With the midterm elections in the U.S. reaching a fever pitch, the issue of migration has taken center stage in a bitter partisan fight. Stories and photographs of thousands of migrants from Central America have filled the airwaves and front pages of newspapers as the so-called “caravan” of migrants slowly makes its way across Mexico heading north to the United States.
We have heard and seen stories of desperate parents walking for hundreds of miles, children in tow. We have also seen harrowing images of children being ripped away from their mothers and fathers as they cross the border into America.
Mass migration has become a central narrative in international news and politics. Whether it is African migrants risking death to cross the Mediterranean or Syrian refugees fleeing bombs, migration makes the front page. But all this reporting has yet to translate into widespread political and personal compassion and understanding. To the contrary, antipathy toward migrants and refugees has increased in many parts of the world.
There has been an alarming rise in misconceptions and stereotypes when it comes to reporting on migration. It doesn’t help that the most powerful leaders in the world are peddling these falsehoods. Take for example U.S. President Donald Trump’s recent assertion that the Central American caravan is full of Middle Easterners — a claim Trump eventually walked back by saying there is no proof. Even the term “caravan” risks belittling the harrowing experiences of Central American migrants fleeing for their lives.
Given how much press attention is being paid to migration, how can we improve the media coverage of it? How can we avoid amplifying misinformation and the over-simplification of a complicated issue? How can we better tell stories about this international phenomenon in a contextualized and humane way?
I recently spoke to four journalists who have covered migration extensively — Eileen Truax, Alice Driver, Oscar Martínez and Ginna Morelo — to get their insights and advice for other journalists. From those conversations, here are ten suggestions that we hope will improve the reporting of migration stories around the world.
1. Go where the story is.
This may sound obvious, but it’s not. Many times when reporters have to cover several topics at a time on a short deadline, much of the reporting is done from an office, far from where migrations are actually taking place.
“You can’t cover migration without going,” says Martínez, a reporter from El Salvador who has traveled with migrants, even joining them on the dangerous train that crosses Central America, called The Beast. “The verb of your subjects is to migrate, it’s to be displaced, to move from one place to another.” Without being there, you can’t really know the process, the paths they take, what happens to them along the way. Movement for reporters, just like for migrants, is essential to fully understanding the story.
2. Get prepared.
Before covering migration stories, it’s important to be ready. If, like Morelo, you are following Venezuelan migrants fleeing their country’s economic crisis to Peru, you have to be prepared. “You have to know the political, cultural, and social situation of these countries. And also the people’s culture, the way they speak, their food,” says Morelo, who is from Colombia. “You can’t arrive to cover the story if you don’t first study the country where you are going.” This knowledge allows a reporter to “be more accepted, even if you will always be a foreigner.”
To be better prepared, Martínez says he speaks to political scientists, sociologists and migration experts, and reads a lot about the social and political conditions that have led to the mass migration of people.
Being able to speak to migrants in their own language is also important, and it helps to build better rapport, says Driver. She also recommends taking courses on trauma reporting and crisis reporting at the Dart Center.
3. Focus on the people.
Many times, migration coverage revolves around everything but the migrants. “The coverage of migration in the United States has been largely focused on politics, legislation, the economy, and securing the border. In those conversations, migrant people are always missing,” says Truax, a Mexican journalist who has been covering migrant communities in the United States since 2004. This approach has helped frame migration as a political debate, rather than an issue of human rights and social justice.
By focusing on communities and people rather than on politics, journalists can also find other more human stories that need to be told. Like those of the Dreamers, a topic to which Truax dedicated a book. “If we give them a name, a face, if we contribute with stories to the migration issue, we are contributing to the conversation with an element and a point of view that is lacking,” Truax believes.
4. Explain the context.
Migration, like most social phenomena, does not happen in a vacuum. There are reasons why people decide, or are forced, to flee their homes. Understanding and reporting on the realities that precede mass migration is necessary, not only to understand migrations, but also to generate empathy for migrants and refugees.
