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This study investigates how journalists covering international humanitarian crises make decisions regarding what types of information to include in stories. Specifically, the inclusion/exclusion of solutions-oriented information is addressed, since crises represent a key time during which the potential for international engagement is discussed in the mainstream media. Interviews with journalists covering hunger crises in Africa reveal an internal tension between maintaining a neutral, unbiased position and writing in a way that supports engagement and action. Ironically, perhaps, journalists find that including solutions-oriented information amounts to unethical and biased coverage, despite the fact that inclusion of solutions to social problems is an accepted and institutionalized aspect of the US news media's mandate to the public. Reasons for this seeming contradiction are discussed, and I argue that solutions-oriented information not only can be included without demonstrating bias, but that it ought to be included to support ethical coverage that properly informs citizens about potential paths for political engagement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores how the U.S. news media construct the topic of hunger in Africa for U.S. audiences. Specifically, the article addresses how newspapers define and delimit the relationship between U.S. citizens and foreign sufferers. Through a framing analysis and critical discourse analysis of randomly sampled newspaper stories, the author finds that while news articles covering hunger in the United States usually frame the problem as pertinent to the public sphere, the victim as worthy of political action, and the reader as political agent, articles covering hunger in Africa frame the issue as irrelevant to the public sphere, the victim as removed from political action, and the reader as politically impotent. Interviews with journalists are used to understand why discrepancies occur. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

What methodological, ethical or other issues arise in 'media development' projects that are collaborations between practitioners and scholars? This article uses as a case study a project led by Radio La Benevolencija (RLB) that sought to address inter-ethnic conflict in Rwanda through a radio drama programme - a Romeo and Juliet story of a forbidden love between members of two conflicting tribes. The intervention was unique in its attention to theories of communication and psychology in its design and implementation, and in its efforts to bring in academics throughout the course of the project to aid in design and evaluation. The authors, commissioned to conduct an evaluation of RLB's past ten years of work, analyse the intervention in the context of Rwanda's history and the organization's use of theory, research and evaluation in their programmes. The authors find that, based on the RLB experience as well as evidence provided by communication and media research, the RLB model for peacebuilding through the media can be usefully adapted to other contexts, given particular parameters. The article concludes by arguing that the collaboration provides evidence of the fruitful ground that can and should exist between practice, theory and research, while problematizing challenges involved in such collaborations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]