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News Xchange 2002: Session Transcripts
11 october 2002
Session 5:
Can Broadcasters Find a Way to Make the World Care about Africa?
Does the audience care about the developing world? Do the viewers understand the stories we tell them about Africa - or could we do more to engage them? Will citizens ever care if broadcasters don't? Or is serious programming being produced and ignored? What roadblocks do African journalists have in getting their story to the west? What roadblocks are set up internally by African stations themselves?
We'll search for answers and also introduce brand new relevant research. BBC News showed reports by its top correspondents to focus groups around Britain and filmed their reactions. They then held a workshop where the reporters met their audience face to face. The research was sponsored by the UK Department for International Development with the aim of finding better ways of engaging the viewer. Fiona Anderson, who trains reporters for BBC News, put together what the audience told the BBC in a video which will be shown for the first time at this session - see what the BBC learned and compare it to your experiences.
Chair: Azeb Wolde-Giorghis, Correspondent, CBC/SRC, UK, formerly based in Ivory Coast
Producer: Peter Verlinden, VRT
Confirmed Participants:
• Fiona Anderson, Assistant Editor, Training & Development, BBC Newsgathering, UK
• Salim Amin, Managing Director, Camerapix, Kenya
• Gilbert Bawara, Executive Assistant to the Special Representative of the UN in the Democratic Republic of Congo
• Peter Verlinden, Foreign Editor, VRT, Belgium
TRANSCRIPT:
Azeb Wolde-Giorghis (AWG): Before we start the debate I'd like to make a few remarks. For many people in Europe or America, Africa is either burning, dying, diseased or starving. This is the kind of picture we always see. Not only do we see a very limited view, but we are also shaping attitudes and stereotyping of the continent.
The problem with the news in Africa is the way we cover it. It's the same way we did ten, twenty, thirty years ago. The way the Biafra famine was covered was no different to the way the current famine of Africa is covered. It's always the same story, the same recipe, a two minute story on the ten o'clock news, first we start with a very dramatic picture of Africa, usually we are talking about starvation or war and when we are talking about Africa it has to be really dramatic and then we usually go to an aid worker who comes from Denmark or Norway or Sweden and they explain the problem of the country.
Then we see the poor African man - usually a victim saying he's lost his wife, his children, his house - and then we turn to the reporter, a stand up usually with an amazing background of refugees and people starving, pointing at them saying these are the lucky ones, but they face an uncertain future if the international community does not respond soon. We see that kind of coverage year after year after year and no wonder the viewers are fed up. They see people starving, they see people dying, they've seen people mutilating each other and they are saying no more. Every time they see news from Africa, they just switch off.
 So the problem with Africa is the way we cover it. When we cover a tragedy in Africa it's always about numbers Ð one thousand people died in Senegal in a ferry disaster, 250 people died in the Ivory Coast during the recent crisis. People don't have a name, an identity, a life, they are usually just numbers.
By contrast, in Europe, we do tell a story. In America we tell stories as well. September 11th, we know the names of the victims, we know that the man who was on the 89th floor of one of the towers was a great dad and we even know the names of his children. Of course, I don't just want to paint a picture of the way we cover it, we have seen efforts by some networks Inside Africa by CNN or France 2 recently opened a bureau in Africa, Ivory Coast and my experience with CBC in Canada has been very good because my Editor wanted to see other stories, not just wars and tragedies.
We would like to see more positive stories about Africa. We never cover peace! The war ended in Angola Ð thirty years of war but that is not going to be the leading news. Twenty thousand Rwandan soldiers left the Congo recently but that is not going to be in the news and on the Ivory Coast, since the ex-pats have gone, nobody really talks about Ivory Coast anymore. There are also business successes in Africa like in Botswana but we very rarely hear about it. I don't want to be simplistic or na•ve, I know that we all here depend on the viewing figures in a very competitive schedule. If people aren't watching the news then there is no point to it but we need to rethink the way we cover Africa. We need to surprise the viewer rather than shock them. We need to grasp their attention because Africa is a goldmine of news stories.
