The Media and Aid in Sub-Saharan Africa

Whose News?

Lena von Naso

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781351271783
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Journalism
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

News coverage on Africa is closely connected not only with how Western audiences see the continent, but also with how a wide Western audience builds its opinion on issues that carry consequences for the public's and governments' support and policy towards development aid. The Western media reinforce a picture of a continent that drowns in chaos, is dominated by conflicts, diseases, corruption and failed democratisation. Whose interests lie behind that? How does foreign news on sub-Saharan Africa emerge, which actors are relevant in its making, and on the basis of what interests do these actors shape the coverage that is then presented as 'neutral information' to a broad international audience?

Closely examining the relationship between foreign correspondents of international news media and humanitarian organisations, Lena von Naso shows how the aid and media sectors cooperate in Africa in a unique way. Based on more than 70 interviews with foreign correspondents and aid workers operating across Africa, the book argues that the changing nature of foreign news and of aid is forcing them to form a deep co-dependency that is having a serious and largely unnoticed effect on Western news coverage.

This comprehensive examination of a new paradigm will interest students and scholars of media and journalism, African studies, development and humanitarian studies and the aid and media communities operating across Africa.

1 Introduction

Coverage of Africa, foreign correspondents and humanitarian organisations

News coverage of sub-Saharan Africa in Western media is dominated by reporting that focuses on crises. Africa mostly appears as a continent homogeneously drowning in chaos, full of warlords, mass rapes, corruption, ethnic conflicts, famines, failed democratisation, pirates, HIV, and epidemics such as Ebola. For years, public fatigue relating to news from Africa has been criticised (Krems 2002; Clark 2004; Mükke 2009a). The lack of interest regarding sub-Saharan Africa is a phenomenon in many Western industrialised nations. Unreasonably high negativism (De Beer 2010), so-called crisis-focused coverage,¹ is considered a likely cause of this (Van der Gaag 2007: 185; Plewes & Stuart 2009: 24f; see also Luger & Pointner 1996; Dilg 1999). Rarely does the news cover progress, successful local economic structures, cultural events, or African personalities as role models; and if correspondents suggest covering any of these stories, Western editors are often not interested in running them (Mükke 2003).² The dominant perception is that the continent cannot release itself from misery and is dependent on Western support. This one-sided reporting is in large part responsible for reinforcing the image of Africa as a hopeless continent in the minds of large audiences (many studies argue in favour of this coherence, see e.g. Plewes & Stuart 2009: 24ff; see also DFID 2000; VSO 2001; Van der Gaag 2007). This is especially so if the audiences have no experience of places in Africa to help contextualise the information that the media and campaigns of humanitarian organisations provide, which is the case for most Western audiences (George Alagiah in Clark 2004: 695; see also Glennie, Straw & Wild 2012: 8ff).

We live in a media society where fictional and ‘real’ actuality conglomerate in a “contemporary reality”, generated by mass media (Merten 2004: 17).³ The very few reports on sub-Saharan Africa contribute substantially to reinforcing the picture of Africa as a hopeless continent. Many studies have shown how dominant and enduring this crisis focus remains in audiences’ perception.⁴ The issue of reporting is thus closely interconnected with the formation of political opinion on foreign issues and can influence the political agenda, if the media are understood as having agency. The media frequently report on incidents because they are on the political agenda; equally, some issues are on the political agenda because they have already been spread to the populace by the media. Studies on the so-called CNN effect show how media coverage indirectly impacts policy making via its influence on political elites, usually by reflecting public opinion and creating pressure to act, by adding issues to the public discourse, or by creating a public climate that encourages or discourages politicians to act in a certain way. Despite controversial discussions about whether the media has a direct causal effect on policy making, its indirect influence is widely accepted.⁵ What kind of social responsibility thus comes with news coverage? The German Federation of Journalists published the following statement regarding the special mission journalists have in our society:

To uphold and extend these freedoms, all journalists are called upon to exercise utmost diligence during their work, to respect human dignity, and to adhere to basic principles as defined in the Press Codex of the German Press Council [Deutscher Presserat]. Journalists can only fulfil their tasks of providing information and commentary and of fostering public checks and balances when they are free of legal restrictions and constraints that hinder these principles.

