Visual Storytellers and Journalists Face Growing Risks. What Can Funders Do to Protect Them?

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Recent years have seen an alarming increase in attacks on visual storytellers and journalists, ranging from online harassment campaigns and lengthy legal battles to imprisonment, injuries, and even death. 

Data from the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) found that at least 62 journalists and media workers around the globe have been killed in 2022 thus far, surpassing last year’s total of 45. The U.S. Press Freedom Tracker reported there were more than 886 press freedom incidents that took place between May 25 and October 29, 2020, amid the record protests in response to the murder of George Floyd. And according to CPJ, a record high of 293 journalists around the globe were in detention as of December 1, 2021. 

There is far less data on attacks against visual storytellers such as documentary filmmakers, but they, too, face many of the same safety risks as journalists, despite the two often being seen as wholly separate from one another.

A recent report looks to shed light on the matter. Targeted toward funders, the report, titled “Strengthening Safety and Security Resources for Visual Storytellers,” provides an overview of the dangers visual storytellers and journalists alike face. 

“We wanted to understand what resources existed in different parts of the world that contemplated the safety and security of artists,” said Cara Mertes, founder and executive director for the International Resource for Impact and Storytelling (IRIS), which published the report.

Originally commissioned by the Ford Foundation, it’s the first publication from the Safer Storytellers Project, a new initiative from IRIS that aims to strengthen safety and security resources for visual storytellers and journalists. 

Last year, Ford, in partnership with the Compton and Skoll foundations, launched IRIS, a three-year, $30 million initiative that seeks to strengthen collaboration between storytellers and civic leaders. The Safer Storytellers Project’s recently launched website is co-hosted through IRIS, the Ford Foundation and the Rory Peck Trust, which is named after a freelance cameraman who was killed in 1993 while working. 

According to Mertes, the goal of the report was threefold: to paint a picture of the resources that were already available to storytellers; to make recommendations about what’s still needed; and finally, to “take the language of human rights defenders and journalists, and safety and security, and begin to expand the definition to include artists as front-line defenders.”

While journalists have a set of protocols and resources for dealing with such threats, and are often recognized as being on the front lines of human rights defense, artists who are often similarly at risk don’t have the same amount of coordinated support. The report set out, in part, to change that.

Key findings

In the context of this report — and the Safer Storytellers Project as a whole — the term “visual storyteller” is used to describe a wide array of creators, including filmmakers, visual artists and visual journalists, among others. Although research for the report was centered on documentary filmmakers in Central America, the Andes region and Brazil, and was written with vulnerable storytellers in mind, it has a worldwide scope and its recommendations are applicable across the board. 

“Since human society has been human society, there have always been people that have wanted to say, ‘This is what’s happening on the ground. This is what’s happening in my community.’ And there are times when those voices are repressed,” Mertes said. 

According to the report, threats storytellers face fall into different categories. These include physical threats to their life and security, threats of legal action and imprisonment, digital threats, reputational threats such as smear campaigns, trolling, threats to psychosocial well-being, and financial or economic threats. 

The report found striking similarities between the dangers that filmmakers face and those faced by human rights and environmental defenders who are often “targeted for uncovering wrongdoing and speaking truth to power.” 

“This is really something that has been building over probably the last decade, if not before then,” said the report’s author, Peter Noorlander. “It’s not just been filmmakers. It’s been other storytellers. It’s also human rights defenders. It’s environmental defenders. It’s really anybody that speaks up against people in positions of power in ways that people find threatening to their power.”

The topics that drive the most risk for storytellers are the environment, human rights, land rights, Indigenous issues, and gender equality, among others. Women are at much higher risk than their male counterparts, the report found. Socioeconomic background, sexuality, geographic origin and race all increase risks for visual storytellers. 

One of the biggest factors that exacerbate the risks storytellers face is the lack of awareness of the issue. On the one hand, many filmmakers don’t see themselves as facing as much risk as human rights defenders. On the other hand, those that are aware of the extent of the risks they face often tend to downplay safety concerns for fear of losing funding. As a result, funders aren’t aware of the extent of the safety issues their grantees face. 

For many, the problem isn’t a lack of awareness, but a lack of resources. This is especially burdensome for storytellers who do not have the support of a large media company or production house. 

A dangerous moment in history

The report offers a crucial piece of context. This increase in attacks against storytellers is taking place at a time when human rights, environmental defenders, and democracy itself are under great threat. 

Considering, for example, the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade, thereby revoking the right to abortion. Earlier this year, a U.N. expert on protection against violence and descrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity warned that the human rights of LGBTQ people, particularly LBGTQ people of color, are being “deliberately undermined” by state governments in the U.S. 

