Suzanne Franks

The Neglect of Africa and the Power of Aid

Since the end of colonial rule, Africa has on the whole been inadequately covered by the western media. It is rarely reported except as a backdrop to disaster or as the scene of a celebrity visit. There is an absence of sustained and well-informed reporting about Africa in the mainstream media. And when the media do cover it they often get the story very wrong, partly because there is no ongoing understanding of and engagement with the continent. Using exclusive access to the BBC archive, the article examines how and why media coverage of Africa has been misleading and misinformed in the postcolonial period. It examines the extent to which the close relationship between media coverage and aid agencies has damaged the cause of informing the public. Aid agencies have seen a huge growth since the mid-1980s - partly precipitated by the power of media imagery. As media organizations have reduced their commitment to investing in reporting on Africa so journalists have in turn become more dependent upon aid agencies, which have filled a vacuum. This symbiotic relationship requires a degree of transparency otherwise there is a danger that it can compromise journalistic accountability.

Women reporting sport: Still a man’s game?

While it is generally known that sports journalism is an area of gender disparity, no major academic study has established the proportion of women sports writers in the UK press. Although female sports broadcasters have increased their visibility in the United Kingdom, the same is not true in the print media. This research first examines the current visibility of women sports journalists in the national UK press, by counting by-lines according to gender. Second, a study explores if the 2012 London Olympic Games had any effect on the proportion of female sports writers in the UK press, by comparing sports by-lines in a sample 6 months before and after the games. Furthermore, these results are compared to a decade earlier to see if the situation has improved. The findings indicate that the proportion of female sports writers in the UK press is lower than in comparable countries, with little improvement over time.

The neglect of africa

Serious journalism is deserting an entire continent, argues Suzanne Franks, who writes: This is the year of Africa. British politicians are falling over themselves to declare 2005 a unique opportunity for the West to sort out Africas problems. ... In July Britain will host the G8 conference at which great pronouncements are expected on the fate of Africa, and in September there is the UN Millennium summit. But how is Africa being reported and will the media use this year as an opportunity to take Africa seriously? Over the past 30 years there has been a steady decline in the attention given to reporting Africa. This presents a paradox; for just as communications and technology have improved, so the coverage of difficult-to-reach and faraway places has in some cases deteriorated. It is now easier to fly to remote locations and to broadcast stories from them, but we are no longer so inclined to do it.

Why Bob Geldof has got it wrong

“Natural” disasters rarely fit the pre-packaged concepts of the media, writes an expert on Ethiopia and the aid that went astray

Is saving the world journalism's job?

News is necessarily amoral: that is how it keeps us all decent. Moral news tells us what has happened – that is all it does and that is everything it does. This is why the BBC’s decision to reject the Disasters Emergency Committee (DEC) appeal for Gaza in January 2009 was hard to get right but was – in the end – correct. The essence of impartiality is that one cannot pick and choose. And protecting impartial reporting is more important than permitting the BBC to be involved in what was inevitably a campaign. It is not the journalist’s job to save the world and the outcome of impartiality may sometimes mean that journalists appear inhumane. The BBC has, perhaps, been lured into campaigning in recent years and has to make sure that it exercises fastidious judgment. Carefully-constructed policies about dealing with appeals and fundraising have come under strain. There was criticism over the Make Poverty History/Live 8 concerts and the BBC pulled out of broadcasting high-profile climate change events as a result of these concerns. No matter how worthy the cause, there are dangers for independent journalism. Michael Buerk, whose reporting once went on to inspire a memorable humanitarian appeal, is emphatic about the role of the journalist. “It is not our purpose to solve the world’s problems but to so inform a working democracy that those people will come to their own conclusions about what is right and wrong... If that line is crossed, even if the goal is as benign as raising money for aid, then people will detect that agenda and not believe you in the same way as they would beforehand.” If the output is tainted by Is saving the world journalism’s job?

