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In the News
- Let’s Talk About USAID, Baby: Former Washington Post Global Opinions editor, Karen Attiah, has taken issue with an editorial published by her former employer which highlighted the “remarkable resilience” of African nations following last year’s abrupt USAID cuts. Attiah rightly criticises the Post’s editorial board for glossing over the deaths of hundreds of thousands on the continent (and elsewhere) as a result of the discontinuation of programmes. However, the editorial’s paternalistic assertion that “African nations are showing that they don’t want to be charity cases” also needs some interrogation. Why did they need to show this? The board seems surprised that “despite the cuts, sub-Saharan Africa’s economy as a whole grew” and that “foreign aid is no longer the continent’s main source of capital”. One could be forgiven for asking what rock they crawled out from under given that this has been the case for over two decades. Even before Trump returned to office, aid was just 2.4% of Africa’s GDP. Not nothing, but also not everything.
In The Spotlight
When is a Genocide a Genocide?: On 22 March, in response to sharp questioning by UK politician Zack Polanski, BBC presenter Nick Robinson defended the institution’s position regarding whether or not to call what Israel has done in Gaza a genocide. “Our job is to report,” he posted on X. “We interview you & those you quote who use the word genocide. We do the same for those who disagree. We also report that no international court has yet made a judgment. Nor has the UN. That’s not me or the BBC taking sides or downplaying what’s happened in Gaza. It’s doing our job.”
Well, this week marks the 32nd anniversary of the Rwandan Genocide, which is officially recognised as beginning on 7 April 1994. The first international court to make a judgment on whether genocide had happened was the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda when it convicted Jean Paul Akaye of genocide in September 1998 – four years after the killings. Yet the BBC was using the word “genocide” long before that. Similarly, the International Criminal Tribunal for Yugoslavia's first genocide ruling on Srebrenica came in 2001. But Western media had been invoking the word genocide from before 1995. In both cases, the word reflected an assessment of events – not a legal threshold.
Legal declaration was not a prerequisite for naming in BBC practice for Rwanda nor for Bosnia. Why is it for Gaza?
More to the point, the idea that a crime only counts as genocide if recognised as such by an international court would negate all genocides except in Rwanda, Cambodia, and Bosnia. But the BBC does not deny the Herero and Nama genocide nor does it feel the need to point out that no court has declared the Holocaust a genocide.
From the Decolonise How? Vertical
“While child-focused advocates might all agree that children ‘shouldn’t’ be targets, our grammar fails us by foreclosing the possibility of thinking about the implications of recognising that they are, and that the international system designed to protect them is blatantly powerless.”
— Kristen Hope, Children are targets. We shouldn’t pretend they are not
Focus on ethics
Whose context matters: As we have seen above with the Washington Post, unacknowledged presumptions can ruin even what looks like a positive story about agency. A news release from the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies marking a year since Myanmar experienced a devastating earthquake highlights the role of local communities and responders in driving recovery. However, there is little acknowledgement that this is the case in pretty much every humanitarian crisis. Without this context, stressing their “extraordinary strength” and “remarkable strength and dignity” risks portraying local response as an exception rather than the norm.
A remarkable statistic from Save The Children reveals that 1.6 million Ukrainians have returned home despite the ongoing fighting partly because “missing their community outweighed the risks”. It is deeply humanising and sadly rare for publics to imagine refugee communities as people who are willing to risk all, not just to escape but also to return, when that is in the best interests of their families. Half of the returning Ukrainian parents did so “because their children were feeling unhappy, stressed, or lonely”. However, it is again important to provide the context that this is not exceptional. In Sudan, despite the ongoing conflict, 1.3 million people have voluntarily returned.
Behind the release
Imagining poverty differently: A poster published by 18 UK organisations “including charities, campaigners, unions and faith groups” marking the lifting of the country’s two-child benefit cap – which limited certain welfare payments – offers an instructive example of how poverty can be communicated in an ethical manner.
The ad centres a simple claim: 450,000 children lifted out of poverty. It is bright and celebratory. Children are present in the illustration, but not exposed. They are shown from behind, without identifiable features. There are no visual cues of distress, no attempt to elicit pity. Instead, the emphasis is on outcome: a policy change and the lives it will affect.
Across campaign materials on the two-child cap, the pattern is consistent: numbers, not faces. The scale of poverty is communicated statistically, not through images of individual suffering.
This stands in sharp contrast to the typical depiction of poverty in the UK, where according to one study, “press coverage tends towards individualised images, which arguably reduce government responsibility”. And the same is true for Global South poverty, which is made legible through images of hunger, deprivation, and distress. The implied response is not political action, but charity.
The current materials work differently. They treat poverty as a structural condition, not a personal tragedy. They locate responsibility within policy rather than generosity. And they preserve the dignity of those affected without diminishing the seriousness of the issue.
It is worth asking why. These materials were talking about British kids to a British audience. The othering that happens when audiences are imagined as donors is discarded when they are seen as fellow citizens with obligations to each other. When the audience is imagined as citizens, dignity, context, and structural clarity are standard. When the audience is imagined as donors, they become optional.
The question is not whether we can communicate poverty ethically. These materials show that we can. The question is who we decide deserves this standard.
That’s a wrap from the narrative frontlines.
The Decolonise How? Digest is partly funded through a grant from Pledge For Change.
Seen crisis coverage that raised your hackles – or warmed your heart? Send it our way: [email protected]
