The InterDependent

A combination of rapid technological changes and economic hard times is causing the media to rely more and more on nongovernmental organizations and aid workers, especially those involved in human rights, to gather information on some of the hottest spots in the world, journalists and other officials say.

The dual role played by human rights and aid workers, including those who work for the United Nations, has not been examined too publicly in the nongovernmental community, even though some have questioned the wisdom of advocacy groups behaving like press outlets, given that humanitarian work and news reporting are very different jobs, with seemingly different agendas.

Yet nongovernmental organizations as well as UN workers on the ground have always been sources of information for the media to some extent, but since many major media groups have cut back their staff significantly in foreign bureaus, it leaves them more reliant on others working in the field.

“We are consciously adopting some characteristics of news organizations,” said Carroll Bogert, deputy executive director for external relations at Human Rights Watch. “We are information gatherers and distributors, and we always have been.”

But two things have changed, she added. “One is the technology, which has allowed us to compete and to move our information much quicker than ever before with a kind of journalistic metabolism, and the other thing is the poor health of the media business, which means they have fewer resources in comparison to us.”

Human Rights Watch received a $100 million "challenge" grant from the philanthropist George Soros last year; the organization currently has more than 90 researchers, which is “more foreign correspondents than The New York Times and The Washington Post put together,” Bogert added. “They do different things than journalists, but part of what they do is the collection and the dissemination of information. So yes, we are very conscious that we are filling a gap that the news media are leaving behind.”

In fact, Human Rights Watch has hired many former journalists, including Bogert, who was a foreign correspondent for Newsweek for 12 years before joining Human Rights Watch 13 years ago.

“That’s partly because the media business is losing talent as they lose money and partly because we understand that among the many things that we do is this real responsibility to provide our information quickly to the general public and to the media, serving two audiences,” she said.

Alma Hidalgo for UNA-USA

Carroll Bogert, deputy executive director for external relations at Human Rights Watch, which has been acting like a news outlet lately.

For example, Bogert said that her organization has a multimedia program that assigns “literally the same photographers that I assigned when I was the foreign editor of Newsweek 18 years ago.”

Suzanne Trimel, media relations director for Amnesty International USA, also thinks that the economy and technical advances play a big role in human rights groups acting as reporting sources. “The economy has so decimated many journalistic organizations because ad revenue is down, because the nature of Internet has changed everything about how journalists can operate, that other sources do step into that gap,” she said in a phone interview.

Trimel noted that reporting from all foreign fronts is especially difficult these days for the American press because it is devoting so many resources to Afghanistan and Iraq, where US troops are deployed, and to Japan in the spring, after the nuclear accident at the Fukushima power plant.

“It’s very costly when you have very long-term stories overseas that you must cover,” Trimel said. “So they might not be able to put the extra person somewhere else and may have to depend on the news wires or the human rights organizations.”

She pointed out that nongovernmental organizations can also be an unrivaled source in places where journalists are denied access.

“We’ve always done research and reporting on what’s happening on the ground in terms of human rights violations in various places where journalists couldn’t get in or it was difficult for them to operate,” Trimel said, adding, “for example, behind the Iron Curtain before Communism collapsed.”

“Similarly, we’re doing some of the same things in various countries today,” she added.

When Margaret Besheer, Voice of America's UN correspondent, was sent to Beirut to cover the unrest and repression in Syria this spring, she, like many colleagues, had to rely almost exclusively on contacts with nongovernmental organization employees.

“I had phone numbers for people in Syria but they didn’t know me, so they wouldn’t trust me and say anything that could put their lives in danger,” she said. So she and her colleagues turned to human rights activists living in Beirut who had fled Syria though still had a network inside Syria, she explained.

For decades, the UN has been a resource at times for journalists whose access is restricted, since the UN always has a public information officer in the places it operates. In June, for example, both NPR and the BBC Radio broadcast telephone interviews with a UN spokesman from Kadugli, in the Sudanese region of Southern Kordofan, where clashes occurred between Sudan and South Sudan forces.

The double job of activist and information provider that nonprofit groups have taken up more increasingly has not caused much of a stir among the organizations, Bogert said, adding that she was trying to open such a discussion.

“I don't know very many NGOs that really understand themselves in this role, who really fully grasp their new role as information providers in this different information economy where we live today. I’m trying to make NGOs pay attention to this.”

But the debate is going on inside Human Rights Watch. “There are some people on our staff who feel we drift away from our core competencies, that we are not journalists and we should not be journalists, that is not our function,” Bogert said. “And I agree with that . . . but that doesn’t mean that we don’t have an important role to play in the new information economy and on that, I think everyone does agree.”

Her strategy has therefore been “to use as much as possible professional journalists to do the work.”

UNDP Pakistan

Women in Punjab province in Pakistan train others how to start and run small business, part of a UN Development Program. UN officials in the field have often been sources of information to reporters.

For one, she said that she usually did not give cameras to Human Rights Watch researchers and ask them to make a photo essay to go with their report.

“Our strategy has been to use the best in the business of journalism so that our research, we hope, is the gold standard. We also want our visual product to be the gold standard, so we use the best photographers we can find. ... So rather than turning our staff into journalists, I use professional journalists to take HRW information and detailed extensive long reports and make them into journalism.”

The staff in Human Rights Watch’s communications department are all former journalists.

Asked about the risk that nongovernmental organizations could find themselves in a conflicting situation, given that they have an agenda, Bogert said she would make “a distinction between objectivity and neutrality.”

“I believe we are objective,” she said. “When we send researchers into the field, they objectively survey what has happened and fairly collect information from all sides and try to arrive really at the truth.”

Human Rights Watch, she said, interviews as many as 80 people for its research reports, and the researchers have much more time than journalists do to put a narrative together, “so the information should be really comprehensive, detailed and accurate.”

“If we are inaccurate, we are dead,” she added. “So we don’t try to say something happened that didn’t happen because we have an agenda. But once it is established what has happened, then of course we are not neutral.”