Returning home a few weeks ago from the picturesque Italian town of Perugia where I had attended the International Journalism Festival, I found myself feeling strangely optimistic. Not that optimism is strange to me – though many of my countrymen have claimed exactly that!
I had been pleasantly surprised to find so many panels and discussions centering around the idea of impact. It seemed to me that the idea of journalists having a mission and trying to effect change rather than being inert observers was no longer a dirty secret. Sure, there was debate about what impact was and how to seek it, but the genie was definitely out of the bottle.
Still, other problematic conundrums and shibboleths remain. Many of the conversations I had about the ethics of covering crises, including the panel I moderated, kept returning to two deceptively simple questions: Who owns the stories that journalists tell? And what do journalists owe to those they report on?
They may sound a bit like ivory tower philosophising but, in practice, they cut straight to the heart of the power imbalances baked into journalism and especially how we cover communities facing crises. They expose a profession that has generally behaved as if stories are, like resources in some unclaimed wilderness, free for the taking.
Too often, journalists enter communities in crisis, extract trauma, suffering, and grief, and then leave. The story gets published. Money and awards may follow. Careers advance. But what is left behind? What is returned? And what are we actually doing when we treat other people’s pain as our professional capital?
The uncomfortable truth is that much of our industry still operates with a colonial logic. Under the doctrine of terra nullius (nobody’s land), colonisers justified the seizure and appropriation of native land and resources, claiming the land was empty and belonged to no one. Of course journalists do not claim that there are no people in the places we write about. However, we act like they are conceptually empty, that the stories we find there belong to no one and are available for extraction. We may not use the old language of empire, but the impulse to claim, define, and profit remains eerily familiar.
The dominant Western journalistic tradition tends to treat stories as neutral objects. If something happens, it is assumed that anyone who either witnesses it or hears about it, has the right to tell it. This assumption underpins the notion of journalistic freedom. But it also conceals an entitlement: the idea that access equals ownership.
In humanitarian crises, the same logic manifests itself when journalists drop into unfamiliar contexts and assume a right to interpret and disseminate stories that are not theirs. Storytelling is inherently relational and the relationship between reporters and their subjects is not just about information, but also about power and exploitation. Who gets to tell the story and be believed? Who gets edited out? And who benefits from the telling?
This is not just a theoretical concern. It plays out daily in newsrooms and in coverage of war, displacement, famine, and disaster. Western journalists often dominate the global narrative, while local voices are sidelined, treated as sources or fixers rather than storytellers in their own right.
Quoted in languages they don’t speak
Crisis reporting often follows a familiar pattern: a journalist arrives, gathers quotes and images, frames a compelling narrative, and departs. The faster the turnaround, the more valuable the scoop. In this model, people and communities become raw material.
Extraction doesn’t just mean taking something away. It can also involve an unequal exchange. Journalists often dismiss the idea that their subjects might have legitimate demands in return for offering up their stories. But as I heard again at the IJF, people in crises can become weary of being constantly asked for interviews, especially when the reporting does little or nothing to ease their plight.
Stories are told about communities but rarely with them. Their perspectives are filtered, their agency muted, and their knowledge systems dismissed.
And the vague promise that “media exposure” will lead to help or political action no longer feels adequate, if it ever did. Many freelance journalists today rightly reject the practice of offering “exposure” in place of payment for their own labour. But do we extend that same recognition to the emotional, intellectual, and social labour we demand from the subjects of the stories we tell? And If we did, how might that change our understanding of our role and obligations to them? How might it shift the kinds of stories we choose to tell?
Further, there is a real cost to being offered up as part of the news buffet prepared by an industry that rewards speed and spectacle. Spectacle flattens complexity. It replaces solidarity with voyeurism. And while journalists may move on to the next assignment, the people whose stories were mined are left with the consequences of being exposed, misunderstood, or reduced to symbols. For many people living through a crisis, it means being reduced to their most vulnerable state (Dr Yafa El Masri articulated this most powerfully when she spoke of what her Palestinian refugee community described as “UNICEF photos”), quoted in languages they don’t speak, and turned into headlines they may never see. It can mean loss of privacy, misrepresentation, or fresh traumatisation.