(Deutscher Journalisten Verband 2012: 2)

Starting from the premise that media coverage can have an influence on events themselves, I thus am of the opinion that coverage bears political and social responsibility (see also Chouliaraki 2006; Chouliaraki 2012; for the argument that media shape and reconfigure disasters and their social relations, see Cottle 2014). Underlying my investigation on foreign news covering of sub-Saharan Africa and its connection with the aid sector is an understanding of normative media theory, in a representative liberal tradition. Media do not necessarily have to only present facts and objective views, but the reporting should be balanced and – if it is interpretative – give a context and understanding. Journalists are not only

external observers but also part of ‘the reality’ that they report on. […] Under certain circumstances, they change the ‘reality’ that they report on, even if they do not intend to do so. There are reciprocal effects between ‘the reality’ and the journalistic depiction of it that cannot be adequately accounted for by the question as to whether the media portray reality ‘correctly’ or ‘incorrectly’.

(Kepplinger 2004, 2. edition: 100)

Journalism, as I understand it, is supposed to be impartial and solution-oriented. It is problematic that in the field, journalists can be caught in the dilemma between impartiality and humanity that might conflict with professional obligations (Gjelten 2001). In such cases, reporting because of its crucial role of holding governments, institutions, businesses, and individuals to account, should always give impartiality preference over lobbying for a cause, however seemingly good it may be. Journalists also have to consider the potential impacts that their reports may have, attend to the causes of a conflict, focus on solutions, reflect on their own position and role, and provide implicit transparency (Bilke 2008).

The CNN effect shows the importance of media coverage and the critical role of media serving as a regulating control in Western democracies. Because the coverage has political consequences, the questions of why reporting on sub-Saharan Africa assumes this strongly crisis-focused manifestation, under which circumstances the coverage originates, and what actors are involved in its emergence, are very important. Especially since studies show that if a broader public is to be engaged with developing countries’ issues, intrinsic values must be addressed, instead of “enhancing the status of Northern ‘givers’ relative to Southern ‘receivers’, and delivering messages focused on giving money or taking easy actions” (Darnton 2011: 2). However, people from the Western cultural sphere are almost invariably consulted when it comes to assessing conflict situations for Western media (Schmoll 1998: 3; Krems 2002; Smith, Edge & Morris 2006; Alam 2007: 59). Two thirds of sources used in news reports are not African (Mükke 2009b: 116) with representatives of humanitarian organisations playing a prominent role as the second most common main actors (Mükke 2009b: 258). It is striking how often they feature in news reports, and are framed exclusively as positive actors (Alam 2007: 59; Mükke 2009b: 114). Additionally, catastrophes in sub-Saharan Africa have to be very serious for the international media market to take notice of them (Mükke 2003: 84; see also VSO 2001; Smith, Edge & Morris 2006; Stollenwerk 2011). The news threshold, the hurdle that events must overcome to be newsworthy, is high. A high news threshold is followed by an increasing crisis focus, resulting in an even higher threshold, and so on. A positive feedback loop occurs. The Kenyan professor Wambui Mwangi criticises: “To get comparable attention [comparable to an event in Western industrial nations], a lot of African deaths are necessary. This disparity is profoundly racist” (Grill 2007: 126). While it is the media that make disasters visible to a broader audience, both the media and humanitarian organisations are key to “the mediation of distant suffering and the global production and dissemination of images and stories of disasters and atrocities” (Orgad & Seu 2014: 8), and both together shape moral responses to this distant suffering. Spohrs showed that de-escalation oriented framing of news is later reflected in the mental patterns of its readers (Spohrs 2006: 1). By proving this, he delivered evidence that news coverage can have a direct impact on recipients and that conflict sensitivity can be transmitted through texts. Other large-scale audience research also precisely identifies the origin of the audience’s perceptions in the media, and in the way the media present humanitarian issues; that is also the case, yet to a lesser extent, for studies on humanitarian organisations’ campaigns (VSO 2001; Opinion Leader Research 2002; Höijer 2004; Glennie, Straw & Wild 2012). Studies show that larger organisations with significant budgets to widely spread their messages tend to use more “pornography of poverty” material that then sticks in the public’s minds (Plewes & Stuart 2009: 29). We see that media coverage can have significant effects on the audiences, but few studies research in depth its origination processes, conditions of production, and its structures, and it is important to close that gap. We need to focus on the actors relevant in the originating process of news. However, until now the scientific debate on news coverage of sub-Saharan Africa has primarily focused on content analysis. So far, we lack studies investigating why this kind of material is produced, and studies that include the actors that are involved in its production process.

