Journalists to give greater voice to environment

Asian and African journalists agree that they must shift their focus away from politics and give a greater voice to environmental issues to encourage their communities to take better care of the environment.

At a workshop on ‘media and the environment issues’ in New Delhi, India, the journalists acknowledged that they rarely pay much attention to issues concerning the environment, in preference for politics, which “sells”.

“Environment issues are put very far to the back in the newspapers, while politics takes up all the space,” said journalist Isaiah Andebe, a freelance science and environmental reporter for Kenya’s Daily Nation newspaper, speaking on behalf of other journalists drawn from Kenya, Zambia, Fiji Islands and India.

Citing the example of Kenya, he said most of the newspapers there tend to focus on the environment only “when something big or disastrous happens”.

The journalists urged the Commonwealth Secretariat to take a lead role on protection of the environment and to organise more workshops to deepen their skills and knowledge.

Adolf Emmanuel Mbaine, an environmental journalism specialist from Makerere University in Uganda, who is leading the workshop, spoke on environmental issues that journalists face in their day-to-day work, such as pollution, land degradation, deforestation and flooding, and said that journalists can help address them by giving early warning signals, and educating the citizens about the various environmental regulations.

“The media can and does influence policy. Governments as initiators of policy often go to sleep if information is not disseminated to the people,” he observed.

“If these issues (on the environment) are brought to the agenda, you will have a more informed population, and certain things will work differently.”

The Secretariat and the Indian Institute of Mass Communication (IIMC) in New Delhi jointly convened the workshop, which is taking place from 7 to 12 April 2008. The workshop is funded by the Commonwealth Media Development Fund (CMDF).

Other key resource persons at the workshop include Dr Sunetra Narayan, a senior lecturer at the IIMC; Richard Mahapatra, a research expert at the Centre for Science and the Environment in India; and Krishnendu Bose, a conservationist and film-maker.

Secretariat Links:

• CMDF