The IRIS report notes that in addition to the undermining of human rights, there has also been a well-documented rise in populism and authoritarianism over the past decade. All of this has grave implications for journalism, documentary filmmaking and other forms of commentary on social issues. 

“We think of it as power-building. We think of storytelling and the ability to articulate your own experiences and have those experiences heard by those who have power or decision-making power as an incredibly important and vital part of democratic processes,” Mertes said. “It’s vitally important in strong democracies to maintain this space, in conflict and post-conflict zones.”

As the report points out, politicians understand that if they can control the public narrative, they can control elections. Generally, this manifests as harsh suppression of dissenting or oppositional voices. 

“What you see is, a lot of the attacks are sometimes explicitly, often implicitly, encouraged from the very top. In some countries, you have really negative, very powerful rhetoric from presidents, from prime ministers, from senior politicians against anybody that they see as the enemy, and that can be the media, that can be human rights defenders, and that can be filmmakers, as well,” Noorlander said. “They can be portrayed as enemies of the state. All that rhetoric… creates a climate in which people think that it’s fair game to attack journalists or to attack human rights defenders.” 

Another method of attacking fact-based storytelling is by eroding the public’s trust in it. American right-wing politicians, including former President Donald Trump, have decried any negative press about them as “fake news,” which has widened partisan divides in media trust. A recent Gallup poll found that Americans’ trust in media is at an all-time low, with 66% of Americans reporting they have little to no confidence in media. 

Threats against storytellers can come from corporations, as well. Leaders at the now-infamous blood-testing startup Theranos, for example, attempted to intimidate and silence investigative reporter John Carreyrou through threats of legal action. Carreyrou had the support of his employer, the Wall Street Journal, and would go on to publish numerous articles that would eventually lead to Theranos’ implosion. The majority of fact-based storytellers, however, do not have access to these types of resources. 

So what can funders do?

The report outlines a number of steps funders can take to help protect storytellers and journalists, stressing that there is no silver bullet recommendation. Instead, the recommendations should be seen as a combination of interconnected and related measures funders can take. 

First is raising awareness. “Generally, there’s not been a focus, there’s not been enough awareness, of the growing risks that filmmakers, journalists, human rights defenders are exposed to, despite annual reports being published,” Noorlander said. “There just doesn’t seem to have been a follow-up by funders to really say, ‘OK, we have to take this seriously, we’re gonna do something about this.’” 

To address this, the report encourages funders to make training and education available to visual storytellers, as well as to other funders and stakeholders, to compensate for storytellers’ tendencies to downplay risks to themselves.

“They don’t want to raise any alarms, because again, that might jeopardize their funding or might jeopardize future projects,” Noorlander said. “So unless funders proactively ask filmmakers to identify the risks, filmmakers themselves sometimes don’t talk about it.”

The report recommends that funders should therefore be proactive and start conversations about protections for all stages of a project, as well as reassure storytellers that funding for safety will be separate from project funding. 

Another suggestion is building awareness of the resources that are already available and providing the groups that offer them with greater funding. While there are some organizations that seek to protect human rights, environmental defenders, and journalists — and that might be able to provide resources to visual storytellers — they are, according to Noorlander, typically under-resourced and “relatively weak.” 

The report states that funders should provide “long-term, unrestricted funding for existing and emerging protection mechanisms that can provide emergency assistance to visual storytellers and journalists under threat.”

Some of the global organizations that provide support for journalists include the Committee to Protect Journalists, Reporters Without Borders, and the International Federation of Journalists. There are even fewer resources for documentary filmmakers. According to Noorlander, the only international organization that focuses on providing assistance and standing in solidarity with filmmakers is the International Coalition for Filmmakers at Risk (ICFR), which was formed in 2020. 

Funders should also ensure there are experts available to “counter legal, physical, reputational, psychosocial and digital threats.” Underfunded safety resources include mental healthcare for storytellers, defense against digital threats, negative PR and trolling, specialist legal resources, and safe havens near countries or regions with the highest threats. 

In addition to increasing funding for existing organizations, the report also stresses the need to build both formal and informal solidarity networks and break down the silos that exist between storytellers. Rather than seeing documentary filmmakers as wholly separate from journalists, the report suggests funders may use their resources to build bridges between journalists, artists and human rights defenders. 

Noorlander says funders should be interested in increasing safety for storytellers not just because they are their grantees, but because storytellers are vital to effecting change.

“There is nothing more powerful than the stories that people tell,” Mertes said. “And in the aggregate, in movements, they’re extremely powerful. That’s why there is such effort put into silencing or modifying or pressuring [them]... or instilling fear so that people feel that they can’t tell these stories. Because it’s dangerous.”