Gourevitch
Journalists and humanitarian-aid workers tend to get along: Often, they went to the same schools, and they end up hanging out together when on assignment or working in the field. In conflict zones, especially, they stick together, staying at each other’s houses, drinking together and sharing thoughts about the world around them. In this way, journalists embed with humanitarian workers when doing stories, as Philip Gourevitch wrote in a provocative New Yorker article entitled “Alms Dealer,” describing how “journalists too often depend on aid workers – for transportation lodging, food, and companionship as well as information.”
Linda Polman
In his essay about humanitarian aid, focusing on a book entitled “The Crisis Caravan: What’s Wrong With Humanitarian Aid?” by Linda Polman, Gourevitch argues that journalists are biased toward humanitarian aid workers. Just as journalists embed with the military in Iraq and Afghanistan – and occasionally lose perspective on the military or the war itself, as Michael Massing described in his article in The New York Review of Books – journalists may become too close to aid workers and fail to report on their shortcomings and mistakes.
The close relationship between journalists and humanitarian workers may be even more troubling than the one between soldiers and journalists. The military and the media have long held each other in mutual suspicion, but that is not the case with journalists and aid workers. They see eye-to-eye on so many things: Both humanitarian workers and journalists have a certain idealism, and perhaps hubris, about their vocation, and they both look at the military with skepticism. This is part of the problem, says Gourevitch, who believes journalists should be more critical of humanitarian aid. Good advice – and, for many journalists, hard to follow.
This is certainly a worthy topic. Sadly, Gourevitch’s piece muddies rather than clarifies the picture.
First of all, the piece misleadingly states that journalists are manipulated by aid workers. Journalists come to get what the public is demanding, which is the traditional media fare of emergencies, tragic stories and the occasional triumph. It’s a regrettable situation, but one in which journalists have at least as much agency and responsibility as aid workers.
Secondly, Gourevitch airbrushes the donors out of this picture. Aid agencies certainly bear responsibility in going after badly-directed aid money, but we’re unlikely to get a good understanding of the situation without including in the discussion the people and institutions who put out the grants in the first place.
Gourevitch blames the NGOs for being self-policing. That’s like blaming unruly children for not having received enough discipline. Shouldn’t he also talk about the people who should be policing the aid industry, including the press and donors?
More generally, Gourevitch fills his article with unsubstantiated claims that he puts out as indisputable fact. His sweeping one-sentence dismissal of Peace Corps is a disservice to any attempt, on the part of the reader, to understand that complex institution. In his last anecdote, he suggests that a boy might not have his throat slit were it not for the presence of aid workers. That’s at best a speculative claim, well below the standard the New Yorker is known far. In any case, this line of thinking indicts the press at least as much as it indicts the aid workers. Sadly, there are plenty of examples of atrocities, in Congo and elsewhere, that happen without any aid presence.
There is plenty of legitimate grounds for criticism of NGOs and emergency work. But for that criticism to be insightful and lead to positive change, it needs to come with an understanding of the system as a whole, and curiosity about why the different actors act the way they do. Both are in short supply in this article. The irony is that Gourevitch’s article is much like humanitarianism at its worse: a smug, self-righteous, under-informed individual, blind to his own limitations, judges others from a position of moral superiority, and does more harm than good in the process.