COMMENT | Compelling stories of the perilous rescue of 12 Thai boys and their football coach trapped kilometres deep in the flooded caves of Tham Luang in Chiang Rai had kept me riveted over the past week even as I watched my favourite teams go down in the World Cup elimination.

For a while I was distracted from the gloomy news of tariff wars, and of children separated from their families at the US-Mexico border due to US President Donald Trump’s clampdown on asylum seekers from El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala. For a moment, a journalism of hope gave us stories of human endurance and the selfless courage of some who risk their lives to save another, more so when it’s a child.

As a parent, I felt for the Thai families whose sons aged 11 to 16 were shown huddled, dazed and emaciated on a ledge in the flooded chamber. The rescue of the Wild Boar football team, and the compassion verbalised and visualised in the world’s media provided a temporary relief even as I know that at the same time millions of babies are dying from preventable causes, children displaced, trafficked or killed in countries torn apart by sectarian strife and corrupt authoritarian regimes.

The World Cup and the International Federation of Association Football (Fifa)’s association with children of the world has indeed provided a breath of fresh air from the daily reportage of disputes and despair. The enduring spirit of the Thai boys and their soccer coach moved Fifa to invite them to the World Cup final in Moscow on July 15.

Fifa’s association with children as beacons of new hope goes way back to the 2002 World Cup season in South Korea and Japan. The organisation had then pledged to Unicef that it saw “football a valuable educational tool for youth since football combines elements such as discipline, respect, and fighting in a positive sense”.

“With football you learn how to win and how to lose, as is sometimes the case in everyday life. In conflict situations, children are robbed of their childhoods. Football is one of the many ways that children can recover a sense of normality, they can be children again,” it said.

Children have since then walked the professional players to the field at each World Cup to remind us of the humanity – and childlike faith – that binds us. I’m reminded of one of the most historic moments of humanity when enemies of war laid down their guns and grenades to play a round of soccer. It was during the week leading up to Christmas near Ypres on the Western Front in the First World War of 1914.

Known as the Christmas Truce, British and German soldiers unofficially ceased fire to exchange greetings, food, and souvenirs. They sang Christmas carols in their own language. Occasionally, soldiers would clamber out of their muddy trenches to the no-man’s land to retrieve and bury their comrades. Tensions eased to a level where the troops even played friendly soccer matches - until the top brass stopped further association with the enemy.

The Premier League in the UK since 2011 has commemorated the random battlefield soccer games in a Christmas Truce Tournament played annually in the Belgian city of Ypres among Under-12 teams from England, Belgium, France, and Germany.

Uniting communities

The Christmas Truce – and the World Cup – is symbolical of what’s good in us regardless of creed or colour. World soccer has often crossed ethnic and religious lines and integrated players into a community. We saw the Bosnia-Herzegovina team comprising Serbs and Croats in their World Cup debut in Brazil in 2014. Can you imagine a World Cup team from Syria comprising Sunnis, Shiites and Alawites? An Iraqi team comprising Sunnis, Shiites and Kurds? Or a Korean team comprising players from the north and south?

The World Cup season has indeed provided a platform for mediated expressions of national pride, which is basically harmless barring the random cases where migrants from war-torn countries conjoin their passion for soccer with fervour for their country of birth. That occasionally happened in Australian soccer, which was often associated with migrants from the Balkans and South Europe to the extent that the pejorative “wogball” was sometimes used to describe the sport.

Ivan Suljic, writing in Australian blog The Footy Almanac, notes that “huge numbers of first-generation immigrants have admitted that their involvement in a soccer club helped them to adjust to their new surroundings, especially because it was usually the only place where they could socialise without proper knowledge of English”.

I know of no other sporting events, beside the Summer Olympics, than the Fifa World Cup that could stir one’s passion for country and ethnicity, with the exception in 1995 during the Rugby World Cup finals in Ellis Park Stadium, Johannesburg when South African President Nelson Mandela walked to the field donning a green-and-gold Springbok jersey and a cap, which inspired the 2009 movie Invictus. The Springbok team, dominated by white Afrikaners for generations, was a hated symbol of apartheid under Dutch minority rule. Mandela, however, redressed the green-and-gold into an emblem of reconciliation to represent a new post-apartheid South Africa.

For all the bad news dominating the media today, there are as many inspiring stories of ordinary people triumphing over adversities, like the Thai football players, their coach and the divers. Besides habitually gravitating towards negativity, journalists can and should critically observe and report on what is right and good happening in their environment.

Journalists need not be led all the time by scandals and sensations. Where there are disputes, seek reconciliation. Where there is disinformation, seek the truth. And, where there is despair, seek hope. Good news should trump the bad – at least momentarily.

That’s constructive journalism.

ERIC LOO is Senior Fellow (Journalism) at the School of the Arts, English & Media, Faculty of Law Humanities & Arts, University of Wollongong, Australia. He is also the founding editor of Asia Pacific Media Educator.

The views expressed here are those of the author/contributor and do not necessarily represent the views of Malaysiakini.