Why Duplicate Communications
Work on Development Summit? Who/What are Corkery Media Consultants?
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07/09/2002
The name may not be the same. It could go by any other. The
problem is the ambivalent attitude to the UN's own department
of public information.
The case in point is the preparation for a forthcoming summit
on sustainable development, ten years after that held in Rio.
Other international conferences over the last decade have been
handled well by an experienced professional team. Susan Markham
who heads a unit dealing with such issues was always there to
prepare the groundwork. Media Director, Salim Lone, has been at
the forefront of raising development issues since his sterling
work at Africa Recovery. The Information Centers in the field
have always carried the brunt of the work doing much more with
much less. Also available are development information officers
in UNDP, UNICEF and other members of the UN system.
Why then bring in Media Consultants to promote the forthcoming
UN conference on development. Clearly any help would have been
welcome if those consultants made the difference. However a company
reportedly favored by Ted Turner's UN Foundation was apparently
charged - and charging a fee to alert the media and mobilize public
information for the South African bound meeting.
By now just a couple of months before the deadline nothing remarkable
has been achieved by that group reportedly named Corker Media
Consultants. Eventually it is the information centers and colleagues
at headquarters that will end up doing the real work while favored
consultants receive their reward. As usual, if anything went wrong,
in this imperfect world, DPI will be easily blamed.
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