United Press International - November 19, 2003
Sarah A. Welsh, UPI Correspondent

"What really shapes the news here is what's left out," said Charles Cobb Jr. senior correspondent for AllAfrica.com. "It's not that you're reading bad or inaccurate stories. ... It's that Africa isn't in the mix" of what's considered newsworthy.

And even when African news events are covered, said Transafrica's Director of Communication Mwiza Munthali, they are approached in a cursory, "Go on safari, come back" manner, with no background or context to help readers understand the historical roots of conflict and corruption -- roots that often involve the policies of Western governments and financial institutions.

This constitutes a dangerous form of neglect, echoed John F. Lloyd of the U.P. Association of Liberian Journalists in the Americas. Newspaper stories raise questions, said Lloyd, and "if they're not answered, people will resort to stereotypes." For Americans ignorant of Africa, that stereotype is of "a primitive people living in a very backward place," said Lloyd.

The "U.S. media has fallen short of its responsibility to properly inform the American public," concluded Lloyd. Instead, it resorts to "quick clippings of senseless fighting, disease or starvation."

Cobb, Munthali and Lloyd all spoke as part of a panel discussion sponsored by the University of the District of Columbia's Journalism Club. Several members of the panel readily admitted that the gloom-and-doom coverage they were critiquing is not limited to Africa, nor even to the developing world, and they also acknowledged that the political reality in Africa is indeed quite grim. However, they still frequently attributed the media's negative coverage in Africa to a pervasive culture of racism.

"You don't even have to go to Africa," said Emira Woods of the Institute of Policy Studies. "Look at the coverage of people here." When black communities make the news, she said, it is because of crime, drugs and poverty. "At its core," Woods said, "it goes down to racism ... embedded in people's view of the world."

Munthali agreed, giving the example of pandemic disease coverage. "AIDS is covered because it's not just Africans dying. ... If just Africans were dying, we wouldn't talk about it," he said. "Look at malaria."Indeed, in sub-Saharan Africa more than 1 million people (by conservative estimates) die each year from malaria; though AIDS claims more than 2 million, a disproportionate number of the malarial deaths are children and some public health officials say that because malaria kills much more quickly than AIDS, it is of greater concern. Yet in a 2000 Transafrica Forum study of the New York Times and the Washington Post, 12 of 89 articles about Africa were devoted solely to AIDS. (Another 63 were related to armed conflicts on the continent.)

The Post was cited frequently by panelists, along with the New York Times, as a primary purveyor of international news for the influential classes -- and therefore most guilty of shirking its responsibility to provide in-depth coverage. Douglas Farah, who did not participate in UDC's panel discussion, has covered Africa for the Post.

"The overwhelming reality (in Africa)," Farah said, "is of few correspondents covering large numbers of countries." The Times maintains three permanent bureaus in all of sub-Saharan Africa, while the Post has only two. (A third in Abidjan has been closed.) On a large continent, news organizations' financial and personnel resources are stretched very thin, Farah said, and devoting more coverage to Africa would mean sacrificing coverage in places like Iraq and Afghanistan. "If push comes to shove, the first thing to go will be Africa."

Is that because of racism? Farah says no, it's simply a reflection of political reality. "There is still a sense in major newsrooms that Africa is peripheral to us, somehow," Farah said. "We don't have the commercial ... ties that we have to South America, or the economic ties that we have in Asia. ... Africa is not part of our policy debate in Washington."

Farah called it a vicious cycle -- although Africa is clearly important because of its natural resources, its oil production, and "the moral responsibility to cover poverty," the lack of interest among policymakers leads newspapers to divert resources elsewhere, and so there are no stories to rouse interest in the region. "Though this is certainly not healthy or right, I don't see it changing," said Farah.

UDC's panelists also plumbed the relationship between newsmakers and news-gatherers. Though the forum was titled "Media's Benign Neglect of Africa," the discussion quickly and often turned to a perceived neglect, not always benign, on the part of the Bush administration and policymakers in Congress.

Transafrica's Munthali and Emira Woods of the Institute of Policy Studies, for example, both critiqued the rise of anti-terrorism legislation in African countries, the passing of which is now a prerequisite to receiving U.S. economic aid. Not only is the legislation being "used by leaders to restrict space for political organizing," as in Eritrea, said Woods, but the phenomenon is the latest example of long-standing, manipulative geopolitics by the United States in Africa. "In the old days, you had to be anti-communist," said Munthali. "Now you have to be anti-terrorist."

Woods also questioned whether the mainstream media's sympathies ultimately lie with international bodies like the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and the World Trade Organization -- bodies whom she called another arm of American power in Africa. At the upcoming Free Trade Area of the Americas talks in Miami, news reporters are slated to be "embedded" with the riot police. Woods believes that this, along with the news media's close ties to the Pentagon during the war in Iraq, shows that "the media is really interested in telling the story of the policymakers."

The beef, then, seems to be not toward select reporters or news organizations, but rather toward a perceived monolith of corporate power, lawmakers and a white culture that continually sidelines the concerns and issues of Africans and African-Americans.

Professor Joseph Elam, who teaches in the UDC journalism program, sees this alienation among his students. "Blacks don't see issues interesting to them in mainstream media," Elam said.

Elam hails from the southern state of Kerala, India, where he said "even the streetsweepers read two papers." In 27 years of teaching, he has noted that his international students are typically better informed than their African-American classmates. The root causes, he said, are that the American audience has been fragmented by identity politics, and that young people expect the media to provide entertainment. He said that African-American students primarily focus on hip-hop culture and the pop stars and athletes that it celebrates. Add cable and the Internet to the mix of traditional media formats and "we have to force them to read the newspapers," Elam said.

Although a number of his students have gone to mainstream publications as working journalists, one thing Elam doesn't see is African-American writers going back to their communities and reporting from the point of view of people there -- talking to the "victims" of social inequality and asking them for solutions. Elam laments this, pointing to a rich tradition of inner-city reporting among whites in the United States, with authors such as Upton Sinclair and Carl Sandburg bringing the plight of workers in the Chicago stockyards to the attention of a nation.

The bigger problem, Elam believes, is that the African-American community lacks the financial resources to support its own independent presses.Koreans in the United States, he pointed out, have hundreds of daily publications, while Indians publish more than 120 newspapers and magazines.Both of these groups make up a small percentage of the minorities living in America, and yet African-Americans -- over 40 million strong -- have no independent daily paper. Elam said that black weeklies do exist, but that a better description would be "weaklies," given their dire financial situations.

The other side of the coin, Elam said, is that the mainstream publications only make minority hiring a priority when there is a big story to be covered. In the 1960s, he said, when he was starting his journalism career in Chicago, black journalists were hired in droves by the mainstream media to cover the civil-rights movement. Then later, during the women's movement of the 1970s, papers brought female reporters on board.

Panelists were split as to whether the situation is hopeful. While some speakers called on the students present to organize themselves as consumers, writers and voting citizens, Charles Cobb Jr. said, "I'm not particularly optimistic that much is going to change. I don't see where the pressure is coming from. I don't see demand from the outside, and I don't see demand from the inside."

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