Khalid Albaih, a Romanian-born Sudanese cartoonist currently living in Qatar, makes a simple point at Cartoon Movement.
Or perhaps it's not that simple.
The current famine in southern Somalia, Southern Sudan, Kenya and Ethiopia seems to defy responsible coverage and that's a good starting point:
Both photojournalists and editorial cartoonists have a limited stage upon which to make their points. If it's never as simple as the photojournalists would have you believe, neither is it as clear-cut as the cartoonists portray it.
Inevitably, you reach for the dramatic image, and that's rarely the typical one. If there are 500 people at a demonstration and one of them dresses as the Statue of Libery, draped with bandoliers and with fake blood on his hands, the 499 who look like the folks next door likely won't see their faces in the newspaper. If the day consists mostly of speeches, the video on the news will be of the brief but dramatic confrontation between protestors and counter-protestors.
For that matter, the photo coverage of a football game will be of the leaping catch, the crushing tackle, the glorious touchdown celebration, even though most of the game consisted of people in uniforms lining up on either side of a football.
And, given that political cartoons make their points through exaggeration, it is ironic for a cartoonist to criticize the media for relying on superficial, exploitive imagery.
But I didn't say it was unfair.
Part of my main job includes creating a weekly news story for young readers, and this past week it was inevitable that I say something about the drought and famine in the eastern Sahara. I looked through the AP file of photographs and passed over the most pathetic and dramatic pictures of dying children, choosing instead a shot of refugees walking out of the desert towards an aid station in Kenya.
I couldn't justify showing the gravest of photographs to 10-year-olds. There's a difference between raising concern and simply traumatizing someone into a state of horror.
But I also wanted a picture that would capture as much of the story as possible, since I only had one shot to tell it: These are people, they need help, their own country is in violent turmoil and so they are turning to their neighboring country which has its own drought victims to deal with.
The seeds of that more complex, complete story could be found in the photo, and, in the text, I made the points that the overarching crisis is an ongoing drought, and that people gathered at aid stations are not on the land preserving and maintaining what is left of their farms, and so the situation deteriorates as the crisis deepens.
The rest of the economic factors, such as the impact of external food aid on local markets or the nearly-inevitable failure of non-African crops in a stressed African ecosystem, were well beyond the reach of a 250-word summary for middle-school children.
Yet they are there, and we do need to see those deeper stories behind the dramatic images. Footage of dehydrated, malnourished, fly-covered children is dramatic and heart-rending, but it does not tell those deeper, more complete stories.
And, by the way, it doesn't help when news reports say that the Somali militant groups are preventing distribution of food while other reports show food being distributed at aid stations in Mogadishu. It is a case of the blind men and the elephant, and, as in that story, it's more complicated than simply choosing which one to believe.
Nor is it easy to thread your way between the cynical view that aid groups exaggerate the threat of famine in order to promote themselves and the pragmatic awareness that, just as dentists think your schedule should revolve around flossing, so, too, aid groups focus on their corner of the universe.
On the one hand, you can't expect an aid organization to say, "We're using our existing funds to deal with this crisis. Please give so that we'll be in a position to deal with the next one."
Nor can you blame someone who has left home and flown out to a remote crisis center to put in 20-hour days dealing with the most extreme victims of a disaster for feeling that it should be something of a priority for others as well.
But none of these reflections get to the core of the issue, and certainly not to the point of Albaih's cartoon.
You can't expect to see the full spectrum of a war, of a flood, of a famine, of a political movement, or even a football game, from any one spot on the ground. And, the more your own culture differs from the culture whose issue you are attempting to cover, the harder it is to make sense of whatever bits and pieces you are able to see from the single spot where you stand.
For that matter, the media's attempts to cover the situation is not the only example of futility in these moments: Handing out grain and administering IV fluids will only make the slightest dent on the total impact of a crisis like this.
Still, it's better than nothing.
We do what we can, and, just as the little boy in the fable can't save all the starfish stranded by the tide, his efforts make a difference to the ones that he does manage to put back in the sea.
(And, by the way, you'd better be doing something damned effective to improve the world yourself, if you're going to sit back and criticize someone else's efforts.)
But there's another oft-told contemporary fable that comes closer, I think, to the meaning of this cartoon:
A group of people are having a picnic above a waterfall when they hear cries and see a child being swept down river towards the chasm. A man jumps in, swims to the child and brings it back to shore. But, just as he climbs out, there is another cry, and another child, and he swims out into the swift current yet again.
And then, as he brings that child to safety, there is yet another cry and yet another child, but this time, he climbs out and begins to run up the bank of the river, shouting to his companions, "You rescue that one. I'm going to go find out who's throwing them in."
If all you see in the Sahel is the current famine, you're missing a much greater issue. And however noble and genuinely worthwhile it is to save this child or that child, saving them once they are in the river is not solving the problem.
Though it does make for dramatic coverage.
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