer a priority for a network or publication. The carrot that lures large advertisers helping pay wages and Christmas bonuses lay in circulation and ratings. Increases in newspaper circulations come from things such as sexy imagery, colourful layout, sensational headlines, incredible reporting, promotional material such as competition prizes; as well as proportionate space for specialized content.

For increased ratings of news bulletins, audiences have to like their presenters; timeslots need to be convenient; sets need to be attractive and banter between hosts needs to illustrate some level of chemistry. The dogma of "you heard it here first" is slowly fading to a system of ‘fast-food’ type news. Therefore, there is a need for the media to reinvent itself into that of something good opposed to its current reputation believed by many as the entity bedding the multi-million dollar corporations.

Although its origins have little to do with social responsibility, gonzo journalism derived from a reporter’s yearning for an audience to believe in what they were seeing or reading. Gonzo journalism immerses the journalist into the story, allowing the reporter to be more than just a narrator of events, but an active participant in seeking out truth. The outcome is usually entertaining and quite empathic providing insight into a particular stance on the issue at hand from an outsider’s perspective. While this is not advocacy journalism in the strictest sense, gonzo journalism works much in the same way Superman or Spiderman (who were both journalists) used to work. They gained insight into stories by being a part of the action and ultimately were able to do good through their participation, which in turn, led to a more interesting article or photograph. Of course, the key variable in the analogy is that Superman and Spiderman both did these good deeds before their work was actually printed – but if this is the only inconsistency that can be quibbled in the metaphor then that is the least of my interpreter’s concerns.

In 1897, when journalism was but a twinkle in Beelzebub’s eye, one of the original media giants, William Randolph Hearst (not to be confused with Orson Welles) announced his belief that a newspaper had an obligation to consistently attempt to correct the ills of public life. This approach, known as ‘journalism of action’ assigned the media a new role of constructively shaping social behaviour and upholding the day-to-day ethics within our society. Ultimately this meant newspapers could no longer use the defence, "don’t shoot the messenger" – as news was not only about delivering a message but taking a specific moral stance. The interpretation of such ‘journalism of action’ however has not always been uniform – and by that I mean I’m sure Murdoch’s FOX network wasn’t trying to prevent rape and pillaging by telling Americans it was detrimental they vote Republican. However, the objective is simple ─ take advantage of the power of influence to perform a duty of public service.

The journalism of action movement came well after the second industrial revolution in a time when the world was becoming more and more ‘civilized’. Warfare was no longer an event with blunderbusses and canon balls – and killing no longer needed to be a face-to-face encounter. The same went for spreading news. As the Roman Empire gave us so much we take for granted today, newspapers were another commodity we can add to the list. The humble newspaper more or less arrived at the time of the empire’s collapse, 300 years prior to Hearst, in Germany. The news in those days resembled something like a Y2K drill i.e., – "the sky is falling; start hording the tinned fruit". These fairly regularly printed updates of the fading Roman Empire were distributed as far as England, and from then on, the print journalism industry began to evolve, gradually developing horns and fangs. It was these bloody origins that gave journalism its merciless roots the industry tends to take pride in today.

Newspapers started out as an incredibly practical medium. They were not for informing us of the weather or the lottery results – they were for communicating vital information to the home-front. They continued to thrive in the 1600s when the Black Death reared its ugly head yet again in Europe, infamously killing 30,000-odd people in the city of London alone. And when the world’s first reporters were not out side-stepping rats they were writing front page stories on a plague that was killing quantities of Europeans in one year that die daily in the third world today. However, these people who die daily today live in a world with modern medicine, plasma television screens, automatic heating toilet seats and very few Black Death casualties.

