Media in Crisis Preparedness and Response

Crises, their tragic context and urgency with the demand for coordinated responses and life-saving content, are not incompatible with the rights to information and freedom of expression. Despite the emergency context, be it epidemics, natural hasards or other, humanitarians and authorities should not seek to influence editorial decisions in ways that compromise media’s professional ethics. Nor should they request disclosure of journalists’ sources. Audiences have to continue to trust the media’s impartiality and be confident that the media is not being used for dis- or misinformation. At stake in crisis situations is to differentiate between strategic/persuasive communications (behaviour change) on the one hand, and independent journalism (reporting) on the other hand. They are complimentary, but media can lose its unique credibility and power to sustain democracy if it is conflated with other kinds of communication. Even during emergencies, the media’s agenda needs to still be the aspiration to produce verifiable information and informed debate in the public interest, conveying not only what citizens need to do, but also what they have the right to know.