MEDIA-AFRICA: Gorillas in a Media Mix

By Jim Lobe Reprint | | Print |

Jim Lobe

WASHINGTON, Mar 7 1999 (IPS) - Just ten days ago Ghanaian President Jerry Rawlings, at a farewell ceremony at the White House, lodged the usual complaint of visiting African leaders.

“It is rather unfortunate that the stereotype image of Africa as a continent full of conflict, lack of democracy, etc…continues to dominate the international media,” he told President Bill Clinton and the White House press corps.

Little did he realize the truth of his statement.

Last week, Africa received more attention than any other story which appeared on the evening news of the nations three top TV networks – even more attention than Monica Lewinsky’s first televised interview since her affair with Clinton became headlines!

That’s right: a story from Africa received a total of 24 minutes on the network newscasts – one minute more than news about Lewinsky, who placed second, according to Andrew Tyndall, a researcher who monitors television news content.

The African story was not about a decisive battle between Eritrea and Ethiopia in Africa’s first modern conventional war between two black-led states. That battle, in which thousands of Africans are believed to have been killed, received no air time in network news broacasts – not even a one-sentence voice-over by the news reader.

And no, it wasn’t about the long-delayed elections last Saturday in Nigeria, Africa’s most populous nation, whose transition from military dictatorship to civilian-led democracy is widely considered the most important political event on the continent since the demise of apartheid.

Those elections received a total of 16 seconds of coverage on the CBS Evening News and 33 seconds on NBC Nightly News, although neither programme reported on Olusegun Obansanjo’s victory.

ABC’s World News Tonight carried nothing about the election.

This week’s big Africa story, in fact, was about eight white tourists, on a trek in southwestern Uganda to view the famous “gorillas in the mist,” who were captured and later bludgeoned and hacked to death by a band of Rwandan Hutu guerrillas.

Two of the victims, a couple who worked for the giant chip-maker, Intel Corporation, were from the United States; the rest were from Britain and New Zealand.

Tom Brokaw, the celebrated anchor on NBC Nightly News, told the the story this way when it first surfaced last Tuesday:

“We begin tonight with a story that still is emerging from Central Africa, a story of tourists, including Americans, who went deep into the jungle to see one of the last great communities of gorillas living in the wild. That’s Africa at its best.

“But it suddenly became Africa at its worst when the tourist camp was invaded by a heavily armed rebel army, a nightmare of kidnapping and murder. NBC’s Andrea Mitchell has the latest…”

The broadcast continued with breathless interviews with the white survivors and family members. (Neither this broadcast nor any others during the week ever mentioned that four Ugandans also were killed.)

Because the nightly TV network news broadcasts are regarded as the most important source of national and international news for the US public, Rawlings’ remarks can begin to be understood.

Last week, the average TV news audience for at least one of the three broadcasts was more than 23 million North Americans. That is more than the daily circulation of the 50 most widely read US newspapers, whose own coverage of the killings was not very much different than the networks.

“My blood pressure just kept going up all week as this story became the biggest in the media,” said Salih Booker, director of Africa studies at the influential Council on Foreign Relations and a frequent commentator for television and print media on African affairs.

“When I tried to explain that Nigeria and Ethiopia were much more important stories, one (TV) producer told me that Uganda killings had all the elements of a great story,” he told IPS. “I took that to mean: white people, including Americans, killed in deepest, darkest Africa by machete-wielding savages; one white woman raped; exotic wildlife in the background.”

“This kind of story really represents the continuation of a 200-year-old tradition into the next millenium,” Booker said. “Just replace the missionaries of the 19th century with the eco- tourists of today.”

Susan Moeller, a journalist and media scholar, is not surprised. “It is difficult to find news in the media about sub- Saharan Africa, unless the United States is involved or something horrific has happened.” she writes in a new book, ‘Compassion Fatigue.’

“It’s not called the ‘Dark Continent’ for nothing.”

Stories about Africa often reflect “unconscious cultural mindsets,” says Amb. Howard Wolpe, Clinton’s special envoy on the Great Lakes region in Central Africa and previously chairman of the Africa Subcommittee in the House of Representatives.

As Moeller points out, the broadcast media in particular are part of an entertainment industry which is deeply embedded in the prevailing culture.

“Media consumers are tied to a tether of cultural images,” she notes – images which, in turn, are based on stereotypes, or “pictures in our heads,” as Walter Lippmann, the influential journalist and media commentator noted almost 80 years ago.

Compounding the situation are steadily declining budgets for international news coverage and changing “news values,” particularly for television, which has grown steadily more reliant on dramatic action photos which capture the viewer.

In the Ethiopian-Eritrean war, says Moeller, none were available, while pictures of voters lined up to cast ballots in Nigeria are simply not as emotionally compelling as those of dead bodies, the jungle, and terrified survivors, as well as file footage of the Rwandan genocide and gorillas in the mist.

“Gorillas are very photogenic,” notes Tyndall, who adds that most television news stories about Africa are about its wildlife (“Africa at its best,” according to Brokaw) or major disasters and violence (“Africa at its worst).”

Follow-up stories to initial reports about the murders stressed the possible vulnerability of the gorillas to poachers if eco- tourism in Uganda dries up, Tyndall observed.

Meanwhile, as Booker noted, the challenge of changing US images of Africa is made much more difficult.

“Twenty-four minutes on the murders of whites in the jungle will make a far, far more indelible impression than 49 seconds of voice-overs about Nigerian elections.”