For example did you know that the first heart transplant was made in Africa? Did you know that a village in Mali one of the poorest countries in the world raised $100 to send to a village in Quebec during the ice storms in 1997? They said we are always at the receiving end so it would be nice to help. Did you know that Ethiopia has the potential to export food, not only to the horn of Africa but to the whole of the Middle East? And in Ghana, some people are buried in a bottle of coke or in a pineapple. I did that story and I am still receiving a lot of letters. It was about a carpenter who was shaping coffins either in planes or pineapples and people were interested in this story. They were interested in the carpenter, what kind of man he was and the fact that he was from Ghana in Africa was irrelevant. So we need to rethink the way we cover Africa. We have to go back to the fundamentals of story telling. We have to be rigorous. Journalism is a great profession and we need to be rigorous when we are covering Africa.
Africa is a huge continent as you know with very diverse cultures and people. People would be interested if we made an effort. I am going to Peter Verlinden who is the Foreign Editor at VRT Belgium. Peter, in your view you were saying that the Congo war was not very well covered by Western news organisations.
Peter Verlinden (PV): Yes I would like to go through with you the whole of the Congo war from 1996 to today and indicate at some point why we didn't cover it in my view in a sufficient way. I think we often forget that in the Congo there were one million to maybe two and a half to three million deaths in six years because of this war and I will go through this chronology together with Gilbert Bawara who is the man who was present on the spot not from a journalistic point of view at first but as a human rights investigator and later now with the United Nations in the Congo. And is it coincidence - I don't think there are coincidences in life - that just yesterday appeared this book co-published by Medicins Sans Frontiers (MSF). The book is entitled Silence en Morte which in English is Silence We Are Dying and I introduce my story to you.
AWG: Thank you Peter. Just to get a feeling of the audience I am just going to ask you a few questions. How many of you here have a bureau or network in Africa? About 10 I can see. How many of you have more than one bureau Ð I can see one. Yes if you could just introduce yourself.
 Sarah Ward-Lilley (SAL) Sarah Ward-Lilley from BBC News Gathering.
AWG: How many bureaux do you have in Africa?
SAL: We have a hub bureau in Johannesburg and another large bureau in Lagos and Nairobi and then we have a network of stringers covering the rest of the African continent.
AWG: OK so how often would you say your correspondent gets on air.
SAL: I think it varies because obviously the BBC has a huge output so the correspondents themselves are very busy broadcasting on a mixture of world service radio, BBC world but also on the domestic outlets so it is very difficult to quantify how often but all the correspondents we have covered the Ivory Coast conflict on national radio and television.
AWG: Peter, one of the problems that you were raising also is the fact that Congo when it was covered was not always well covered because reporters didn't really know the story. Peter has been covering the great lakes region now for nearly ten years. Could you tell us a bit about it?
PV: Well I'd like to start to make this point that Congo is something well covered by introducing a small piece of feed. I took some feeds that we have received at the VRT and also from APTN and Reuters. Let's start on 1st November 1996 Ð maybe you will remember that at that time you had the refugee camps in the east Congo and at that time these camps were attacked by the Rwandese army (runs video feed). The shots we got indicated that these were Hutu militia dancing on the border of Rwanda and the Congo. I would like to make one first point. I think that this problem with information and there is also a big problem with cultural differences with understanding what is happening, nobody can tell who these people are exactly at this moment. It's a spectacular image, it's funny so it went all over the world, but it had nothing to do with the point that at that same moment there were hundreds and hundreds of people who were killed in the camps because at that moment the journalists could not enter into the refugee camps which were attacked by the Rwandese army in this case.
Let's stay in the same moment one day before Ð the Rwandese Zaire border and we got these images from the 31st October 1996.
(runs video footage)
PV: In my view, maybe I'm a little bit severe, but these are misleading images. These are the only images that we got from the Rwandan-Congolese border at this time, but I have to put it in context because at that same moment more than 1 million people were attacked by military people, you had refugees entering back into Rwanda and if you use these images, and you are obliged as an editor to use these images because they are the only ones you can get at that moment. If you use these images, you are getting an image as if the return of these Rwandese refugees was passing in a completely different way, peaceful way. There is even information and comment saying that these people are happy to return.
What we learned only a few weeks later or few months later and at that time it is obviously no longer in the news, but at that same moment there were more than 200,000 people who were leaving to the other side and were starving. Of course there are a lot of reasons Ð I don't want to blame the cameramen that made these images Ð the public don't know the reasons why you only get these images like security, military reasons.
