The television camera frames a child in an African village, flies buzzing about her head, her body maimed by polio. The reporter turns to the camera and says: "And some aid agencies have been saying there isn't a crisis in Sudan".

What mother could not be moved by this image of a suffering child? What news editor could fail to be impressed by the implication of neglect by goody-goody humanitarians? The aid agencies failed to alert the world to the disaster, the story says, until the media rode in to the rescue.

A pity then that the image is so misleading. Visit any village in Africa and you will find children with polio. The reasons for this have nothing to do with hunger in southern Sudan. They have everything to do with shrinking aid budgets, local mismanagement and the crippling debt burden Western banks impose on poor countries.

But you won't find these topics often on the diet of primetime television news. The girl in the camera lens is likely to go on suffering long after Sudan becomes a fading line in the reporter's curriculum vitae.

Media reporting of previous famines raised millions for pounds in aid. Journalists won their stripes in Africa, and some picked up awards. But the images used were often misleading and simplistic and portrayed Africa as a place where people exist only to suffer.

In many ways, things are worse this time. Ethiopia and Somalia were famines; southern Sudan has not yet reached that stage. The complexities of the situation here are greater even than in those previous catastrophes.

Yet the past month has seen the region fill up with planeloads of journalists who could barely tell Sudan from Swaziland. One Sunday newspaper mockingly sent its restaurant critic. Their mission: to find an image, a story, that encapsulates one word - famine. But faced with an absence of large numbers of starving bodies, some panicked.

Thus, polio victims came to represent the hungry. One reporter tripped up on a halfburied skeleton in a village and cited this as evidence of starvation. If he'd checked with the villagers, they'd have told him that people are buried in many different places in Africa. If he'd checked with the World Food Programme, they'd have told him the village received a food drop only the week before.

But getting a briefing from the agencies working on the ground was a luxury for some television crews with a tight deadline. More knowledgeable local correspondents were shouldered aside as the big guns moved in. Agency sources say even well-known reporters couldn't tell one rebel leader from another and knew little about the complex dynamics of hunger.

The reporters would argue that the agencies are sore at their treatment by the media. The BBC's Africa correspondent, George Alagiah, says he has been accused of waging a "personal agenda" against the agencies. Alagiah was outspoken in his criticism of British agencies for not organising a general appeal for Sudan earlier.

His views are supported by some relief workers. "The media have been ahead of the agencies in saying the situation was serious. Without them, we'd be lost," says Dan Eiffe of Norwegian People's Aid.

BUT British agencies like Save the Children Fund (SCF) say the complexities of the situation have been sacrificed to a ratings war between rival television stations. Angered that ITN had stolen a march on it, , the BBC chartered two aircraft and at one point had five separate teams of correspondents in southern Sudan.

Famine and disaster reporting offers journalists the chance to make their names, as in the case of Fergal Keane in Rwanda in 1994. Indeed, there was Keane himself in Sudan last month, as if to remind his colleagues of the stakes involved. Competition is rife, even within organisations like the BBC.

SCF and other agencies reject Alagiah's contention that they miscalculated. The agencies have been saying since the beginning of the year that a disaster was looming; the problem was the world - and especially the media - was not listening.

I have in front of me a report by World Vision Ireland which starts: "Sudan faces a dire humanitarian situation. . ." It is dated Spring 1996. There were countless more warnings of this sort.

Humanitarians are caught in a bind, Either they holler and are accused of crying wolf, or they make polite noises and are ignored until disaster happens. They too make mistakes.

But in Sudan the resources simply weren't there earlier in the year to move huge quantities of aid. Even now, Unicef estimates it is supplying only 30 per cent of the food and seeds that are needed. The pilots leading the airdrops fly a distance equivalent to London from Rome, twice a day, just to reach their target areas.

Finally, almost none of the reports on Sudan I have seen or read has managed to capture the dignity, the hospitality, the humour and the resilience of the Dinka people I have met in the past few days. Yet again, in the rush to bring bad news out of Africa, the humanity of a people has been sent sprawling to the ground.