Do celebrities comply with humanitarian standards?

Using celebrities to promote ideas, products or a cause is hardly a new thing. Already in 1928, Edward Bernays – usually referred to as the “father of public relations” – explained how the “modern propagandist” works to “create dramatic interest” in a given subject.

“He [sic] stages an event or ceremony,” Bernays wrote in his book Propaganda. “To this ceremony key people, persons known to influence the buying habits of the public, such as a famous violinist, a popular artist, and a society leader, are invited. These key persons affect other groups, lifting the idea [that is being promoted] to a place in the public consciousness which it did not have before.”

Bernays was concerned with buying habits, of course, but the principle obviously works as well for other sorts of habits, like supporting a humanitarian operation.

A quarter of a century after Bernays wrote the paragraph quoted above, the UN began using celebrities to publicize its work and raise funds – starting with US entertainer Danny Kaye, the first Goodwill Ambassador for the UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF).

Today, the UN has 183 Goodwill Ambassadors. US actress Angelina Jolie, probably the most well known of them all, fulfilled that role for the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR) for ten years and is now a Special Envoy for Refugee Issues.

No wonder that on 16 November, the US Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, best known for its lavish annual distribution of Oscar statuettes, will reward Jolie’s efforts with one of them: the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award. Named after a Danish actor and philanthropist, the award is given to an “individual in the motion picture industry whose humanitarian efforts have brought credit to the industry.”

The question of how good Goodwill Ambassadors are is of course open to discussion. Those who are in favour will argue that they are able to amplify the message and allow organisations to reach a public they wouldn’t normally reach otherwise. Those who are against will counter that celebrities over-simplify complex issues, in fact diverting attention from them towards die-hard clichés.

Although opinions diverge even on the issue of whether the return on using celebrities to promote a cause is worth its cost, the phenomenon – which today involves not only the UN but also most international aid organisations – is not going to disappear any time soon.

The announcement that the flagship national public service and most- watched TV channel in Italy, RAI 1, would run a show involving the filming of celebrities at humanitarian aid operations has wreaked havoc on the organisations involved.

According to news reports, the show – named The Mission – will show eight celebrities working for two weeks for a humanitarian NGO in refugee camps in South Sudan, the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Mali.

The show was quickly qualified as “reality (in this context almost synonymous with ‘trash’) TV”. Its critics have accused it of playing with the lives of refugees and making them objects of ridicule, as well as of downplaying the consequences of conflict and resuscitating second-class celebrities.

The agency providing the humanitarian setting to the show is INTERSOS, a Rome-based 20-year-old NGO currently working in 15 countries.

INTERSOS director Marco Rotelli denied that the show would have a ‘reality TV’ format. “Well-known individuals will observe and participate first-hand in the activities that we carry out,” he said in a public statement. “They will see, work and live the humanitarian reality, amongst and with people in a state of need. They will choose, with their own compassion and understanding, how to describe what they have seen to the viewers of the television show.”

Why is INTERSOS involved with the show? Because they want “to bring [their] message and [their] knowledge to the general public, who today cannot find such information within the everyday media,” as humanitarian issues are usually “confined to the last page of the daily newspaper, to the small boxes in the margin of the weekly, or to the midnight TV slot”.

As INTERSOS weathers the media storm and the show’s broadcasting date – scheduled for 4 December – comes closer, it may be useful to ask what guidance humanitarian standards can contribute to this debate.

The Sphere Handbook, focused on the essentials of designing and implementing programmes in life-saving areas of humanitarian response, does not have a section specifically dedicated to how to communicate humanitarian crises and responses. But there is guidance in the Code of Conduct for the International Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement and NGOs in Disaster Relief, one of the Handbook’s cornerstones, as well as in the Handbook’s Protection Principles.

The Code of Conduct‘s 10th and last principle states: “In our information, publicity and advertising activities, we shall recognise disaster victims as dignified humans, not hopeless objects.” The Code insists on the need to “respect” the affected population, whose “capacities and aspirations” should be highlighted. It requests that an “objective image of the disaster situation” be portrayed and that “publicity” pressures not be allowed to take precedence over “relief assistance”.

The Code also warns about situations in which media coverage “may be to the detriment of the service provided […] or to the security of our staff or the beneficiaries”. This resonates with the Sphere Handbook Protection Principle 1 – “Avoid exposing people to further harm as a result of your actions” – which proposes a checklist of questions to be considered when analysing a given activity.

According to Rotelli, INTERSOS, which is a frequent , has taken all of the above into consideration.

The organisation’s staff and the beneficiaries of their work have been informed, have evaluated the proposal and “agreed to participate in the show”, he says. The organisation will not divert money, attention or energy from their humanitarian activities. Even more, Rotelli believes the show will actually uphold “rights and dignity” – the cornerstone of the organisation’s mandate.

So, has INTERSOS crossed a dignity line that should not have been trespassed or is it simply paying the price of being an ahead-of-its-time innovator? Only time will tell. Meanwhile, if you can, watch RAI 1 on 4 December and form your own opinion.