How media can change lives

“I was recruited by warlords and taught to kill, rape and maim,” Tepita Voze Sando (17) told delegates gathered at the Sandton Convention Centre in Johannesburg. “I enjoyed it very much at the time, but one day I never thought my life would change all of a sudden.”

Sando said that when he was demobilised through the United Nations programme, he was approached by a radio station and trained as a journalist. “Today I thank the media for changing my life,” he said, adding that he then used his own radio show to appeal to other child soldiers who refused to join him to lay down their arms.

Power of the media

“As I speak, there are 15 of them now working with me in that radio station. This just shows you the power of the media in changing people’s lives. Today, I am a very happy kid. I conduct interviews and make an honest living and I am proud of it.”

Another child speaker, Caroline Zephil (16) of Haiti [Central America], who wondered aimlessly in the streets, has also testified how she turned her life around by training as a radio journalist. She is now one of the top radio DJs in that country.

A 14-year-old Palestinian girl, Aseel Issa, who lives in Bethlehem, made an emotional appeal to the media worldwide to expose what she called a string of children’s rights abuse by the Israeli Army. “We live under constant fear of the Israeli killing machine, which kills defenceless children on a daily basis,” she said, with tears streaming down her face.

“Sometimes I ask why the media aren’t intensively reporting these terrible events. I think if they did, something would have been done long time as the media have the power to change things.”

However, sometimes getting real stories out of the war zone is not as easy as many people think, as Canadian-born Ian Stewart, a former Associated Press (AP) correspondent for West Africa found out.

Unpredictable obstacles

“There are always unpredictable obstacles,” Stewart told Bizcommunity.com on the sidelines of the summit. “The danger number one is safety. The second is to find the right sources who are willing to give you what you want. You really do not know whom you are dealing with. Your life is constantly in danger.”

Stewart, a former AP bureau chief in Freetown [Sierra Leone’s capital city], together with two Western colleagues, was ambushed in July 1999 by a group of child soldiers aged between 12 and 15. The cameraman was instantly killed and the photographer escaped unhurt. But Stewart was flown out to London and operated on to remove bullets that were lodged in the back of his skull. The operation left him paralysed in his left arm.

“I am happy to be back in Africa – alive,” he said, adding that he was still disappointed that he could not get the story out of that war zone. “It was an important story, people were dying and nobody seemed to care. And we were the only foreign journalists in that area.”

Now a PH.D student at the University of Michigan, Stewart said the second obstacle is infrastructure such as lack of phone lines, internet connection and even a good PC, which can discourage to do your work properly.

Lastly, he said he regrets the attitude of media executives and newsrooms managers who he said are failing the audiences by making decisions that are not in the best interests of the media.