“When I was working in Mexico, an uncomfortable idea struck me: As journalists, we hadn’t been useful enough in explaining what all those people were fleeing from,” says Martínez. “If they were willing to cross Mexico in such terrible conditions, they had to be coming from very disastrous places.” So Martínez started working on Sala Negra, a reporting project on violence in Central America, the region from where most of unaccompanied minors come from.
5. Go beyond the stereotypes.
Most migration coverage is focused on two types of “easy” stories, says Martínez: “The success story of the migrant who arrived without anything and now owns a business in the U.S. and is able to send money back home, or the shallow reports of migrants crying by the train tracks. But there are other stories that matter to people,” he says. “The stories are there but time and resources need to be invested to discover them.”
6. Adopt a gender approach.
Looking at migration through a gender lens can be a powerful way to enrich and add layers to your reporting. “Migration, like so many issues, has long been reported by men and about men, with very little attention given to anyone else,” says Driver, who has been covering migration since 2009 focusing on the experiences of Central American women, girls, and the LGBTQ+ community. By adopting a gender approach, other stories can be found and told to enrich the existing narratives. “I’m interested in telling the stories of women and girls who have been denied access to healthcare or transgender women who have been denied access to an education. That is [a form] of violence, and it is violence that we often don’t discuss” unlike gang violence, which has been covered extensively, she says. As an example, Driver wrote about a trans woman named Marfil Estrella as she migrated to the United States.
7. Beware of misinformation.
Misinformation about migrants and refugees is rampant, both on social media as well as in news coverage. This is particularly true in the United States where the issue has become so partisan.
Journalists need to get informed so that they don’t end up repeating the government’s rhetoric, says Truax. Trump’s talk about the border wall and deportations is one example. “There’s no wall and the number of deportations hasn’t actually increased,” she says. Both stories can be easily debunked with simple fact-checking. However, many reporters use certain talking points without verifying them. “They need to go beyond government discourse,” she adds.
Another antidote to misinformation about migrants are human stories. “It is easy to demonize immigrants when you don’t know them and you don’t know their stories,” says Driver. “Americans live more and more segregated lives, and to break down barriers and misinformation, we need to listen to the stories of others.”
8. Words matter.
The words we use can shape the public discourse on migration. The 2015 refugee crisis in Europe put the spotlight on the importance of words when talking about this issues. Al-Jazeera English made an editorial decision to use the word refugees and not migrants in its reporting. Conversely, former U.K. Prime Minister David Cameron was accused of dehumanizing refugees when he referred to them as a “swarm” of migrants.
Morelo agrees on the need to pay attention to the language we use, and also to the language migrants themselves use. When talking with Venezuelan migrants, she realized they talked about “fleeing” their country, and she decided to use that word to in all her reporting on the topic. “It’s their language we are using to talk to our audience, so that they understand” what migrants are going through, she explained.
9. Follow through.
Migration is an ongoing phenomenon, rarely something that happens overnight, and covering it properly and humanely requires time. The people you will meet on the migration trail are often fleeing for their lives. They have a complicated past. They will not just trust you with their stories in one reporting trip. “It was impossible to cover the migration trail in a sporadic way, going in and out of the locations where migration takes place,” Martínez explains. To do the type of in-depth coverage that pays due respect to these people and their stories, Martínez says, spend three years on the migration trail.
Truax is happy to see that some major media outlets are starting to treat migration as a distinct beat and hiring experienced reporters to stay on this story over a period of years. But Truax hopes that this isn’t a fashionable trend that will soon fade. “Understanding and explaining (migrant) communities can take years. It can’t be tied to a political moment,” she says.
10. Empathy.
Last but not least, journalists need to remember to cultivate empathy. “It’s not easy and sometimes we forget,” says Morelo. “It’s important to understand otherness so that you can produce stories that are really empathetic, that really explain things; as journalists, that’s our job.”