Well-established American media professor from Washington’s American University, W. Joseph Campbell, noted that Hearst carried out a variety of strategies in The New York Journal. These strategies saw the newspaper perform a number of moral deeds such as: solve crimes, contribute to charities, influence foreign policy and challenge local government. While these characteristics sound like they belong to either a superhero or a widow’s dead husband no man could ever live up to, they make for all the elements of an exemplary news publication. And while objectivity is always going to be the key ingredient to credibility when it comes to journalism, you can’t say that it isn’t impressive when one paper’s helping put the Riddler and the Penguin behind bars. This isn’t to say that ‘journalism of action’ is not present today, but with the media having developed the way that it has, it can be hard to distinguish the difference between its objectives of acquiring praise and that of acting responsibly.

In an article written by Campbell titled Advocacy Journalism Revisited, Campbell speaks of The New York Journal’s finest hours in relation to reactive journalism. In 1897, reporter Karl Decker helped a Cuban teenager serving a 15-month sentence in a Havana jail as a political prisoner, escape from her cell. Evangelina Betancourt Cisneros was the daughter of a Cuban rebel leader who was incarcerated. Suspicious of how her father would be treated in prison, she decided not to leave him and it wasn’t until an altercation between Cisneros and a prison guard erupted that she was separated from her father and moved to a more abrasive jail. Cisneros was imprisoned without trial on charges of conspiring against the Spanish military, which at the time was attempting to put down a rebellion across Cuba.

After some time covering the incident, Decker infiltrated a secret Cuban network in Havana that smuggled weapons and medicine into Cuba. With the support of the US diplomatic sector, Decker managed to break Cisneros out of jail and carry her aboard a streamer to New York City. Campbell addressed this story as a romantic anecdote of the origins of advocacy journalism. And while we will no doubt see the story of Decker and Cisneros on the big screen one day with J-Lo and Matt Damon, its relevance in Campbell’s article tells a tale that Hearst’s newspaper was more than about spreading news; it was about righting wrongs.

While Campbell tells a tremendous story of what is perhaps one of the reasons some people grow up and want to be reporters in the first place, it is an example of advocacy journalism on the part of the media only. If we were to implement advocacy journalism as the key tool in ending extreme poverty, the message needs to transcend both messenger and audience. A fairly recent instance of advocacy journalism (or to use Hearst’s term, ‘journalism of action’), can be seen in CNN’s sterling coverage of five-year-old Iraqi burns victim, Youssif (last-name-withheld). While playing outside his Baghdad home on January 15, 2007, an unsuspecting Youssif had gasoline poured over his entire body and was set on fire by masked men before fleeing. For the next nine months, the boy’s father had attempted to seek specialist medical attention in Iraq for his son’s scarring but to no avail.

In August later that year, CNN foreign correspondent Arwa Damon submitted a report on Youssif’s story which, when aired, created a consequential tidal wave of support from its viewers. Subsequently, the story was relayed on CNN.com and it became one of the most popular non-breaking news stories in the network’s history. More than $300,000 was raised by viewers and placed into a fund established by CNN in conjunction with the Children’s Burns Foundation; and the story’s conclusion saw Youssif fly to the US for treatment.

This is the type of journalism which should take priority on our news pages and bulletins today. Not because it exercises newsworthiness via the category of ‘human interest’ but because it demands a practical response. Sex scandals, high interest rates and tax reform are also newsworthy items ─ but should warrant being bumped down the hierarchy chain. And the reason advocacy stories should take precedence is because they present circumstances which can ethically be remedied. This would be a responsible and ethical course of action and one the press councils should uphold.

But like the story of Cisneros and Youssif, there are dozens of individuals needing to be fought for, numerous causes to advocate, and infinite civil wrongs to attempt to right. This is where extreme poverty beams with urgency. Extreme poverty is somewhat different altogether from these individual stories due to the colossal volume of people it kills combined with the remedy we have ready to administer. Ergo, extreme poverty demands a different take altogether. Extreme poverty demands front page, priority one, urgent news coverage. The situation we are in now is like having found the cure for cancer but deciding not to manufacture the drug. And of course this simile is a comparison that would never realize due to the vast number of people in the developed world, who have been, or are currently, being affected by the loss associated with cancer. Bar supermodels and Irish protestors, apart from feeling hungry when we’re forced to sit through a Powerpoint presentation, few people in the developed world know exactly what it feels like to experience hunger.

