How is Africa usually portrayed?
An African crowd is a “teeming, raucous, sweat-drenched mass of humanity.”
A carefully planned genocidal attack is an “orgy of tribal slaughter.“
When were these descriptions written? During a late 19th century “exploration” by missionaries? By mid-century colonial governments trying to “keep down” their populations? Try again.
These direct quotes come from major U.S. media (The Washington Post on President Clinton’s 1998 trip to Africa and Newsweek on Rwanda in 1994 respectively).
Coverage of Africa has often been of poor quality, tending toward stereotypes and misinformation.
Patterns and images often originated in the 19th century and were continued by the colonial governments. Just as Africans who fought for independence were often depicted as irrational “savages,” the tendency to call any opposition to the status quo or any political violence irrational continues. Whenever there is violence in Africa, you can bet it will be labeled “tribal” or otherwise tied to racial characteristics.
Western media continually refer to internal disputes, civil wars, and genocide as inexplicable tribal violence. Political complexities are overlooked and often simply left out as the news media emphasize what they see as the primitiveness of Africans. In South Africa, for example, armed political disputes were labeled “black-on-black” fighting. Yet, whenever violence breaks out in European countries such as Bosnia or Northern Ireland, it’s called “ethnic violence” or other less pejorative terms.
Besides focusing primarily on disasters and violence, media coverage also tends to highlight the “humanity” of Western aid workers and other foreigners (most likely white) involved in interventions — while dehumanizing Africans. Professor Helge Ronning calls this a “tyranny of compassion,” and says the media fail to critically cover the many Western aid organizations that work throughout Africa. Indeed, Western aid workers are often portrayed as heroic saviors ministering to passive, childlike populations around the continent. Africans who help their own people are often overlooked or ignored. As African media scholar Folu Ogundimu told Nieman Reports, Western media leave out stories about “enterprise, resilence and the abundant energy of the African people.”
And, of course, the main roots of all of these problems are almost never discussed in Western media coverage: the on-going debt crisis in which African countries have been forced to borrow money through institutions such as the World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF). The harsh restrictions tied to these loans has meant African governments have been forced to severely cut spending on health care, education and other important social service areas.
Lack of coverage
Africa simply does not receive the amount of media attention that other regions of the world do. This is not a new phenomenon as various researchers have documented the decline and continuing lack of media coverage of Africa over the last 30 years. Consider:
- In an analysis of 10,000 stories from 1972 to 1989 on ABC, NBC, and CBS, William Gozenbach el al found that only 2.2 percent of the stories were about Africa.
- The Tyndall Report found that from 1988-1990 only 5.6 percent of the international news on the three major television networks was about Africa.
- Africa News Service found that when Namibia became the last African country to be decolonized in 1991 — an event of major significance attended by many heads of state — CBS devoted four sentences to the event. ABC and NBC each covered the event with two sentences.
- A Pew Center for the People and the Press 1995 report found that of 7,061 stories that were printed in newspapers or broadcast on television or radio, only 421 (6 percent) were about Africa.
If you think these statistics are true only for commercial coverage, Africa News Service found that in the first half of 1992, PBS’ News Hour aired twice as many stories about Asia as about Africa. They also found that in January/February of 1993, National Public Radio (NPR) ran 54 stories about Somalia and 136 about the former Yugoslavia.
As a Freedom Forum report noted, “The truth is that unless there is news of a coup, famine, earthquake or other natural disaster, Africa tends to drop off the list of international stories waiting to be published or aired by the gatekeepers of the media.”
Indeed, what coverage that does appear tends to focus on wildlife or the activities of Westerners.
In examining the number of times gorillas versus guerrillas came up in a Lexis-Nexis search on Rwanda in the early 1990s, Ken Silver said he found a “rout by the apes.” The animals came up 1,123 times, the fighters 138.
Brill’s Content came up with similar findings. They looked at the first week of coverage of two events by the news magazines Time and Newsweek: 1) the Rwanda genocide in 1994 in which hundreds of thousands were murdered and 2) the murder of eight Western tourists on the Uganda-Rwanda border in 1999. Time produced 1,898 words about the tourists and 797 about the genocide; Newsweek produced 1,387 words about the tourists and 775 words about the genocide.
