Out Of Africa: Where T.V. News Falls Short
If there are eight million stories in the naked city alone, think of the billions around the globe, and the thousands of stories with real impact on the world. A great many of these stories get scant coverage or are overlooked entirely, by the mainstream media. But one area in particular seems to come up over and over again when this topic arises – Africa.
Famine in Niger, the war in Sudan and the ongoing AIDS crisis in Africa are a few of the topics that aren't often addressed on television news in particular. When they answered questions for us, both Michael Bass, senior executive producer of "The Early Show," and Randall Joyce, a CBS News producer based in London, brought up Africa when asked what isn't being covered enough at CBS News.
There are others within the network who agree. David Gelber, a producer at "60 Minutes," says that while programs like "60 Minutes" and ABC News' "Nightline" continue to do stories on the AIDS crisis and other conflicts in Africa, "In general, in network news, the fact that 30-40 million people have AIDS or are HIV positive in Africa is not on the radar screen. If they were Europeans that were dying, it would be a different matter."
Gelber continues: "There are lots of countries where we aren't covering things but when you have an epidemic with the proportions of the Plague, it seems to me that warrants more coverage than we've been getting."
Gelber, who also covered apartheid extensively for "60 Minutes," produced a piece in 2000 on AIDS in Africa for "60 Minutes II," called "Death By Denial," which won a Peabody Award. Gelber says that the reason the piece aired was because "60 Minutes" correspondent Ed Bradley and Executive Producer Jeff Fager "really wanted it to happen."
"I really should stress what an incredible sanctuary '60 Minutes' is because they still run stories because they are important and not because they are audience-tested," said Gelber.
It does appear that the networks long-form broadcasts are a sanctuary for stories out of Africa. Over the past year, "60 Minutes" and "60 Minutes: Wednesday" featured two reports on the war in Sudan, ABC News' "Nightline" has broadcast numerous stories on events in the region and NBC's "Dateline" featured a piece on Uganda's civil war.
Otherwise, much of the networks' coverage on their flagship evening newscasts and morning shows consists of brief voice-overs or tells and only occasionally a substantive, detailed look at the crisis.
Andrew Tyndall tracks the weekday editions of ABC's "World News Tonight," "NBC Nightly News," and "CBS Evening News." According to Tyndall, Sub-Saharan Africa has received a total of 67 minutes of coverage so far this year (from Jan. to Sept.). That represents 2% of overall foreign coverage for the broadcasts. To put some perspective on these numbers, each network averages 19 minutes of editorial content in each half-hour newscast, for a total of 285 minutes during the weekdays, according to Tyndall. For example, when Katrina hit the Gulf Coast, the networks spent a total of 263 minutes on the story during the week of Aug. 29-Sept. 2.
This is the region-by-region breakdown, stated as percentages of overall foreign coverage, according to Tyndall:
Middle East/Persian Gulf 51%
Europe (ex-USSR excluded) 24%
Asia/Australasia (Middle East excluded) 14%
Former Soviet Union 2%
The Americas (USA excluded) 7%
Sub-Saharan Africa 2%
Looking at network news in general, much of the coverage of the region and its conflicts is often prompted only when a major U.S. administration official visits the region or, more often, when a celebrity calls attention to it. For example, all three networks covered Condoleezza Rice's July trip to the Sudan, although much of the content focused on a fracas in which reporters were roughed up by Sudanese officials. Don Cheadle's film, "Hotel Rwanda," which dealt with the genocide in that country, called attention to conflicts in the region on all three networks for several weeks. ABC's "Good Morning America" anchor Diane Sawyer's interview with Brad Pitt in Africa, the content of which focused primarily on Pitt's concerns about poverty there, was the subject of a "Primetime Live" full hour and two days of coverage on "Good Morning America."
In newspapers, coverage of the sub-Saharan African region has been relatively extensive and prominent. Among three major newspapers (New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Washington Post) over the past year, there have typically been 3-5 front-page articles per month that originate from the region.
We learned earlier this week that the lack of coverage on television may be explained by audience research that suggests people are not interested in such topics because they aren't relevant to their own lives.
While that may be true, says Chris Hulme, foreign editor for the CBS "Evening News," "I don't think that means you just ignore the place, it's a continent with a lot of important interesting stories … We still have a responsibility to cover it even if research shows people are interested in other things."
CBS operates an office in Johannesburg, South Africa, where CBS producer/reporter, Sarah Carter, is based. Carter typically pitches and produces the stories that originate from the region. "Our challenge in the bureau is to produce stories that are compelling and the extra peg is that they have to be interesting to an American audience," says Carter. "You have to come up with not only compelling stories to keep the audience, but reasons why they should care, because it's not something that's on their radar."
Hulme suggests that perhaps the audience's disinterest is a result of not fully understanding the conflicts in Africa and acknowledges that "maybe we could do a better job of educating them" about the region.
"We've done the story," says Hulme, referring to the "Evening News'" coverage of the war in Sudan. "Could we have done more? Yes, I think so. But we don't have limitless airtime to fill and we're involved in a war and that tends to suck up airtime and resources."
There are also logistical barriers for some stories in Africa, says Hulme, who says that CBS was refused visas by Sudan and Zimbabwe back in March.
Hulme says that the barriers to covering Africa are not necessarily cost-related, but more a question of what type of foreign news is prioritized for a broadcast with a limited amount of time.
"The trouble is that before 9/11 and before the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, we had a policy of at least once a year going to Africa and doing stories, which we did and they were a pretty good range of stories," says Hulme. "What we try to do is amortize our costs and be smart about it. If there's a breaking news story, we'll leap on a place and cover it. But Africa tends to have ongoing on issues such as AIDS and hunger, so what we used to do was send a correspondent down there and set up a two or three-week trip and cover a variety of stories. We'd take the time to do some good post production work and air those when there was an opportunity."
But since that influx of foreign news, "We haven't really done it since. I have been looking for an opportunity to do it again," says Hulme. "All the best laid plans don't work when suddenly the people you were going to send there get embroiled in London bombings or something like that. It doesn't mean to say we've forgotten about [stories in Africa]. We have to prioritize with our resources."