What do the television sitcom The Vicar of Dibley and the headline "25,000 Africans died needlessly yesterday" have in common? They are both, in their own way, challenges to the way we report world poverty.
The headline challenge comes from Jeffrey Sachs, UN special adviser to UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan on the millennium development goals. It could be used any day, he said, and it would be true. He was speaking at a conference last week, organized by the BBC World Service Trust and the Department for International Development, on the media and the fight against global poverty.
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BBC1 controller Lorraine Heggessy had brought along a clip from a special forthcoming edition of the sitcom about Dawn French's vicar, based around a letter-writing campaign from the Dibleyites to the prime minister, asking why he hadn't yet solved the first millennium goal to halve by 2015 the number of people who live on less than a dollar a day.
Both were held up as ways of changing our attitudes to reporting world poverty and getting development into the popular consciousness if we are to have an outside chance of keeping those promises made by world leaders in 2000. As it stands, the outlook is bleak. A straw poll on the BBC Web site found that 73 percent of users hadn't a clue what the millennium development goals were. Another indicator showed that, in a one-month period, the phrase appeared in British papers only seven times. Perhaps not surprisingly it was in the South China Morning Post 17 times and across the major African press on 593 occasions.
Richard Curtis, who created the sitcom and is also vice chair of Comic Relief, reckons it's time the gloves came off and the story switched away from funding.
"What's the story?" he asked. "People will say we've given enough to charity, now it is time for the politicians to act."
Sachs, an American, said, "I am living in a country that doesn't discuss these issues at all. The president of the United States has not ever mentioned the words `millennium development goals' in sequence. Not once."
The lack of knowledge about poverty in the third world is highlighted by the belief, according to one poll, of the majority of Americans that 20 percent of their taxes go to foreign aid. It is less than 0.1 percent.
The British ability to get the story across is little better. A study for the international development department four years ago found that 80 percent of the British public was informed about developing countries by television and that in a 10-year period relevant factual programming, outside of news, had decreased. Human rights, environmental, religious and cultural topics were being replaced by travel and wildlife programs.
Now it is worse. The research organization 3WE reported in May this year that factual international programming on Britain's four largest terrestrial channels was 40 percent lower last year than in 1989 to 1990, and what we get now tends to be travel programs, series following British adventurers, documentaries about Brits abroad, and reality game shows in exotic locations.
Enter Chancellor of the Exchequer Gordon Brown with the storyline. For Brown, next year is the crunch year. For the media, the opportunities for reporting on global poverty and the north's political initiatives, or lack of them, are laid on in a month-by-month program.
Next month we have the UN millennium project report on poverty; February sees the G7 finance ministers meet under UK chairmanship to examine debt and finance for development; in March comes a personal report by Annan on world poverty; April and June have special meetings of G7 to prepare a final paper on debt and development; in July Britain hosts the G8 summit in Edinburgh preceded by the report of the Africa Commission; that's followed in September with the UN millennium summit; then in December in Hong Kong the world trade talks offer the opportunity to get to the heart of one of the other great development issues of our time.
So the news list is there if we care to plug in to it.
"Live Aid," Brown said, "was that extraordinary moment when, through the power of television, everyone in the world realized here was an issue that wasn't just a matter of opinion. And Live Aid started with the exposure by journalism -- Michael Buerk's reports from Africa."
Since then, he went on, "despite the massive publicity, aid to Africa, which was US$33 per person 10 years ago, is just US$19 per person now."
These are "human disasters with human causes," he said, "and whole governments should be held to account."
Most media executives see development stories as too dull. David Yelland, former editor of the Sun and deputy editor of the New York Post, bluntly said: "Stories like this don't sell."
But James Ruddy, deputy editor of England's Eastern Daily Press, has a different story. With a circulation of 70,000, he believes good international coverage is a "massive brand asset."
"It does not turn off the readership," he said.
The regional newspaper has broken several national stories based on its long-term work with non-governmental organizations and in 2002 won the One World Media award for its campaign to provide vital medical treatment for Sierra Leone war child Issa Kamara.
There are plans to redress the balance. Dorothy Byrne, head of news and current affairs at Channel 4, explained how she had changed programming to place Dispatches and other documentary slots more centrally, and had begun to "go to places at a time when there is not an immediate disaster." During the G8 summit, Channel 4 will be broadcasting all week from Africa.
The conference also discussed the state of the media in developing countries and gave Myles Wickstead, head of the secretariat of the Commission for Africa, a few ideas to take away.
The commission was asked to address the media question in order to strengthen its independence and make it a tool for accountability and transparency. It might consider linking new aid to progress towards independent media, organizing effective local training, and providing seed capital to form an independent all-Africa news agency.
One delegate from South Africa even suggested never sending another northern reporter to do a southern story. But the suggestion that attracted most discussion, especially from the large number of African journalists there, was how to set up an "all-African Al-Jazeera." Now there's a development goal.
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