Let's hope they don't die during sweeps week
Darfur starvation will be televised ... eventually
By Andrew Stroehlein
…Journalists who are getting into Darfur right now arrive at an eerily calm interregnum. They aren't there to witness Janjaweed attacks, they only see villages that were burnt to the ground weeks or months ago. For print and radio this is not an impossible obstacle, and articles and radio packages now appear regularly, though not frequently, in several serious newspapers and on radio.
The same cannot be said for TV, however. There was a tiny blip of television reports in mid-May based on interviews with refugees in Chad, but the few TV crews that were there have long since packed up and left. Even fewer have any intention of returning soon.
This moment between Darfur's ethnic cleansing and mass starvation is not made for TV as it is understood by news producers. They want active visceral footage to enliven a story. And, looming famine or no, video of burnt-out, abandoned villages only goes so far.
So, rather than report early on a horrific tragedy in the making - and thus possibly even contribute to its prevention or at least its amelioration - television news will wait for the starving to begin.
Once that happens, of course, everyone will send in a TV crew to film the dying and the dead. And reporters will link up to the world by videophone to ask why this has happened, and ask why no one did anything to stop it weeks and months before - that is, today, when television is refusing to cover the story.
