Ammon News - HRH Princess Rym Ali, founder of the Jordan Media Institute (JMI), has said that the institute and its partners have released a handbook to help journalists better cover the news of refugees and displaced people and share their suffering and stories with the world while upholding human rights, respecting their dignity, and avoiding bias.

The remarks were made at a Saturday ceremony to kick off a series of UNESCO trainings on "Reporting on Migrants and Refugees: A Handbook for Journalism Educators" in collaboration with the JMI and and Germany's TU Dortmund University.

Her Highness thanked UNESCO for its unwavering support of the media worldwide, as well as the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees for its assistance in launching the handbook.

She continued by saying that some reports failed to consider the human aspect of refugee and immigrant issues and instead portrayed them as a burden that had a negative effect on the host communities.

Princess Rym noted that many initiatives have been undertaken in the region by individuals and non-governmental organizations to aid refugees, but that none of them compare to the handbook, which she praised for being based on a thorough methodology that accounts for the highest standards of journalism.

Her Highness emphasized that accurate reporting on refugees and migrants should shun hate speech and inaccuracies, and that the constructive press is the only one that investigates the stories behind the headlines.

The High Commissioner for Refugees of the United Nations, Filippo Grandi, stated that media reports on refugees were not as significant as they are today, noting that the failure of governments in various countries of the world caused 200 million people to flee their homelands.

He clarified that expert reporting requires knowledge, precise information, the use of images, and awareness of the trauma that migrants and refugees have gone through.

In turn, the UNESCO representative in Jordan, Min Jeong Kim, stated that she hopes that this guide will help journalists and university and institute students cover the news of refugees and displaced people, as well as remind them of this global phenomenon.

She added that journalists play a crucial role in amplifying the voices of migrants and refugees and communicating their suffering and human stories to the global community.

Released in 2021, the handbook is based on five years of research and analysis in the context of the Journalism in a Global Context (JiGC) project.

The handbook aims to provide journalism educators with a comprehensive set of modules that will allow them to train journalism students to better understand the complex factual dimensions of covering migration and forced displacement, as well as to translate this knowledge into sound and sensitive, yet critical and challenging, reporting techniques.