When the caravan just moves on
The bigger the disasters and the less prior knowledge and contacts the media have, the more important the role of NGOs. This was also the case with the recent factory collapse in Bangladesh. A report on everyday journalist training and the fight against (un)professional cynicism by Oliver Classen.
When the terrible news of 24 April spread like wildfire through the networks of global non-governmental organizations (NGOs), the major news agencies were still silent. Listservers such as that of the Clean Clothes Campaign initially spoke of "a fallen factory ceiling with several dozen fatalities". But when the dust slowly settled after the building collapsed in a suburb of Bangladesh's capital, we knew: Referring to the Rana Plaza disaster as the "Bhopal of the textile industry" in our media release was not only legitimate, but necessary. Primarily to highlight the monstrous dimensions of this tragedy, which had been heralded by many previous factory fires. But also to provide editors with a quotable historical benchmark.
The actual "fashion victims"
When the rescue workers stopped their work three weeks later, the toll was 1129 dead and 2438 injured, many of them paralyzed or maimed for life. The almost 3,000 people who died in the World Trade Center in 2001 are rightly commemorated every year and "WTC One" is a symbolic memorial of a special kind. But that was in New York, in the heart of the globalized financial world. And the victims were a handful of religious warriors running amok. In Dhaka, the corrugated iron metropolis of one of the poorest and most densely populated countries in the world, human lives count for far less than the next construction or production contract. And the seamstresses were only victims of the systematic exploitation of dirt-cheap labor on which our (in)prosperity is based. They are the real "fashion victims".
Theory of the "themed career"
So much for the facts. I should have gotten used to another fact by now. After all, the theory of "issue careers" was already drummed into me during my journalism studies. And now my current work practice consists to a large extent of tracking and influencing "issue developments", as the new German term is now called. The latency phase of the topic of "working conditions in sweatshops" was heralded in the mid-90s by outraged ghetto kids chanting "Nike, we made you, Nike, we can break you" in front of the flagship store in New York. It took almost 20 years (and countless smaller disasters) for this issue to really enter the public consciousness for the first time with Rana Plaza. But after two weeks (and countless conversations with more or less haphazard and clueless journalists), this peak phase was over much quicker than the horrific images from Dhaka had left their mark on me.
The emotional downside
They still do today. But apparently only in me. My professional privilege of having an information advantage and direct contacts therefore has an emotional flip side, which has caused me the odd nightmare this time, even without seeing it on site. While my partner is happy "that the misery of others at your job still affects you at all", I am alienated by feelings of consternation - especially in myself. Wow, now I've written it myself: Consternation, this unword from the fund of peace activists and fundraisers! But okay, there must be a reason for the survival of this sentimental, spitfire key term of the 70s and 80s.
Oliver Classen is media spokesman for the development policy organization Berne Declaration. He previously worked as a media journalist.