HOW FAMINE CAPTURED THE HEADLINES

Michael Buerk’s report from the Ethiopian highlands, broadcast on 23 October 1984, was a landmark news item both in terms of its immediate consequences and also as a model example of the impact news can have on audiences. John Simpson, the BBC’s World Affairs Editor, observed that ‘The famine in Ethiopia was probably the biggest news story BBC Television News broadcast in the 1980s, until the fall of the Berlin Wall’ (Simpson 368). It acted as an international siren telling the world about the plight of the famine victims in Ethiopia and spurred on the biggest humanitarian relief effort the world had ever seen. This paper gives a detailed and comprehensive narrative of the sequence of events which explain how the BBC report was made; the process of acquiring and transmitting the pictures. Using privileged access to the BBC Archives and extensive first-hand interviews it analyses the multiple drivers which made this such an important media moment in the 1980s. The significance of this particular news item arises both from its initial impact on audiences it was eventually broadcast on 425 different television channels across the world and seen by a potential audience of 470 million (Gill 91) but also later from its wider implications and its eventual institutional and social consequences. It had a substantial effect upon public opinion, the nature of charitable giving, the scale of operation of aid agencies and upon relations between aid agencies and the media in the coming years. In itself the story of a famine was far from a unique event. Famines occurred regularly in the twentieth century and indeed throughout history: many of them were more severe than the Ethiopian famine of 1983 85. Yet as a result of the reporting, the media response to the coverage of this disaster was on a completely different scale from anything that had gone before. It is therefore illuminating to investigate what made the coverage of this famine unique and thus to provide a case study of the extent to which our understanding and perception of disasters depends upon media coverage. The standard histories of broadcasting in the UK tend to focus on the institutional issues confronting news organizations. There is minimal emphasis upon the question of news judgements and how decisions are made on the treatment of particular stories. In the fifth volume of Asa Briggs history of the BBC, covering 1955 74 (Briggs 154) there is just a single entry for ‘news values’. Both the histories of the BBC and ITV devote only a limited space to foreign news coverage, which sometimes include accounts about how certain stories were covered. Much of that tends to be more concerned with the logistics

“Please send us your money”: The BBC’s evolving relationship with charitable causes, fundraising and humanitarian appeals

Fundraising for charitable causes has had a key place in the BBC’s schedule since the earliest days of the corporation and the establishment of the weekly radio appeal. As new forms of fundraising through high-profile media events developed in the 1980s, raising unprecedentedly large sums for charity, the BBC had to adjust the way it negotiated with good causes and audiences. These changes coincided with professionalization and rapid growth of the NGO sector, which sought to elicit funds from a wider public using innovative techniques and new ways of reaching out through the media. This article uses internal BBC documents to examine how, against this rapidly changing background, the organization navigated the rules behind broadcasting of appeals. This includes the way that the BBC interacted with the Disasters Emergency Committee that had been established in the 1960s to provide an interface between broadcasters and charities to oversee exceptional fundraising for international causes. In some cases, the BBC faced difficulties in reconciling its duty to educate audiences about charitable causes with the fundraising imperative which relied on TV extravaganzas. In other cases, the BBC confronted the question of whether it was hosting a global fundraising event or simply covering an event organized by others. These kinds of emerging challenges which arose out of new innovations in fundraising via broadcasting produced interesting debates that are still evolving both within the charitable sector and in the way it relates to the media. The BBC’s role within this ecology provides some illuminating insights about the issues connected with raising funds for humanitarian causes.

We have seen his type before

When the populist president took to Twitter, this former television journalist realised his style owed much to an unlikely source.

Reporting famine; changing nothing

The media coverage of famine in Africa has been inextricably intertwined with politics and the use of aid. In the 30 years since the BBC famously reported famine in Ethiopia little, if anything, has changed about the media’s over-simplification of the subject.

BBC Reporting in India in The 1970s and 1980s: Globally Connected Media Ahead of Its Time

We are accustomed to the complaint that western media depict the developing world in a stereotyped and inadequate manner. However this article, based on documents in the BBC Written Archives Centre, demonstrates that the way India was reported in the period 1970–1987 provides an exception to this characterisation. The material reveals that the there was surprisingly, an intense care and attention shown by broadcasters and managers to the coverage of India. The factors which underlay this include the growing confidence of the Indian diaspora population, a continuing interest by individual broadcasters in Indian affairs and the influence of an exceptional correspondent in Delhi throughout this period. Moreover the Indian government and indeed many Indian individuals maintained a critical interest, bordering sometimes on an obsession, in the portrayal of Indian affairs by the BBC. The networks between India and its UK diaspora enabled pressure to be exerted on the BBC which, as the records demonstrate, broadcasters took very seriously. This ability of Indians to ‘access’ their coverage (and then complain about it) is an early precursor to the pattern of foreign reporting which prevails today in an era of globally available media.