Founder and executive director of The Institute for Public Accuracy, the national consortium of policy researchers and analysts, Norman Solomon, wrote an article published in the widely dispersed newspaper column Media Beat on May 16, 2006. Like most columns, Solomon’s article, Corporate Media and Advocacy Journalism, was most probably read as quickly as it was forgotten. However, the tragedy behind this ritual of the throwaway tabloid is that the themes in Solomon’s article should have been enough to inform our media of the substantial hypocrisy behind dormant inactive news reporting. Corporate Media and Advocacy Journalism puts forward the notion of the ridiculousness of extreme poverty in a world of credible journalism.

Corporate Media and Advocacy Journalism

by Norman Solomon

We see this kind of news story now and again. Sometimes we try to imagine the people behind the numbers, the human realities underneath the surface abstractions. But overall, the responses testify to journalism’s failings ─ and our own.

"Poor nutrition contributes to the deaths of some 5.6 million children every year," an Associated Press dispatch said in early May, citing new data from the U.N. Children’s Fund. And: "In its report, UNICEF said one of every four children under age 5, including 146 million children in the developing world, is underweight."

The future is bleak for many children who will be born in the next decade. As AP noted, "the world has fallen far short in efforts to reduce hunger by half before 2015."

Reading this news over a more-than-ample breakfast, I thought about the limitations of journalistic work that is often done with the best of intentions. Try as they might, reporters and editors don’t often go beyond the professional groove of the media workplace. Journalists routinely function as cogs in media machinery that processes tragedy as just another news commodity.

Many people are troubled by the patterns of negative events around the world. And hunger is especially disturbing; in an era of prodigious affluence for some, the absence of basic nutrition for huge numbers of human beings is a basic moral obscenity. Across the spectrums of culture, faith and ideologies – whether remedies might seem to lie in religious charity or governmental action – heartfelt desire to reduce suffering is very common.

News outlets are adept at producing vivid stories about misfortune. Those stories might be emotionally affecting or even politically mobilizing in terms of relief efforts. But the overarching matter of priorities is not apt to come into media focus. In general, corporate-employed journalists are not much more inclined to hammer at the skewed character of national and global priorities than corporate chieftains or government officials are.

In a world where so much wealth and so much poverty coexist, the maintenance of a rough status quo depends on a sense of propriety that borders on – and even intersects with – moral if not legal criminality. The institutional realities of power may numb us to our own personal sense of the distinction between what is just and what is just not acceptable.

On this planet in 2006, no greater contrast exists than the gap between human hunger and military spending. While international relief agencies slash already-meager food budgets because of funding shortfalls, the largesse for weaponry and war continues to be grotesquely generous. The globe’s biggest offender is the United States government, which at the current skyrocketing rate of expenditures is – if you add up all the standard budgets and "supplemental" appropriations for war – closing in on a time when U.S. military spending will reach $2 billion per day.

This is what Martin Luther King Jr. was talking about in 1967 when he warned: "A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death." Such an occurrence isn’t sudden; it overtakes us gradually, becoming part of the normalized scenery.

Journalism, in its prevalent incarnations, has a strong tendency to blend into that scenery. And whether you’re working in a newsroom or watching in a living room or reading at a breakfast table, it takes a conscious act of will to look at the big picture – and challenge the reigning priorities that are simultaneously quite proper and horrific.

We’re encouraged to see high-quality journalism as dispassionate, so that professionals do their jobs without advocating. But passive acceptance of murderous priorities in our midst is a form of de facto advocacy. It’s advocacy of the most convincing sort – by example.

A hoary cliché says money makes the world go ’round. The extent to which that’s true may be arguable. But deeper questions revolve around the priorities that ought to determine the profoundly important choices made by individuals and institutions. Journalism can’t answer those questions. But journalism should ask them.