There is also the deeper cost of erasure. Stories are told about communities but rarely with them. Their perspectives are filtered, their agency muted, and their knowledge systems dismissed. This erasure is especially acute when journalists come from vastly different cultural or socio-economic contexts and fail to recognise their own positionality. Without deep cultural understanding and humility, the story told is not just incomplete – it can be harmful.
And it is not enough to claim to be “giving voice” to the voiceless. People are not voiceless. The task is to listen, and to create conditions where people can speak for themselves and be heard. The ethics of crisis reporting cannot be limited to consent forms and traditional media codes. They must include questions of justice, reciprocity, and repair.
Journalists owe their sources more than anonymity and accuracy. They owe them dignity. They owe them context. They owe them a share in the power that comes with shaping the narrative. And they may also owe them something more material.
If journalists profit – professionally, reputationally, or even financially – from stories rooted in another community’s suffering, what is owed in return? Should communities have a share in those profits? At the very least, should they have a say in how stories are told, and by whom?
These are uncomfortable questions, especially for a profession that still clings to the idea of objectivity and distance. But they’re necessary ones—because what’s at stake is not just representation, but justice.
And it’s important to clarify: “local media” and “local community” are not the same. A reporter based in the capital city may not understand, or be trusted by, a rural community they parachute into. Similarly, local outlets can reproduce elite or outsider perspectives. So we must go beyond proxies and invest in meaningful consultation with the communities directly affected, not just the institutions that speak about them.
This could mean involving communities in how stories are told and framed: sharing drafts or interpretations before publication; giving over co-authorship or creative control; committing to long-term engagement and follow-up; ensuring the reporting leads to some tangible benefit for the community.
Listen more and speak less
This question of what is owed is most uncomfortable when we consider the unspoken taboos around compensation. At Perugia, one of the more provocative conversations I had was about whether journalists should ever pay their sources. In most mainstream journalism circles, the answer is an unequivocal no. Paying sources is considered unethical because it might incentivise exaggeration, fabrication, or manipulation. Some who have crossed that line have seen their reputations stained, their work discredited.
But the principle starts to feel shaky under scrutiny. We worry that paying sources will distort their stories yet we rarely question whether paying journalists does the same. After all, a powerful story can launch a career, win awards, attract funding. If money distorts truth, why assume it only does so at the bottom of the pyramid, and not at the top?
Humanitarian journalism must shift from a mindset of extraction to one of relationship – from “telling the story” to honouring community and humanity.
And in humanitarian contexts, the stakes are even higher. We are often speaking to people who are desperate, who may be hungry, injured, grieving. The disparity between the journalist and the person being interviewed is stark, and it creates a deeply uncomfortable power dynamic. In that moment, what does ethical journalism require? Does it forbid you from offering water? Food? Money? It feels that there may be something obscene about recording someone’s pain for publication and profit, while they receive nothing.
We must ask whether our ethics are designed to serve people or to serve the profession. Too often, the principle of not paying sources functions less as a safeguard against distortion and more as a way of protecting journalistic authority and reinforcing the idea that stories are freely taken without obligation or reciprocity. But perhaps in the context of crisis reporting, we need to rethink what reciprocity means. And what accountability demands.
None of this is easy. But ethical journalism was never supposed to be easy.
Decolonising storytelling means recognising that journalism is not neutral, and that power travels with the storyteller. It means acknowledging the colonial roots of modern media and actively working against their legacies.
It also means being open to other ways of knowing and telling. In many cultures, storytelling is communal, iterative, and deeply tied to responsibility. There are protocols around who can tell what, and why. There are stories that are not meant for outsiders, not meant to be commodified.
Humanitarian journalism must learn from these traditions. It must shift from a mindset of extraction to one of relationship – from “telling the story” to honouring community and humanity. That includes rethinking who gets the mic, who gets the byline, who sets the frame. It may mean funding and supporting local media, but it definitely requires we listen more and speak less. It means being truly accountable to the people whose stories we take and on whose authority we claim to tell.
Journalism prides itself on bearing witness. But what if the goal is not just to bear witness to something, but to witness with the people experiencing it? That shift from extraction to community is at the heart of decolonised storytelling. It asks us to move beyond the drive to inform and towards a commitment to transform.
If we truly believe that stories matter, then we must believe they have weight, consequence, and ownership. And we must learn to carry them with care.
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