It's hard for us old Africa hands desperate to see more coverage of stories from the continent. Yet when we get that coverage, it tends to make us cringe.

Take, for instance, the violence in northern Mali. The situation is by far the worst unfolding humanitarian crisis in the world today, but compared with say, Syria or Afghanistan, you probably haven't heard much about it.

Or consider the flurry of coverage of Central Africa that followed March's Kony 2012 phenomenon. First of all, it is frustrating that it takes a viral internet video or the involvement of Hollywood celebrities to bring attention to the depredations of groups like the Lord's Resistance Army.

Even worse, many Africa correspondents file stories that fall prey to pernicious stereotypes and tropes that dehumanise Africans. Mainstream news outlets frequently run stories under headlines like ‘Land of Mangoes and Joseph Kony', seemingly without thinking how condescending and racist such framing sounds.

Western reporting on Africa is often fraught with factual errors, incomplete analysis, and stereotyping. However, these problems are tolerated and, in some cases, celebrated.

To Africa-watchers, there is a clear double standard for journalistic quality, integrity, and ethics when it comes to reporting on the continent. Why is there so much bad reporting on Africa? Part of the problem has to do with the limited number of journalists assigned to cover the continent.

Many major western media outlets assign one correspondent for the entire continent — more than 11 million square miles. He or she will be based in Johannesburg or Nairobi, but be expected to parachute into Niger, Somalia, or wherever the next crisis is unfolding, on a moment's notice.

Lack of correspondents

This is insane. Africa is a continent of 54 distinct states, all with multiple languages and ethnic groups and unique political dynamics. Nowhere else in the world would one person be expected to report on so many complicated situations.

Twenty years ago, most major western media outlets also only had one to three Africa correspondents. Very little has changed. There is an easy solution to this problem: Hire local reporters. Rather than relegating them to second-tier or co-author status, why not hire Africans as country or regional correspondents?

A reporter does not have to be Caucasian to provide objective and well-written reporting from the continent, and in many cases, this reporting is more nuanced than that of an international correspondent who spends five days reporting a story. Hiring local reporters also addresses the problem of language barriers, another key reason so much reporting on Africa is so bad.

This is evident in the Anglophone-Francophone divide: Coverage of the Mali crisis by outlets such as Agence France-Presse and France 24 has been considerably better than that of much of the English-language media. They had the best information from the battlefront and were able to interview non-Anglophone Malians with ease.

The problem is not simply that reporters cannot be expected to speak all of Africa's 3,000-plus languages; it is that foreign correspondents tend to rely on the same small group of fixers to arrange interviews, interpret, and manage logistics. Yet fixers tend to take reporters to talk to the same subjects, over and over and over again.

NGO mouthpieces

As Karen Rothmyer noted in a Columbia Journalism Review article, many reporters working on Africa rely "heavily, and uncritically, on aid organisations for statistics, subjects, stories, and sources". It is thus no wonder that much reporting on Africa is so heavily focused on crises and that many pieces read like little more than NGO promotional materials.

Another major issue is the lack of journalistic ethics employed by some reporters working in Africa. Standards for the depiction and identification of victims of conflict, rape and child abuse are frequently handled very differently from how they would be were the victims American or European.

It is very common to see pictures of starving children or rape victims in the pages of western newspapers. The most egregious example was Nicholas Kristof's 2010 identification of a 9-year-old Congolese girl who had been gang-raped.

The New York Times printed the girl's real name along with a facial photograph and even a video of her online. After a firestorm of controversy, Kristof blogged a response in which he promised not to do it again.

It is hard to imagine a situation in which any editor would have let such a ‘slip' occur had the story been about a western child-rape victim. Such a story never would — or should — have made it to the publication stage without changing the name to an alias, removing the photograph, or replacing it with a non-identifiable shot.

It is precisely these kinds of double standards that infuriate Africa-watchers and those who care about the ethics of reporting on victims of violence. Yet such abuses are too often tolerated in the western media when it comes to Africa.

— Washington Post

 

Laura Seay is assistant professor of political science at Morehouse College in Atlanta, Georgia.