Silence of the media in Syrian refugees

Following the topic for this week and last week simulation, I wanted to focus my blog post on media coverage of Syrian refugees. 

The Syrian refugee crisis, labeled by the UN as the greatest humanitarian crisis in modern history, has overpassed 2.4 million of people flowing out of the country. Despite the catastrophic evidence, mass media is being quite silent about this issue. One of the articles that I read compared the media coverage on the missing Malaysian airplane to the reports on Syrian refugees. In a week the news about the Malaysian Flight 370 were 1800 at LexisNexis, this article explains, whereas the stories about Syrian refugees were 241. 

There could be many reasons for this lack of media coverage, and as Jessi explained in her post, one of them could be the ‘glamourization’ of disasters. Reporting about a refugee crisis requires most of the time stories of families and how they are living outside their home country, stories that can seem repetitive and monotonous after months of same news. However, the Malaysian airplane news seem more attractive for the public because of the peculiarity of the situation. 

Another explanation is that a great deal of the problem of media coverage in the Syrian refugee crisis involves the lack of proper reportage. Finding the areas of interest, translation for the interviews or safe regions makes really difficult for reporters to find a good story to cover.  Due to this scarcity, many media outlets are forced to use the same fixers, and therefore have less to report, leading to sometimes empty news stories.

Lack of media coverage about Syrian refugees can lead to extreme consequences that aggravate the crisis. The first one is the international response. Media coverage is essential for public awareness, and consequently for public response to the disaster or crisis. CNN International, for instance, has facilitated public information of the refugee crisis in Syria, creating a specific section called ‘How you can help’. Not only CNN has tried to cover stories of this crisis but also cooperate for active humanitarian response. Other consequence of limited media reports on the Syrian refugees crisis is the view of this issue in the neighboring and host countries. For instance, lack of international media coverage forming an opinion to the crisis, has lead to Egyptian news to condemn Syrian presence. TV presenters have accused Syrians of undermining their country’s well-being and threatened violence upon the refugees. 

With all this evidence, we can see the importance of media coverage on disasters and the consequences when there is a lack of it. The Syrian refugee crisis, specifically, has been worsened by the limited media coverage. The solution to the biggest humanitarian crisis in modern history, could be in hands of the media. How much influence mass media can have on disasters response and disasters solving? Does the media increase our awareness and response to disasters? 

http://www.juancole.com/2014/03/reasons-refugees-malaysian.html

http://www.cnn.com/SPECIALS/middleeast/syrian-refugees

http://borgenproject.org/lack-media-coverage-syrian-refugees/