And what Solomon might be too humble in preceding to is that journalism asking these questions is the very beginning of journalism answering them. Usually the media, via political analysts and foreign correspondents, help be our tellers of when political spin-doctoring is going on and artful trickery being used. And these smoke and mirror tactics just so happen to be ever so respectfully coming from the very people we voted in, cunningly diverting our attention from what really are important issues. A simple example might be the Bill Clinton sex scandal in 1998 and 1999 which helped us forget about a series of bombings. These bombings included a debilitating assault on Iraq over possible (ha) weapons of mass destruction; NATO’s bombing spree of Yugoslavia that killed thousands of soldiers and civilians; and the traditional everyday (can’t remember a time when we weren’t bombing them) bombings going on in Afghanistan and Sudan.

Thus, while the media willingly took part in reporting on the silliness of President Clinton’s affair, they can also take credit for informing us ─ the audience ─ that the reason this scandal was probably being emphasized as much as it was, was to distract us from all the bombing. If only George Dubya had had an intern! However, the point is not that conspiracies are going on in the White House, but that the media can at times, rather successfully, do its job in demystifying current events and political motives that the everyday fit and proper person might not be able to decipher ─ and then flood that knowledge into the mainstream. These are the same attributes needed when relaying a medical or science-based story. We can’t all be doctors as much as we can’t all be in public relations.

Solomon uses the example of military spending in the US resembling a ludicrous figure when compared to humanitarian aid to the developing world. This is the sort of observation that needs to be injected into the mainstream like Justin Timberlake or Coca Cola. The overload of information in the information age can distract even the wisest of men. I’m pretty sure the Dali Lama himself moved all the way to Los Angeles just so he didn’t have to wait six-months for the next season of Californication. Talk about spiritual death. Solomon’s statement encouraging us to look at dispassionate reporting as credible or "high quality journalism" is correct. And he is spot-on to say that the passive acceptance of what is being reported on is indeed a form of "de facto advocacy". While this might have been a necessary foundation for journalism to flourish, it is redundant in the new millennium.

So what do these observations mean for journalism? It means journalists have to go back to school and re-learn how to be reporters. In the same way we have to re-learn every few years how to perform CPR or treat a nosebleed. The head tilts back, right? Or was it forward? Nowadays, if a terrorist hijacks a plane we happen to be on, we are no longer taught to give them our wallets and Rolexes and everything will be fine – we are taught to rustle up any karate moves we can remember from every Steven Segal movie we might have tried hard to forget and immobilise the terrorist. The same goes for extreme poverty. If we do not implement a different method of reporting, and a different approach in relaying information, millions more people will continue to die. Ironically, the only variable in the analogy is that there has been no change in famine-related deaths. There has been no major event causing anything to change in the same way we deal with terrorism differently today. We are in the same disgusting predicament we’ve been in for centuries.

Head of Rhodes University’s school of journalism, award-winning journalist Guy Berger spoke of the apartheid years in South Africa as being a time when the political circumstances required journalists to go beyond the parameters of their daily duties. Berger talks of journalism as more than just a job but a vocation of sorts, like the priesthood or the police force might be. In the early 1980s when he first began lecturing, Berger spent three years in a South African prison in East London for owning banned material. The material included Mandela’s Freedom Charter and the publication, Che Guevara. Despite describing his experiences as a nightmare, Berger continues to support advocacy journalism, even when the consequences are severe. In an article from the South African online newspaper, Daily Dispatch, Berger states:

"There was a hell of a lot of journalism that just kept its head down ─ not necessarily because it was scared but because it was narrow-minded. There were a lot of people who just didn’t get it – that the situation was so dire that it called on you to be more than just a journalist."

Once the romanticism and gallantry of what Berger’s asking fades, the responsibility of the task is somewhat formidable. What sort of danger does Berger expect the average reporter to have to submit to? Advocacy journalism in Nazi Germany or an apartheid-era South Africa could have been suicide. Rick Blaine’s creed that "I stick my neck out for nobody" in Casablanca is not welcome in Berger’s idealistic world. So what follows then are the personal dilemmas reporters must endure in relation to whether the controversy the printed story could cause is worth the outcome it could possibly achieve. Journalism in countries such as North Korea and Cuba today are under more than merely Big Brother’s gaze ─ they are controlled by the state, and the social climate in these countries, much like extreme poverty, is a problem we in the free world are fortunate enough not to be burdened by.

