Journalists covering development don’t get this one thing

There’s one thing that journalists covering international development don’t get about accountability in the industry. It’s been bothering me for years, and it’s niggling at me again after reading this HuffPost/ICIJ expose on the World Bank.

So if you’re a journalist, consider this. Who keeps you more honest, your editor or your audience? OK, your editor might keep you honest in some ways, sure, but your editor might also try to push you towards an angle that goes against your better judgement or towards a more sensationalist framing than you would like.

When I was writing (and I expect this is true for many of you) it was really the imagined public that kept me honest. Will someone think this article is stupid or naive? Will they think I’m a dick for exploiting someone’s suffering? Will someone knowledgeable call me out for mistakes or inaccuracies and force me to file a correction?

Now consider a mid-level staff member at an institutions of international development. They are, in essence, like journalists with no audience. Because they are in another country, they don’t have the same engagement with the public that an equivalent public official would have back home. “Street-level bureaucrats” are actually quite accountable in their own way. But not World Bank or UN staff. They are cordoned off — in so many ways. All they have to keep them honest is a few “ editors” — some in their own institutions and some in the host government.

While there will certainly be some tensions between what those different editors want, those tensions are unlikely to put the pressure on these staff that would make them reticent about whether social safeguards are being violated, for example.

You guys covering international development, I am begging you to put these invisible people in the limelight more often. They aren’t in your stories anywhere. This massive project by HuffPost and ICIJ is a classic example. Leaving aside for a moment the strangely self-aggrandizing tone of the whole affair, it never once mentions anyone who isn’t a high-level executive in Washington. Going for the glory, going after the institution, is where it fails. Because the institution is ready for this story. The staff members on the ground are not.

Show how specific mid-level staff saw events unfolding and responded, how local governments and their higher-ups responded to them… deep dive into the people that populate these institutions, and you will achieve far more influence, I’m sure. When the people who’s names cannot be mentioned worry that they may have to account for their decisions publicly, they might just make a stand — just like a good journalist who tells his editor that, this time, she’s wrong.