By Sanjay Suri
GLASGOW, Scotland, Jun 21 2006 (IPS)

It’s a problem just about everyone who has anything to do with civil society faces every day. How very nice this work is, people will say. And how very boring.

They may not quite say the last bit, but you hear it in the tone in which they say the first. The verdict is almost universal; people will usually grant that civil society is useful, but rarely find it interesting.

Media, far more, is inclined to find civil society deadly dull. Evidence of that too, faces us every day; nobody dares to count the number of civil society stories in a newspaper or on television any given day, despite some recent and occasional improvement in appearance.

“We have good and bad experiences to draw on regarding our engagement with the media but generally, civil society organisations face a real challenge in trying to translate their issues and messages into a media friendly form,” says Martin Sime, chief executive of the Scottish Council for Voluntary Organisations (SCVO) which is organising the civil society world assembly in Glasgow this week jointly with Civicus.

“Maybe we start from a slightly distrusting position but it is also true to say that some organisations and some campaigns have been very successful in winning hearts and minds through good use of the media,” he says. “Better understanding all round is required.”

The Live 8 concert in support of Africa last year was news – on the back of celebrities, more than the cause itself. Few in civil society believe that kind of attention is good enough.

“Civil society is still not able to access and express its thoughts and actions in the media as it would be desirable,” says IPS Director- General Mario Lubetkin. But that is not just the responsibility of civil society, he says.

“I think it is partly the responsibility of civil society and partly of the media, which have failed to report correctly on this active international news protagonist. To cover big civil society events or campaigns like GCAP (Global Call for Action Against Poverty) meetings or Live 8 is not enough. Ongoing information mechanisms must be established.”

The need for that is apparent from the speed with which African debts and poverty left the front pages, or even the inside pages, after pop stars Buno and Bob Geldof became otherwise engaged.

“I think there’s a major disconnect between civil society and mainstream media,” says Civicus secretary-general Kumi Naidoo. “That is why the role of alternative media providers like IPS is so critically important.” No one denies that IPS has stayed with civil society concerns after the cameras around the celebrities at the Africa events of last year were switched off.

But civil society is not just about dire poverty in Africa or elsewhere. Increasingly, an expanding civil society is addressing people’s concerns in all sorts of ways, everywhere. And the disconnect between media and civil society – to the considerable extent there is one – could in that measure be a disconnect between media and people themselves.

“All the main reporting in mainstream media focuses on government and business to the exclusion of issues that civil society organisations are concerned about,” says Naidoo. “And if you think about it, it’s a reflection of the undemocratic media environment that we actually have.”

That is because mainstream media is not taking on people concerns enough, he says. “If we look at what people are most concerned about in the world today, people want poverty to be reduced, they want gender equality, they want the environment to be dealt with in a responsible way,” Naidoo says.

But civil society is nevertheless making news more and more, Naidoo says.

“The issues that civil society is concerned about is penetrating through, like we saw how poverty actually was given the profile it got. But it should not have to be this sort of effort that civil society should have to undertake to make that happen. There should be much more insight and much more vision on the part of the mainstream media if indeed their brief and their intention is to report on the issues that the majority of people on the planet are concerned about.”

It should not be IPS saying this, but the success of the Civicus world assembly will be measured partly by the extent to which news providers other than IPS report it.

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