“Credibility” in News

Here’s a Reality show for you…

The video you see above was shot by a member of Surgeons Over Seas, an excellent group of highly dedicated surgeons who travel the world teaching locals basic surgical techniques.  That saves lives.  More people die in Africa, for example, from lack of access to basic surgery than they do from AIDs.  Shocking, huh?

Of course, I could not sell this one to Discovery or Nat Geo either.

Cupcake Wars are always more popular than real wars.

In any event, Surgeons Overseas, or SOS is an example of an NGO – A non-government organization. People who go into some of the most troubled places in the world and live there and dedicate their lives to trying to help people.

Pretty impressive.

What is more impressive is that they really know the places in which they are working. They know the language, the culture, the history, the local politics and the people. They know them intimately because they live the story every day.

There was a time when their abiliy to tell their story – to get that kind of information out into the rest of the world was limited. It was limited by technology.  It cost a lot to send a CNN crew to places like Darfur or Liberia.

So mostly they didn’t go – and places like that remained a vacuum on the world stage.

Now, of course, it’s possible to empower those people at NGOs with the technology to tell their story to the world – and for next to no cost.  We could empower 100 people around the world for what it costs NBC News to send one of their reporters and a crew to a place like Darfur (if they even went) to do one story.

As a consequence of this technological revolution, I am priviledged to be part of a group trying to do just that.

And the NGO workers around the world are, of course, all for it.

But you know what?

The ‘news organizations’ are all against it.

Their reaction, time and again is ‘forget it’.

Forget it, why?

Because they believe that what these people will produce is “not credible’.

Not credible.

Let me ask you something. Is it more credible to send Ann Curry or someone like her, who does not speak the language, who does not know the country, who parachutes in and out in a day or a week, to report on a story that until the day before she knew nothing about – and at massive cost?

This, apparently, is ‘credible’ to the conventional news organziations.

Real stories told by people who really know what is happening, is, apparently, not credible.

Hey, Pearl Buck, stop writing books about China.

You’re too close to the story. And as a missionary, you obviously have an agenda.

No.

Let’s send Matt Lauer instead.

He doesn’t speak Chinese.

But he’s credible.