AFRICAN CONFLICTS NOT ‘CHOSEN’ FOR COVERAGE

As seen in the previous articles, the domination in the news of certain conflicts means that there is precious little time or space for the remaining 20 or 30 conflicts; going on throughout the world. If it is indeed a trend that the conflicts that are chosen are those that involve Western powers directly or are close to their vital’ interests, then this means that in the post-Cold War environment, conflicts in Africa will not be chosen for heavy coverage. This appears to be the case.

Saturation coverage was given to Somalia in the early 1990s with US involvement, and a certain amount of coverage was given to Rwanda towards the end of the genocide in 1994.

There was further coverage after the genocide, with the media focusing on the plight of the refugees in the camps in eastern Zaïre. This culminated in the approval and preparation for an intervention in 1996 to be led by Canada involving US troops, but coverage ended abruptly when Rwanda invaded pre-emptively and the intervention was called off. Coverage of African conflicts appeared to end there, with very low levels of coverage of conflicts in the DRC, Angola, Sierra Leone and Ethiopia-Eritrea. It was only in 2004 that a significant amount of coverage began to be given to African conflicts, Darfur in western Sudan, although it has failed to overcome Iraq as the dominant conflict in the media.

Statistics show this situation clearly. In the first three months of 1999, the combined coverage of the DRC, Angola, Sierra Leone and Ethiopia-Eritrea (all of which were experiencing significant resurgence of violence) on the international pages of the New York Times dropped from 6 percent in January to less than 1 percent in March, as coverage of Kosovo rose. In 2000, the BBC devoted 8.5 percent of its coverage to Africa, while CNN devoted 6 percent. On both stations, more coverage was given to violence in Zimbabwe targeting white farmers than to the large-scale conflict in the DRC. On the websites of the three main newswire services studied in 2005, no African country was among the ten most covered countries.

Global Media Assimilation of African Conflict

There is a huge variety of news corporations in print, broadcast and even internet across a broad background of countries, languages and cultures. Wire services have offices in more than one hundred countries. Yet it would appear that news agendas are incredibly similar when it comes to foreign conflicts. That is, they give a high priority to the same ‘chosen’ conflict of the times; and very little coverage to the others, including Africa’s conflicts. This is not to suggest that the media corporations agree on these issues, but they increasingly tend to agree on which issues are important. This is seen not only in the Western world, but beyond, even in Africa itself.

There are significant regional differences: Asian media concentrate on Asian conflicts and events, and European media focus more on European conflicts and events. Language is also a factor, with English language media outlets more likely to report on English-speaking countries than French, and vice versa for French media outlets.

As a whole, however, coverage of African conflicts, and Africa in general, is seriously limited, as can be seen by the following table. One exception here is RFI (Radio France International), whose majority listeners are French-speaking Africans. The majority of listeners to BBC radio are also Africans, but this does not appear to be reflected in coverage on Africa in the news. To compensate for this, BBC radio broadcasts separate programs focusing on African issues.

Source: studies conducted by author

Interestingly, a similar trend of assimilation can also be seen within parts of Africa itself. That is, international news has a tendency to focus on the dominant conflicts of the times, and African conflicts are given limited attention. The Post newspaper of Zambia (the newspaper with then largest circulation in Zambia) is an interesting example. A count of the numbers of articles on the international pages over the course of 2004 revealed that the Middle East was the most covered region (24 percent of articles), followed by Africa (19 percent), the Americas (18 percent) and Asia and Europe (17 percent each).

The three most covered countries were the USA (13 percent), Iraq (12 percent) and Israel-Palestine (9 percent). The only African country featuring in the top ten was Sudan at number five. News on all eight of Zambia’s neighbours combines made up only 4 percent of the total coverage.

Local African Media Coverage

Zambia’s ZNBC television news revealed a similar trend. A historic peace deal in Sudan (between the north and south) signed on 9 January 2005 was not mentioned on the main evening news. International news on that day instead covered Palestinian elections and the mistaken bombing of a house by US forces in Iraq.

The first summit of the African Union’s (AU) Peace and Security Council in January 2005 was also given little attention in Zambia, both on TV and radio. The aftermath of Palestinian elections, and of the Indian Ocean Tsunami, and even domestic US politics (the nomination for the Head of Homeland Security) were given more coverage. It should be noted, however, that there are other African media corporations that do, on the other hand, give significant coverage to African issues.