human rights essay

总结

 

在1999年,美国国务卿克林顿她个人多次谴责并哀叹苏丹平民所受的痛苦,“苏丹的人权状况对美国人民不适销。”在马德莱娜·奥尔布赖特坦率承认之后不到五年的时间里,民主党和共和党一起在美国众议院敦促政府采取“联合国安理会如果在达尔富尔没有行动就采取多边甚至单边干预以防止种族灭绝”。苏丹迅速成为如《纽约时报》和《华盛顿邮报》这样的美国报纸报道的热点地区,描述了一个纯真粉碎邪恶这样一个简单易懂的故事。媒体描绘了达尔富尔种族屠杀--阿拉伯领导屠杀几乎无防御的土著黑人,反射出非裔美国人,美国犹太人,宗教保守派和自由派他们都采用冲突的原因。

 

达尔富尔地区在美国和西方国家的受欢迎程度总体上可以更好地通过检查911的政治氛围来理解。在许多同样的甚至更凶猛的非洲冲突中,对于许多西方人来说达尔富尔迷人的既不是什么可怕的强度也不是深不可测的暴行。这就是在非洲大多数暴力冲突的整体特征。所谓的受害者和罪犯这样种族构成使达尔富尔地区变得独特。不像大陆上其他被视为严格非洲事务的冲突,媒体就“阿拉伯”反对“非洲”的阅悉,达尔富尔将危机放置在苏丹这是阿拉伯另一个更大的领域,穆斯林邪恶,而大多数白人读者通常会发现很难与非洲黑人谋杀其他非洲黑人这样的情景相联系,达尔富尔的悲剧引起了深深的共鸣,因为它呈现了一个可以联合起来对抗西方新标杆的独特机会—冷战“复仇者”。

 

Human rights situation in Sudan    

 

Conclusion

 

In 1999, the American Secretary of State under the Clinton administration lamented that as much she personally deplored the suffering of Sudanese civilians, “the human rights situation in Sudan is not marketable to the American people.” Less than five years after Madeleine Albright's frank admission, Democrats and Republicans joined together in the US House of Representatives to urge the government to take “multilateral or even unilateral intervention to prevent genocide should the United Nations Security Council fail to act” in Darfur. Sudan rapidly became marketable as American newspapers such as the New York Times and the Washington Post depicted a simple and digestible narrative of innocence shattered by evil. The press portrayal of Darfur as an Arab led genocide against a virtually defenceless indigenous black population reverberated with African-Americans, Jewish-Americans, religious conservatives and liberals who all adopted the conflict as a cause。

 

Darfur's popularity in America and the West in general can be better comprehended by examining the post-September 11 political climate. Amidst many equally or even more ferocious African conflicts, what made Darfur enthralling to many Westerns was neither its horrific intensity nor was its unfathomable brutality. These are all integral characteristics of most violent clashes in Africa. What made Darfur unique was the racial makeup of the supposed victims and perpetrators. Unlike other conflicts on the continent which are regarded as strictly African affairs, the media's ‘Arab' against ‘African' reading of Darfur placed the crisis in Sudan within the larger context of another Arab, Muslim evil. Whereas most white readers would have ordinarily found it difficult to relate to a situation where black Africans were murdering other black Africans, the tragedy of Darfur resonated deeply as it presented a unique occasion to unite against the West's new post-Cold War nemesis.

 

Unaware of the complex identity politics involved in Darfur due to the media's depiction of a battle between good and bad forces, readers were called upon to assign themselves as saviours of Darfur. By imbuing Darfur with absolute moral lucidity, with pure villains and victims, the New York Times and the Washington Post had two obvious and linked objectives in mind with their coverage of the region which was to flatter and indulge their readers' sense of humanitarian anger that in return it would trigger a miliary intervention. In short, the American press interest in Darfur was almost as much about Darfur itself as it was about inventing a moralistic and uncomplicated generational assignment for Western activists and journalists.

 

By viewing the violence in Darfur through their own personal prejudices, the American press avoided looking at the deeper issues involved in the crisis and obscured uncomfortable truths such as the economic incentives involved in intervening in Sudan and the atrocities committed by rebel groups. Little space was given to analysing the roots of the crisis and the precise role of major players were not put in perspective. This oversimplification allowed the New York Times and the Washington Post to maintain their overarching editorial stance that Darfur was indeed a genocide committed by Arabs against Africans. Unlike the Guardian, their coverage of Darfur disqualified any discussion, facts or evidence that diverged from this preferred narrative.