And these days, occupational health and safety is an inbuilt luxury in our workplaces helping many husbands and wives make it home to their families each day. There is little risk in the democratic world if we were to implement advocacy journalism on a more prominent level, which is another reason why we need embrace it. Of course it is important for the media to remain objective in relaying to us the information of the day; however, for issues of vital importance, such objectivity becomes redundant. It is like the extravert at the dinner party adamant on being an individual and defending Hitler as a fine economist and emotive speaker. But such traits become irrelevant when one’s economic plan no longer needs to account for some six million people ─ along with the fact that any white man can excel after a weekend at Toastmasters.

Berger goes on to say:

"Considering where we come from, I do think journalists need to think about if their journalism is contributing to democracy and ask if we are exposing undemocratic behaviours and attitudes. I don’t think they should be completely objective. Given the kind of divisions we have had in our society, I think journalists have some responsibility to promote understanding among different South Africans ─ although I am not talking about only doing positive stories. For example, how do we make sure that the new elite ─ and I don’t just mean black elite – doesn’t forget about the greater part of society, which is still languishing in conditions that one didn’t like under apartheid ─ and we still don’t like."

Therefore, what Berger is alluding to is the media’s unauthorized position as the fourth estate, ergo, the discourse obtaining a regulatory role in society. While the ‘estates of the realm’ might appear obsolete, their divisions are somewhat relevant in a metaphorical sense at least. Devised in medieval times, the first three estates refer to the Church, the Kings and the commoners; with the press referred to as the fourth estate after an observation picked up by author Jeffrey Archer from something Louis XVI said 200-odd years ago. More than a set of guidelines separating the different social classes, the media as the fourth estate can be looked upon as an authoritarian body to keep in check the doings of the kings, the clergy and the commoners. Thus, act as an ombudsman, if you will, for the authorities that already exist. Current affairs programs these days are the purest forms of regulatory journalism, however, a competitive trend to sensationalize every single report has tended to lead to a mass waning in credibility.

So Berger’s utopia of a media that exposes undemocratic behaviour is a type of journalism that operates by taking a particular side. The democratic nation that is South Africa indeed has many things to worry about, extreme poverty included, which raises the question that perhaps the level of dire straits a country is in, amounts to the level of objectivity that can be discarded. And what follows then is the dilemma of choosing where to draw the line. In Zimbabwe for instance, there is no freedom of the press, meaning South Africa as a neighbouring country can either advocate for a free press in Zimbabwe or tend to its own problems. Both endure high doses of extreme poverty. On the other side of the world, however, Australia’s biggest problem is trying to work out if alcoholic passion pop should be branded a bigger tax. But Berger raises an interesting point, stating that journalists write stories in the same way a university student might write an essay ─ being for the one marking the paper ─ aka, the reader. He states:

"Our media pay attention to the development challenges and poverty issues of South Africa ─ and that’s different to a lot of other societies. Because your middle class are your main media consumers, no one wants to bother them with what’s happening at the bottom end of the spectrum. And I think we do."

Berger uses the phrase "media consumers" instead of ‘audience’ addressing news mediums as commodities. People do read and watch what they are interested in and what affects them. The attitude that ‘the only thing a homeless bum is going to use a newspaper for is to sleep under’ ─ has traditionally meant the media has had no need to advocate for bums; unless of course, advocated for indirectly through a human interest piece. The rights of bums are not worth fighting for; however, a group of people who are in the discourse community or class of "media consumers" fighting for the rights of bums will make for a profitable story. What needs to happen and what Berger is saying is that this particular type of journalism that shamelessly sucks up to the majority (ie proletariat) and its mainstream ideas are both unethical and not constructive.

