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Africa News Service (Durham)

Africa: Dateline: Africa

Tamela Hultman

1 December 1990

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Durham, NC — On March 21, 1990, scores of world leaders gathered in a soccer stadium for a dramatic midnight ceremony. After a long war against South African rule, the last colony in sub-Saharan Africa became an independent nation.

The independence of Namibia was the end of an era that began when the European powers divided Africa among themselves at the Berlin Conference of 1884-'85. It was also, many hoped, a sign of things to come in Africa. The constitution that came into effect that night is one of the world's most democratic. Among its features is an environmental bill of rights, designed to reverse a century of ecological decline.

Coverage of the historic event on the ABC "World News Tonight" was a concise tag at the end of another item:

Meanwhile, at midnight, the flag of South Africa was replaced by a flag of Namibia, marking the independence of the last South African colony. A black government took over power of the country which has a seven percent white minority.

NBC also devoted two sentences to the item; CBS doubled the coverage with four sentences. Only CNN reported the independence of Namibia as more than a backdrop for talks between U.S. Secretary of State James Baker and Soviet Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardnadze, who attended the ceremonies.

Although the cost of transporting reporters and camera crews long distances is cited by network executives as a major reason for infrequent African coverage, Namibia was a reminder that the most important reasons may lie elsewhere. All four commercial networks had crews on the spot.

"I think we might have done better on Namibia," says Bill Wheatley, who for five years was executive producer of the NBC "Nightly News." "That certainly is an important place with ramifications for Americans, given the American involvement over the years, and also because of the South African connection. So I think that deserved more time than it got."

David Gergen, an advvisor to Presidents Reagan and Clinton and a former editor-at-large for U.S. News and World Report, says what happened in Namibia was part of a pattern.

"The history of American media," he says, "has been one of general inattention to Africa, except when there's been major famine or conflict." Gergen says "parachute journalism" a quick in-and-out during crisis situations has been the most common response to African events.

But even African crises tend to be undercovered. Before Nelson Mandela's release from prison attracted attention to the fighting in South Africa's Natal province, the killings there went largely unreported in the U.S. press. Yet since 1987, according to several estimates, more people have died in Natal than have been killed in Lebanon and Northern Ireland combined. The fact that the major African story is economic always a difficult topic for mass media to tackle further hampers coverage of Africa.

But economic stories in some parts of the world do attract attention. "We are now getting a lot of coverage of the problems of economic restructuring in Eastern Europe and the social costs of austerity programs," says Pauline Baker, a former Democratic Senate aide now at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

"People don't have a clue of what's been going on in Africa since the eighties in terms of social costs of economic restructuring. I don't think there's been either sufficient explanation of why the continent is so distressed or sufficient coverage of the exceptions to the rule."

Baker points out that the debt burden which is proportionately heavier for Africa's economies than for countries anywhere else in the world is covered as though it were almost exclusively a Latin American problem.

Africa "has to be undercovered," says John Leonard, media critic for CBS's "Sunday Morning," "because I read all the time I read hundreds of magazines, I get five newspapers a day and I don't know what's going on."

Washington Post columinist Jim Hoagland, who won a Pulitzer Prize for his coverage of South Africa, says Africa has gotten short shrift in the media for a long time. "I was foreign editor and assistant managing editor [at the Post] for about eight years," Hoagland says. "And I would have to be honest in saying that Africa weighed relatively lightly on the scales of newsworthiness. As a former correspondent in Africa, I regret that."

New York Times Executive Editor Joseph Lelyveld also won a Pulitzer for South Africa reporting. Like Hoagland, Lelyveld sometimes has questioned the way news decisions are made. He recalls his stint in Zaire then the Congo as a young reporter. The world's media, he says, congregated in the capital, practicing journalism-by-press-release. His stories made the front page regularly.

"At a time when a place is recognized as being hot," he says, "almost any reasonable development can be front page news or make the network news simply because there's a concentration of journalists there. That creates a media momentum, unrelated to what's really important. Sometimes very fundamental and important coverage gets lost at moments like that as the herd tramples around."

Lelyveld says he began to feel "a little fraudulent that I was writing authoritatively about a subject I knew very little about. I knew the capital and this was a vast country. The rest I was doing mostly on hearsay."

So, "almost with a sinking feeling," he left the pack, venturing into the countryside and filing stories quite unlike those of other reporters. Although his dispatches ran in the paper, they were buried deep on the inside pages. And when the New York Times downplayed the story, other papers followed suit. Years later, Lelyveld said he still felt a bit guilty that "in a sense, I had taken the Congo off the front page."

Codi Simon, former foreign editor at National Public Radio, acknowledges that what's being reported in other media influences coverage at NPR. "It's a combination of factors," she says, "like what's in the papers, what's on the wires."

"In the past year," Simon says, "Africa hasn't been a priority of ours not because we're not interested and not because we don't care but because so much else is happening in the world. It's very hard to find the air time right now to fit in an important but frankly secondary story from anywhere else."

Even journalists who say that Africa is a priority are affected by the pressure to concentrate on other areas. John Barth produces the public radio show "Marketplace," a daily program designed to acquaint U.S. listeners with global economic issues.

"I cannot possibly go for a week without doing something about the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe," he says. "There's too much going on there that is immediately important to our government and the businesses that are cutting deals there."

Africa's real problem, Jim Hoagland says, is that it "is becoming increasingly irrelevant economically to the rest of the world."

Roger Wilkins, who teaches at George Mason University and has served on the editorial boards of both the Washington Post and the New York Times, disagrees. "I think Africa is undercovered," he says, "and I don't believe that decisions are made on the basis of its economic importance."

Like others who have questioned editors and producers about the lack of Africa coverage, Wilkins has heard, time and again, that there is no constituency for news about Africa in the United States. "Let me tell you something," he says. "A very substantial proportion of the people in the United States are of African descent. And it's only the ignorance and the racism of people who make news decisions that keep those stories real stories, powerful stories, interesting stories from reaching our television screens and our newspapers."

Wilkin's assessment gets strong reactions from media decision-makers. "That is something which I categorically reject," says NPR's Codi Simon. "I do not think it's a question of racism. That's something I completely disagree with. It is not because these are black people who are starving. There are starving people everywhere who are not covered."

If you don't think racial factors play a role, Wilkins counters, look at who's making the choices. "What is news and what is newsworthy," he says, "is basically decided by middle class, middle age, white American males people who have a very narrow slice of human experience but who overvalue the ability of their limited experience to give them a broad world view. Most of these are people who have never had a close African-American friend, let alone an African acquaintance."

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