 

While the two American media outlets treated debate as a luxury and military action as a given, there were several positive trends to emerge in their coverage of Darfur. Darfur defied previous studies into the Western media's handling of Africa that exposed a widespread reluctance by Western media outlets to allocate money to African issues. All three newspapers clearly invested considerable money and resources into Darfur by sending their journalists to Africa to cover the story. Perhaps more significantly, Darfuri voices were featured predominantly in several of the news articles. One of Edward Said's major grievances was that the subjects of orientalist representations were spoken about but did not actually speak in the narratives in which they are appeared, but in the case of Darfur there seems to have been a concerted effort to incorporate the perspective of those actually involved in the conflict. Even though 90 percent of articles were narrated through the authoritative voice of Western journalists or human rights specialists, the people of Darfur were given greater opportunities to directly present their story to the media than in the past.

 

Sadly, these positives were overshadowed by the glaring errors that were committed. With the exception of the Guardian which published diverse opinions on the matter, the coverage of the Darfur crisis in the New York Times and the Washington Post displayed several shortcomings traditionally associated with the Western media's treatment of the African continent. The American media's black and white analysis of the crisis contained sensationalism, flawed analysis, blatant inaccuracies and conspicuous omissions. They focused on reader impact rather than on accuracy. Many journalists writing for the American papers undermined the very essence of their profession by failing to deliver a well researched, balanced and complete portrait of the violence in Darfur.

 

A large proportion of blame however needs to be affixed to factors outside the control of average Western journalists. The presentation of the Darfur conflict in the Western media was as much influenced by the personal inclination of individual journalists as it was by the infiltration of tabloid culture in all sectors of the media. The concentration of media ownership and cost cutting tactics that have limited the resources available to journalists to investigate a story have also made it more difficult for journalists to perform their job in communicating information to the public.

 

The standard of journalism exhibited by the New York Times and the Washington Post reflect these changing conditions. Worryingly, the state of American investigative journalism has serious ramifications in terms of influencing and shaping public opinion and government policy not only towards Darfur but foreign policy in general. As the world becomes more interconnected, it is the responsibly of the mass media to not only inform and draw attention to events occurring in remote areas, as they have successfully done in Darfur, but to also instigate public debate about these issues. This task ‘requires journalists not only to listen to and synthesise public commentary but to present independent research on alternative public views, so that citizens can be informed in their public judgment.' With the exception of the Guardian, it is doubtful that the other two media outlets examined in this thesis accomplished this as they refused to deviate from a dominant framework that was socially and politically acceptable.

 

Ultimately, the Guardian, the New York Times and the Washington Post did an admirable job of raising awareness about the catastrophe in Darfur. All three newspapers brought an appalling conflict in an innocuous corner of Africa to worldwide attention. As such, this thesis is not intended to downplay the seriousness of Darfur or to dismiss the benefits that come with media attention in humanitarian wars. Challenging aspects of the media's presentation of Darfur does not in any way make what transpired in Darfur any less tragic or abhorrent and nor does it exonerate the Sudanese government or rebel militia groups from serious human rights crimes. Whilst it is almost impossible not be moved by the horrifying scale of human suffering depicted in the press and the outpouring of compassion that Darfur elicited in the media and West, the message conveyed in many editorials in American newspapers was decidedly deceptive and simplistic. Many journalists, particularly those working in the American media, did a disservice to their audiences by denuding the conflict of its complexity. Although any movement to halt the slaughter of innocents is a noble venture, the reality of the Darfur crisis is clearly much more complicated than the media's easy identification of an Arab perpetrator. It is quite disheartening to see that in Darfur, some Western media organizations have not learnt from the struggles of the 1970s to make global media representation more equitable and factual for the developing world.#p#分页标题#e#

 

Jok Madut Jok, War and slavery in Sudan (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001), 172.

 

James David Armstrong, Force and legitimacy in world politics. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 266.

 

Paul S. Voakes, “Civic duties: Newspaper journalists' views on public journalism,” Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly 76 (1999): 759.