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“Today” in Africa

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 August 2021

Extract

Complaints about Africa’s media image have been voiced for years, and for long little seemed to change. Civil wars, famine, squalor and primitivity have continued to dominate the headlines and to paint a grim image of mankind’s ancestral home. The recent media fixation on Somalia is but one in a series of this one-dimensional coverage. In the early 1960s, the anarchy in Katanga (Zaire) dominated the news and defined Africa. In the late 1960s, it was the Nigerian civil war and the consequent misery in “Biafra.” In the 1970s, the real and conjured eccentricities of Uganda’s Idi Amin became the African news. Political conflict in Zimbabwe and South Africa dominated much of the 1980s, until the starvation of Ethiopians eclipsed everything else. Recently, the grim images were of Somalia. While these events warranted the press attention they received, their coverage to the near exclusion of non-crisis modem African life has left a severe knowledge gap and perpetuated a historical image problem.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © African Studies Association 1994

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Footnotes

*

Minabere Ibelema, Ph.D., teaches journalism at Eastern Illinois University in Charleston, Illinois.

**

Ebere Onwudiwe, Ph.D., is associate professor of political science and director of the Center for African Studies at Central State University in Wilberforce, Ohio.

References

Notes

1. See, for instance, Richstad, Jim and Anderson, Michael H. (eds.), Crisis in International News, New York, Columbia University Press, 1981.Google Scholar

2. For a comprehensive articulation of the issues, see Masmoudi, M., “The New World Information Order,” Journal of Communication, v. 29, n. 2, 1979, pp. 172185.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

3. The ratings figures were obtained from NBC’s research department in New York.

4. Main Street America and the Third World, John, Cabin, MD: Seven Locks Press, 1986.Google Scholar

5. Unger, Arthur, “Bryant Gumbel: No More Mr. Humble,” Television Quarterly, v. 26, n. 2, 1992, p. 15.Google Scholar

6. See, for instance, “War on bugs is no small mission for U.S. Marines,” Chicago Tribune, Jan. 21, 1993, Sec. 1, p. 5.

7. Chicago Tribune, Dec. 7, 1992, Sec. 1, p. 1.