What We Need to Know

Sudan is in the grip of the world’s largest and most catastrophic humanitarian crisis. Since a brutal civil war erupted in 2023, almost fourteen million people have been forced to flee their homes, and famine is so widespread that more than 40 percent of the population is not getting enough food. The healthcare system has completely collapsed, and there are reports of another genocide in Darfur. It’s a situation that António Guterres, the secretary-general of the United Nations, has described as “a crisis of staggering scale and brutality.” And yet there has been a glaring disparity between the scale of the crisis and the media coverage it has received.

One notable exception has been PBS NewsHour, which has consistently covered the conflict since it began. Last week, Ann Curry filed a heartbreaking report for the program from a camp for displaced people in South Sudan. In one particularly harrowing account, Halima Omer, a refugee, told Curry that she fled Khartoum after aerial bomb raids and spent years traveling until she finally reached the camp. “There was a woman we spoke to,” Curry told viewers, “who carried her mother, her elderly mother, on her back because she was aging and ran with four kids and keeping them all in line to leave as the bombs were falling. And she said that her mom eventually died.” Omer does not know if her husband survived.