Paris Hilton gets more press in the New York Times than the humanitarian crisis in Darfur.
This is according to Matt Thompson, a reporter working for the Poynter Journalism Institute, who reports that a search of the Lexis-Nexus news database shows that between May and June this year the New York Times gave about 10 000 words to stories that mentioned Darfur and "at least 17 000 words to...
more Paris Hilton gets more press in the New York Times than the humanitarian crisis in Darfur.
This is according to Matt Thompson, a reporter working for the Poynter Journalism Institute, who reports that a search of the Lexis-Nexus news database shows that between May and June this year the New York Times gave about 10 000 words to stories that mentioned Darfur and "at least 17 000 words to stories mentioning Ms. Hilton".
For those that don't know, Ms. Hilton is the publicity-loving daughter of the Hilton hotel dynasty, famous among other things for appearing in her own reality TV show.
A cursory glance at media coverage of the African continent only makes the picture bleaker. Not just scant, coverage of the continent and its people is also shallow and sensational. It usually boils down to war, famine and venal African leaders and elites. At best, it celebrates positive intervention in the lives of Africans by either US or European nationals, their governments, multinational businesses or aid agencies.
When queried, US-based Africa-watchers will explain Americans do not care about Africa, that editors don't either, or that international coverage sells little advertising.
Another excuse is that Americans, who have difficulty following more than one story at a time, are already swamped with bad news from America's invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan -- as a result, they are numbed by news of continual strife and violence in Africa. Also, they say, it costs a fortune to pay for the upkeep of a correspondent in Africa, and journalists have to face up to incessant government censorship.
A second, more serious, set of reasons has to do with racism. As one journalist wrote in response to Thompson's story on the Poynter website: "Although the editors apparently don't want to say it out loud, this is a story about a bunch of black people who can't sing, act, do standup comedy, play sports, get arrested on a Fox reality program, or pass for white. So who cares? Not most of the American public. And even less of the American press. Unless there's a prize-winning photo to be gained from all the suffering."
There may be a lot of truth to these views, but the story is also more complicated.
For example, early August coverage of the crisis in Darfur increased exponentially in major US newspapers and news magazines. And take the idea that American editors are numbed by the cycles of violence in most African states. A reporter for Bloomberg News contends that this is "a laughable assertion considering major media can't seem to get enough of [Israel and Palestine] and always find compelling ways to retell that story."
As for the explanation that the pervasiveness of government censorship is a major obstacle, Kenneth Bacon, president of Refugee International, writing in the Columbia Journalism Review this month about media coverage of the crisis in Darfur points out that "journalists from Europe, where the public has more interest in Africa, got around the red tape by sneaking into Darfur from Chad."
That said, a focus on these indicators fails to capture some of the more profound and deep-seated processes at work. That is, editors take an interest in the African continent when US political, strategic and financial considerations come into play.
For example, Darfur has been recruited into the "clash-of-civilisations" narrative (currently a powerful factor in US politics) as yet another example of the barbarity of the Arab World. Other factors fuelling African coverage are the background of the "War on Terror" (the increased focus on the spread of Islam in Sub-Saharan Africa and the clamour to establish US military bases there) and America's search for new, alternative oil sources.
Perhaps even more importantly it is not just the media taking cues from government or political interest groups -- it goes the other way round, too. Senior New York Times writer Howard French, who spent the late 1980s and the entire 1990s covering West and Central Africa, argues that US policy on Africa in recent administrations has been heavily influenced by journalistic accounts of politics on the continent.
According to French, this is largely a consequence of a very thin knowledge base in the State Department on Africa.
During his first term President Bill Clinton required his staff to read Robert Kaplan's book and essay by the same name, The Coming Anarchy, and during his second term he was similarly influenced by New Yorker writer Philip Gourevitch's powerful book on the Rwanda genocide of 1994, We Wish to Inform You that Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families (1998).
According to French, Gourevitch's book was particularly influential in Washington during the events that accompanied Mobuto Sese Seko's final exit from Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of Congo) in 1997. Gourevitch played to the usual American habit of reducing complex struggles to "good guys" and "bad guys", and the tendency to support whatever the "good guy" undertook.
In his recently-published memoir, A Continent for the Taking: The Tragedy and Hope of Africa (see page 41 for an exclusive extract), French makes an explicit connection between the Zairean wars and Rwandan tit-for-tat killings of the late 1990s, a connection not often made outside Africa.
At the time, Paul Kagame's government blamed Rwandan Hutu refugees for forming new armies in the Zairean refugee camps (where, of course, they had been driven by the Rwandan Tutsi government). French suggests that in 1997 most journalists covering Central Africa, as well as US officials, focused exclusively on Laurent Kabila's march on Kinshasa -- partly as the ouster of Mobuto made for such an easy story line.
However, they missed a larger story: Rwandan government forces took revenge on Hutu refugees hiding in the Zairean countryside under the cover of Kabila's insurgency.
Much of the explanation for this -- both for journalists, and more importantly for policy makers -- was that Gourevitch's book had applied the template of the Holocaust to the earlier Rwandan genocide, comparing the Tutsis to European Jews and the Rwandan government to Israel, and the narrative still resonated with Clinton and his administration despite all indications to the contrary.
There were no good guys in Rwanda's catastrophic modern history, according to French, and the same was true of Zaire's civil war. So it's telling that Madeline Albright's spokesperson, James Rubin (also brother to Gourevitch's girlfriend), told French that Gourevitch's influence was key to selling Laurent Kabila to Washington, and downplaying the Rwandan-backed slaughter of the Hutu refugees in Zaire.
In an interview, French told me that no American interviewer has asked him about his charges on the Central African conflict, even though it is a major part of his book.
He has his own explanation: "Look, we are averse to self-examination not just in the media, but as a nation and a culture. I had to fight this in my own coverage. My editors were reading Gourevitch in the New Yorker and I am on the ground telling them stuff that I am seeing and they say it could not be this way because this guy who has already been sort of sanctified says otherwise."
[From The Media, http://www.themedia.co.za/article.aspx?articleid=194620&area=/media_insightglobal_effect/]
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