Journalism Deficit Requires Deeper Expertise
By Eamon Kircher-Allen
MIA 2009
When Kenyan journalist Kodi Barth visited SIPA last Monday to talk about
media coverage of the elections there, he pointed out that for the most part American newspapers and TV have called the violence “tribal.”
Barth said that folks in the United States have repeatedly asked him to compare Rwanda and Kenya. It’s a comparison that makes little sense, he said — tiny Rwanda’s mid-1990s violence was between two ethnic groups, whereas Kenya has a plethora of ethnicities whose boundaries are hard to define. Further, so-called ethnic conflict in Kenya can be directly traced to the politics of post-colonial land redistribution in the mid-20th Century — not age-old tribal antagonisms.
But with some exceptions, American journalism has failed to explain this. And it’s not just a problem in Kenya. Throughout Africa and in many other regions, American journalism misses the point all too often when reporting on international conflicts. Until proven otherwise, conflicts in Africa are described as being rooted in tribalism. In the Middle East, the default explanation is that violence is rooted in tradition and religiosity. And so on.
These paradigms damage our journalism and worse, block our understanding of
the world.
Admittedly, there’s no easy remedy to this. Any reporting must rely to some degree on
assumptions and shared knowledge. It’s impossible to explain all aspects of the
context of any story in a normal-length news article or broadcast (that’s what
we have academia for). This is not especially problematic when we report on
domestic issues for a domestic audience — usually, readers already know a large
portion of the background information, even if not everyone sees all the
details in exactly the same light.
In contrast, international journalism for an American audience that has few
or no reference points for the subject at hand is far more complex. In fact, we
would probably be foolish to expect an American news analysis of the Kenyan
elections, for example, that approaches the complexity of our analysis of our own
elections. Such an analysis would also be irrelevant for an American audience.
Still, we should be able to do a little better. Thirteen years after the Rwanda genocide,
does the average news-watching American understand the historical reasons
behind the violence there? (Bizarrely, fictionalized movies like Hotel Rwanda and Sometimes in April have probably done a better job at educating than CNN has.) What about Darfur? Nuanced explanations (like this one from Columbia’s Mahmoud Mamdani on Democracy Now!) are few, far between and poorly packaged for mass consumption.
In the case of Kenya, lazy headlines like CNN.com’s January 28, 2008 “Ethnic hatred fuels more Kenya violence” are easy for an American audience to digest, even though they are wrong. That’s because they tap into an overarching backstory — anthropologists might call it a metanarrative — that we all think we know: Africa is a dark place ruled by passions and mysterious customs. With such a backstory, acts of outrageous violence do not require political, economic, social or historical explanations. Tellingly, this narrative is inherited from the days of colonialism. News reporting in other regions relies on other narratives, and they usually have similarly dubious origins.
American journalism’s antidote to this must be more expertise, more self-awareness and a constant vigilance about the pratfalls of received truths. When it comes to severely misunderstood regions like Africa and the Middle East, there must be nothing less than a revolution in reporting. This is made more difficult, but all the more important, because foreign bureaus are being shuttered, parachute journalism is on the rise and newspapers are struggling to define themselves digitally.
The revolution starts with journalism training and education. We need more
expert journalists with deep backgrounds in economics, political science,
anthropology and second languages. A tighter marriage between international
affairs schools and journalism schools is one way to promote this (SIPA and the
J-School should take note).
The public storytelling of journalism helps us define our relationship as Americans to the outside world — in our efforts at peace and diplomacy, our waging of war and our business endeavors. When it comes to international news, our globalized, wired world demands more than what is currently on offer.
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This is a brilliant call to action that doesn’t get preachy. It’s great to see an approach such as this.
The only media outlet you cite is CNN. CNN’s greatest quality is its ability to slap a video camera on any event anywhere, anytime. They purposely eschew nuanced analysis in favor of eye-catching video candy and endless commercials touting CNN. Nothing wrong with that, there’s clearly a market for it. But no serious media consumer looking for nuance on, say, an African election would insist that CNN provide it.
There are other outlets easily available in English to US markets: BBC, NPR, The New York Times, and The Economist all provide deeper insights and longer analysis. And if those don’t scratch your itch, then as you point out “that’s what we have academia for”.
CNN is pop news. That’s what it does. Its international broadcast does indeed provide “Africa Today” and “Asia Today” programming, but if it tried to provide lengthy analysis of African elections to the mainstream US market, its ratings would suffer and it would either quickly reverse course or turn into NPR, quality programming aimed at a small educated segment of the population.
You can’t have it both ways. CNN doesn’t do foreign affairs nuance, and it probably shouldn’t try.
Really interesting observations. Kodi Barth described the vacuum left by colonial legal systems (in Kenya’s case British), and the way tribal leaders exploited it to make a grab for resources. The easy story is “ethnic conflict and ancient hatreds.” The tougher story to report is “who got the land and the contracts.” It takes something closer to investigative reporting, and that is an expensive enterprise. It’s an incredibly useful model to consider in writing about conflicts.
Thanks to all for the comments.
It’s true that I make things easy on myself in this short post by looking to CNN for an egregious example of shoddy reporting on Kenya. In contrast, The New York Times has produced some good articles on the violence in Kenya. Jeffrey Gettleman has written some particularly insightful pieces.
Overall, however, I am unimpressed with American journalism’s take on the Kenya violence and many other issues in Africa and the Middle East.
My gripe with CNN and other American cable TV news programs is not simply their lack of nuance — given the requirements of the format and the intended audience, we shouldn’t expect the in-depth analysis we’d get in the Times.
My gripe is that the coverage is often wrong in fundamental but less-than-obvious ways.
But there is absolutely no reason CNN cannot get things a little more right. The BBC explanation of the historical roots of the Kenya violence (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/newsnight/7216204.stmis ), at less than 500 words, is hardly an academic paper. It still manages not to bluntly blame the violence in Kenya on “ethnic hatred.”
We are completely entitled to expect more from outlets like CNN, whether they are pop news or not. Their reporters are as sharp and inquisitive as any and they have plenty of resources.
In American print journalism, I would like to see a better-informed media climate in which it does not take a long, analytical article to gain a more accurate understanding of an international issue like that in Kenya. Right now, it takes so long to explain the accurate story because in doing so we are battling against the ingrained “ethnic hatred” explanation that we seem so attached to, and which much of the rest of American media reinforces.
That such media franchises like the CNN producing lazy and un called for headlines is no suprise by any means. The post election violence was one of the lowest points in the history of kenya but some of the news content emanating from the international media houses is wanting. It is enough proof that there are no media doctrines and ethics that guides most of their writers and if anything is to by, then the call for professionalism on the part of writers is heading for the dustbins. I as a person would like to see global change on the art of writing in order to prevent deliberate negative sensationalism that would take Kenya and potential affectees in Africa to the dogs.
Remember, what the media writes about Africa mostly determines its economic destiny and i am sure, itm would be the same media houses to have a go at such African countries when the economic reform agenda fails forgetting that they indirectly participated in the negative performance of such countries.