An ongoing development drives the global news market. The global cutback of foreign correspondent posts in Western media is alarming, and is associated with diminishing interest in comprehensive and knowledgeable presentation of foreign news. Prominently placed foreign stories in British newspapers decreased by 80 percent from 1979 to 2009 according to a study by M. Moore (2010: 17), and there is little evidence that this trend might change. For news from sub-Saharan Africa, with its considerably higher news threshold, this development comes with severe consequences: there are very few reports about the African continent south of the Sahara in the Western media. Note that more than 30 percent of foreign correspondents for American media covering sub-Saharan Africa think the continent should receive more attention (Wu & Hamilton 2004: 527; also Ricchiardi 2005). They especially believe that positive news should be covered more, since not everything is negative⁶ in Africa, despite its association with backwardness not least since the publication of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness.⁷ The increasing number of blog entries, travel novels, memoirs, and other publications produced by foreign correspondents besides news stories is beginning to advance a more positive picture of Africa south of the Sahara.⁸ The Africa correspondent of the German newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung remarks:

The situation in Africa has generally improved significantly. The wars in Mozambique, Angola, Ivory Coast, Sierra Leone, and Liberia have ended. The economic growth on the continent is on an average six percent a year. Roads are being built everywhere.

(Scheen 2008)

The media, however, have for centuries concentrated on ‘hard news’, covering up-to-date and consequential news that are relevant to the audiences (Weichert & Kramp 2011: 14). Certainly one of the media’s tasks is to point out problematic issues. But because the crisis focus is so immanent in Western news on sub-Saharan Africa, my research interest sprang from the assumption that aspects other than those generally responsible for global news production, such as news values, and unreconstructed stereotypes about Africa, play a significant role in the concentration on crises in sub-Saharan African news (see Chapter 2, 3, and Chapter 4, section 4.2). Those existing theories cannot explain satisfactorily why the media coverage of sub-Saharan Africa is so persistently negative, or why the coverage consistently ranks lower than news from less developed countries in Asia and South America (Lange 2003: 88f).

Because of the marked decrease of Western foreign correspondents in Africa, even media of record sometimes use so-called parachute journalists;⁹ the working reality of journalists changes constantly (Hamilton & Jenner 2004; Sambrook 2010), and the news-making process has become ever faster, while requiring more workforce to be able to supply the media’s digital presence with new material constantly. This is due to the development of the information technology and infrastructure mainly since 2000 that allows reporters to file anything from anywhere at any time, exacerbating their influence (Shrivastava & Hyde-Clarke 2004), and due to the online presence of news media. The digitalisation of news puts more pressure on correspondents to react immediately to events, and to prioritise crises. In addition to media outlets competing against each other and increasing the speed of news, also audiences have higher demands since they can compare reports from different outlets directly, and may for example demand that ‘their’ newspaper or broadcaster reports on issues that other outlets report on already. This is a challenge for correspondents, not only but especially in sub-Saharan Africa. A correspondent covering sub-Saharan Africa for German media, for example, is responsible for an average of 33 countries (Mükke 2009a: 43), while travel budgets shrink. This trend is the same for other Western media nationalities. Additionally, sub-Saharan Africa is seen as a springboard for careers; in the beginning most correspondents may have journalistic experience but little or no knowledge about Africa (Mükke 2003: 83; W...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Figures and tables
• Preface
• Preface in German
• Selected acronyms
• Acknowledgement
• 1 Introduction: coverage of Africa, foreign correspondents and humanitarian organisations
• 2 State of research
• 3 Theoretical concepts
• 4 Media and aid – sectors and actors: basic assumptions
• 5 Research design and methodology
• 6 Research findings
• 7 Summary and conclusion
• 8 Outlook
• Index
• Annex