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SUNDAYREVIEW | OPINION
Were Missing the Story
By ANJAN SUNDARAM JULY 25, 2014
LISBON THE Western news media are in crisis and are turning their
back on the world. We hardly ever notice. Where correspondents were
once assigned to a place for years or months, reporters now handle 20
countries each. Bureaus are in hub cities, far from many of the countries
they cover. And journalists are often lodged in expensive bungalows or
five-star hotels. As the news has receded, so have our minds.
To the consumer, the news can seem authoritative. But the 24-hour
news cycles we watch rarely give us the stories essential to understanding
the major events of our time. The news machine, confused about its
mandate, has faltered. Big stories are often missed. Huge swaths of the
world are forgotten or shrouded in myth. The news both creates these
myths and dispels them, in a pretense of providing us with truth.
I worked in the Democratic Republic of Congo as a stringer, a
freelance journalist paid by the word, for a year and a half, in 2005-06.
There, on the bottom rung of the news ladder, I grasped the role of the
imaginary in the production of world news. Congo is the scene of one of
the greatest man-made disasters of our lifetimes. Two successive wars
have killed more than five million people since 1996.
Yet this great event in human history has produced no sustained
reporting. No journalist is stationed consistently on the front lines of the
war telling us its stories. As a student in America, where I was considering
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a Ph.D. in mathematics and a job in finance, I would read 200-word
stories buried in the back pages of newspapers. With so few words,
speaking of events so large, there was a powerful sense of dissonance. I
traveled to Congo, at age 22, on a one-way ticket, without a job or any
promise of publication, with only a little money in my pocket and a
conviction that what I would witness should be news.
When I arrived, there were only three other foreign reporters in
Congo. We were all based in the capital, Kinshasa, while the war raged
more than 600 miles to the east. My colleagues lived well: one in a luxury
hotel suite, another in an immense colonial home with servants and
guards. I envied them. To make matters worse, shortly after arriving I was
robbed at gunpoint.
I found work as a stringer for The Associated Press, and rented a
room from a family in a run-down home in one of Kinshasas poorest but
most lively areas. The house frequently lacked water and electricity, and
neighborhood children would run through it after playing in sewage. It
became The A.P.s headquarters in Congo.
I shared with my host family the only meal they ate each day. I helped
draw the curtains and hid with them when a band of street boys pillaged
our neighborhood. I was present when their baby first crawled.
My proximity to people was essential to my reporting. They were as
surprised as I was by news of a rape or a political killing especially if it
wasnt in the war-torn east of the country.
But the world outside is rarely surprised by a Congolese death. Those
same rapes and killings were not deemed important enough to make news.
Ignored, they were soon forgotten. The world saw Congo as a violent
place, but not worth reporting on, unless the story was spectacular and
gruesome.
Joy was often ignored.
Few Congolese, even in the war, see themselves as victims. The idea of
their victimhood is imagined, and the news in these moments seems to be
speaking to itself.
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Our stories about others tell us more about ourselves.
The telltale sign of such mythical, distant reporting is a distinct
assuredness. Confusion and vulnerability are stripped away, as are the
subtleties and contradictions of life. People and places are reduced to
simple narratives good and evil, victim and killer. Such narratives can
be easy to digest. But they tell us only a portion of the story.
A few months ago I traveled to a remote town in the Central African
Republic that had just been burned and destroyed by the government. The
town, now empty, was believed to have sheltered anti-government
militiamen during a battle. Bodies were strewn across the bush, quickly
decomposing, beside baby clothes dropped by fleeing mothers. On my way
back from the town I saw groups of outraged militiamen who wanted to
fight back. There was little reporting from there at that time; The
government had been demonized and the militiamen portrayed as victims.
African Union and French peacekeepers tried to curb the fighting by
disarming government forces. But the militiamen, unchecked, began
widespread massacres.
News from a distance worsens these problems. Living among
Congolese, I was continually held accountable for what I wrote, whether
about killings and rapes, election politics or Pygmy tribes who had given
away sections of forest to foreign logging companies for some sacks of salt.
A WARLORD once told me that war crimes were more
comprehensible than crimes in times of peace; the world didnt realize, he
said, that such atrocities were committed in times of confusion. He didnt
deny that war crimes should be punished, but merely asked to be
understood. He had become a warlord when armed men had stormed into
his home and killed his daughter. Unable to protect his family, he had
formed a militia. His subsequent brutality, whose targets included other
fathers and daughters, was criminal. It would be easy to dismiss him as
evil. His story tells us that his context produced evil.
Such immersive reporting is essential if news is to serve its purpose
and help us construct any real sense of the world.
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News systems are not designed for this. Reporters move like herds of
sheep, flocking to the same places at the same times to tell us, more or less,
the same stories. Foreign bureaus are closing. We are moving farther
away.
News organizations tell us that immersive reporting is prohibitively
expensive. But the money is there; its just often misallocated on expensive
trips for correspondents. Even as I was struggling to justify costs for a new
round of reporting in Congo, I watched teams of correspondents stay in
$300-per-night hotels, spending in one night what I would in two months.
And they missed the story.
Parachuting in with little context, and with a dozen other countries to
cover, they stayed for the vote but left before the results were announced.
A battle broke out in Kinshasa after they left, and I found myself hiding in
an old margarine factory, relaying news to the world, including reports to
this newspaper.
News organizations need to work more closely with stringers. Make
no mistake: Life as a stringer, even for those eager to report from abroad,
is daunting. Its dangerous, the pay is low and there is little support. For
years after I left Congo, my position with The A.P. remained as it is now
vacant. The news from Congo suffers as a result, as does our
understanding of that country, and ultimately ourselves. Stories from
there, and from places like the killing fields of the Central African
Republic, are still distant, and they are growing smaller.
Anjan Sundaram is the author of Stringer: A Reporters Journey in the Congo.
A version of this op-ed appears in print on July 27, 2014, on page SR4 of the New York edition with
the headline: Were Missing the Story.
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