While current affairs programs might appear to be examples of advocacy journalism (in Australia anyway) mostly they are not. The reason why Australian current affairs programs on commercial networks are so bad is most probably because we don’t have very much to advocate. Known as the lucky country ─ Australians tend to have lucky problems. In Oz there are too many poker machines here so we have issues with problem gambling. The Commonwealth also has a solid welfare system which brings about problem dole cheats. Even the cancer we are at most risk of contracting is caused by spending too much time lazing on the beach without sunscreen. The lucky country is so great that during the 2007 federal election, no one could tell the difference between the two major political parties and party policies that the end result was decided most probably for the novelty of a change of government.

A fascinating article written by USA Today journalist Peter Johnson titled 'More reporters embrace an advocacy role’, discusses the various American reporters who have adopted a cause to lobby, as a way of contributing to their own identities. And no other journalist/celebrity has embraced this type of advocacy as effectively as Oprah Winfrey. Johnson states:

"The ‘social journalism’ that made Oprah Winfrey an international fairy godmother is the new rage in network and cable news, and it’s expanding to other media. Increasingly, other journalists and talk-show hosts want to ‘own’ a niche issue or problem, find ways to solve it and be associated with making this world a better place, as Winfrey has done with obesity, literacy and most recently, education by founding a girls school in South Africa."

Johnson goes on to say that there is a growing trend for television reporters and news anchors to find individuality from their competing networks (that goes hand-in-hand with a genuine desire) to do good. At the risk of the following sounding like Chinese whispers, Johnson uses an example given by Tom Rosenstiel of the non-profit non-political media evaluation organisation, Project for Excellence in Journalism. Johnson speaks of Rosenstiel speaking of Bob Woodruff, the ABC World News Tonight anchor who experienced quite an ordeal in northern Baghdad. Acting as a US foreign correspondent, Woodruff received serious head injuries in a roadside bombing. The first-hand experience led Woodruff to discover (or fully realize) the rather critical issue of inadequate medical care from the US government for soldiers suffering head trauma. Woodruff’s empathic stance led to the investigation by the Department of Veterans Affairs on returning troops from Afghanistan and Iraq who now undergo routine checks for head trauma.

Johnson also lists The Washington Post’s victory over the constant coverage of the Walter Reed Army Hospital which the newspaper believed was employing substandard conditions by neglecting veteran patients. The story prompted the resignations of three decorated Army officials including Major General George W. Weightman as well as set off a series of congressional hearings. In a further case of Chinese whispers, in light of both Rosenstiel and Woodruff’s observations, Johnson goes on to acknowledge University of Mississippi journalism professor Samir Husni’s theory that advocacy journalists, and even celebrities like Oprah Winfrey, claim a type of ownership for these niche subjects. Husni’s idea is that these stories cut through a crowded media marketplace because of a yearning by audiences to witness something different and something out of the ordinary. The dogma is similar to Goebbels’ notion of, "For God’s sake, don’t be boring". Husni states:

"People are hungry to be surprised by the content. The key is to get people addicted to your content. If you can’t surprise them, you can’t get them addicted."

This requirement of audience addiction then becomes a task for the journalist to alter his or her story from being a chore to read or watch, without the use of sensationalism. Is it even possible? Johnson goes on to give other examples of creativity in advocacy reporting that goes as far as even the weatherman using his three minutes of daily fame to make some sort of difference. ABC weatherman Sam Champion took his passive bulletins on temperatures and rainfall and turned them into constant reminders of climate change. Therefore, Champion contributed to the injection of the issue of global warming into the mainstream knowledge banks of the network’s viewers. This is something extreme poverty has never had the privilege. Fox News villain Bill O’Reilly advocates for Jessica’s Law – which would give child predators a mandatory sentence of 25 years to life in prison. Australian finance expert David Kosch lobbied for the Australian intervention of peace keepers in East Timor. While such soapbox stances might seem self-important and harbouring a reputation of being ‘political’ – retaining the humility to refrain from standing up for what one believes in can go as far as being destructive. I think the Susan Sarandons and Tim Robbins’ of the world are all well aware of the fact that they can sound like dicks going on about the political issues they advocate; but all this proves is that these ‘dicks’ are intelligent enough to overcome the embarrassment such lobbying begets, in turn, accepting the fact that such awareness does need to somehow make it into the mainstream.

But what follows this argument of ‘to advocate or not to advocate’ is the result. Does bringing certain issues to light and into the mainstream actually do anything for the cause? Obviously the answer is not so black and white. While for extreme poverty, it mightn’t feel like anything has been achieved through the works of Bono and Geldof and Live Aid and Live 8 etc – deaths caused by extreme poverty have gone down 10,000 people a day each decade for the past thirty years. However, this can also be dangerous information as it suggests much has been done for the third world when in fact it is not the case. It is like saying Hitler wouldn’t have been as bad a bloke had he been responsible for the deaths of only five million instead of six. It must be noted that there is still a billion people in the world dying from hunger.

While specific causes can be at risk of the dire repercussions of the cliché (i.e.; audiences switching off; audiences immediately becoming uninterested; developing a ‘no change = nothing is working’ attitude) advocating issues needs to continue but in a revolutionized way. Therefore, there is nothing wrong with continuing to deliver an ignored message; but for results to ensue, the message needs to be emitted in an original or creative way. Johnson’s article goes on to discuss an extract from NBC Dateline journalist Chris Hansen. Hansen conducted a piece of investigative advocacy journalism on online child predators which involved 10 hidden cameras. The story led to the arrest of more than 200 suspects. The story was a triumph in relation to television ratings, however, its own success in combination with the intriguing nature of the story, led to a series of backlash from critics questioning the amount to which the story was motivated by advocacy and that of ratings. Hansen defends the process by stating creativity as critical in retaining consumer interest. He states:

"We have the discussion here all the time: How do you balance what is clearly compelling TV with good responsible journalism? But every time we do one of these stories that really makes a difference, we raise the bar for ourselves and each other to come up with creative, dynamic and enterprising ways to cover these stories. It’s a challenge for our business."

Such challenges are the key. For advocacy journalism, the same amount of thought should go into the orchestration of a story as its content. Therefore, there should be a creative process in relaying the story so as to feed the audience of its addiction to be entertained. But let’s also give audiences a little bit of credit. Human beings are not necessarily shallow creatures. We yearn for important issues to affect us so that we can give our lives meaning. The only reason we are drawn more towards Hollywood gossip over the conflict in the Middle East is because of the ordinariness in which it is relayed. Hollywood gossip is sexy, personal, colourful, illustrative and easy to understand. The conflict in the Middle East is political, vague, generic, dusty and never easy to follow. There is nothing personal about it; nothing we can relate to. Even the violence is an anticlimax with a lot of guns being fired in the air, unattractive soldiers with thick bushy moustaches and the same boring monotonous manic depressive sounding British accents narrating the pictures.

For the world’s media to lobby for the annihilation of extreme poverty, the world’s media needs to adopt a revolutionized approach to conveying extreme poverty’s stories. The world’s media needs to deal with the issue through a 24-hour, 7-days-a-week, telethon-style assault on the situation like it was a war zone; but constantly. If the UN and our corresponding governments are not sending troops or peacekeepers or food and medical supplies to the thousands of villages in the third world regions of sub-Saharan Africa and Asia and South America etc – then it should be the responsibility of the moguls to send in their troops. If the Coalition of the Willing can invent a war against an abstract concept such as terror – then the media should be able to successfully execute a war against poverty. The industry already has some of the bravest employees who have travelled to some of the most remote and dangerous places throughout the globe. Our world’s journalists can be a new type of soldier, accomplishing things through the old-fashioned corny notion of ‘uncovering the truth’. They should be abseiling out of helicopters armed with cameras, notebooks and microphones. They should be storming villages wearing flack jackets and sensible shoes. They should be eliminating extreme poverty from the list of useless feature articles that are written on a monthly basis. It is a united media that needs to declare war.