 Margaret Ward (MW), RTE, Ireland: I was a reporter at the time that the gentlemen were referring and I think that the reporters that were there certainly RTE did cover these issues that they are referring to in the sense that in our live coverage or radio coverage we tried to explain that there was all these people going in the other direction and the Rwandan manipulation of the situation and I don't think there was a lot you could do in terms of security and the access to these people on the other side. We did come across bodies, we did see people that were killed in the camps and we did show that but we weren't aware of the vast scale of it at the time it was happening. I think the vast difficulty was that after three or four days of the refugees coming across the border, when we had all done the story, there was a huge pull out. Everybody left more or less on the same day. The story was over, we were all leaving Africa, those of us who weren't permanent correspondents and that is the difficulty with Africa. I don't think the journalists on the ground didn't know what was happening. I think the difficulty is that there is not the commitment to stay and follow the story up subsequently and while you may be in contact with aid agencies later who tell you what's going on, we tend not to go back and that is the biggest problem, we don't go back and revisit these stories.
AWG: No follow-ups. I remember because I was also there that there was a difficulty to access those regions. The fact that we don't have access, does that mean that we are not covering the news and that we are only covering the regions we have access to?
MW: This doesn't only happen in the situation in Africa but the same kinds of things were happening in Kosovo, but at least in a place like Kosovo or in other instances people stick with the story and they go and find out later and they verify what has happened whereas in a story like Goma that just didn't seem to happen, people didn't stick around to do any investigating or maybe to try and get in later when it was easy to do so.
PV: I completely agree with what you are saying Ð we also had a correspondent on the spot at the same moment and I recognise what you are saying and in fact I am picking up some images now because in twenty minutes you cannot show it all and three or four days later we received images from the empty camps I knew very well and I had the same problem I was editing in Brussels at the same moment. First I was in Kinshasa and then when I came back to Brussels I was helping to work on this material and the whole question was, was that our Editors were no longer interested in the story because the story was over. Also I agree completely with what you are saying. Maybe just to complete this, let's look at the next 45 seconds that I have prepared and then it completes this story about the refugees and maybe later we can go to another one. It is something that we did not receive from the agencies, but that we received from ECHO which is the humanitarian aid organisation of the European Union and together with the stuff from the European Commission in Brussels I made this edit
(runs video footage).
PV: This is three months later and my impression is that it was late if not too late and I just wanted to add some small elements Ð that you also have these organisational, technical and logistical problems. Of course, I tried to get to the spot but the only way you could get there was if you were going with ECHO and so it was impossible to reach the spot so I know that there were either also elements playing and this was three months later and there were probably tens of thousands of dead people in the bush of the Congo.
AWG: I think we have somebody here who would like to react to that.
Nik Gowing (NG), BBC, UK: I happened to get involved in writing a very long report about this coincidentally for Echo and a big conference in London called Dispatches from disaster zones because I have a particular interest in the role of conflict and information in war and I think you have to put it in perspective which is much broader than this about the level of propaganda which was being very carefully hatched not only by Vice President Kugame at the time who has admitted very openly to me when I was putting together with study, but also the Americans and the way the Americans were briefing which was misleading a lot of journalists knowingly. They were briefing against a multi-national force.
I talked to the Canadian Commander who was trying to get a force together and he said his job was made impossible Ð any idea that politicians were in any way going to get involved with what was happening across the border was dead in the water especially at the Stuttgart conference which took place and then finally you have the massive differences of opinion between the NGOs and that caused enormous problems for journalists on the ground trying to work out what the accuracy was because you had NGOs who were using figures for their own reasons for their logistics for their planning and for their own political purposes and therefore I think the issue and the whole matrix of this is far broader than how well we did as journalists and one final thought Ð when you compare what happened in Goma then to what happened in the volcano earlier this year and see the speed with which we were able to get satellite dishes in, which we couldn't do in 1996 and 1997, I think the whole parameter of the way we work in Africa is significantly different now to what it was six years ago.
PV: I completely agree with your point and I am happy that you are putting it in this broad a context and I did not yet arrive at this point, but it was going to come at the end of my explanation. I think that these problems are much stronger in Africa than when you have similar situations in Europe for example, where logistical problems, technical problems are less important. In Africa it is almost impossible to go your own way, only if you have a lot of money and if you have very good protection. I remember very well myself I tried to go through Eastern Congo several times and I was prevented from going to Kinshasa and when I tried to explain the regime in Kinshasa that in fact it was even in their interest because I was covering on the spot what was happening and I agree completely with what you were saying about the manipulation and the views of the NGOs. I agree completely.
AWG: Somebody else here who would like to react.
 Milica Pesic (MP), Media Diversity Institute, UK: I want to pick up where Nik Gowing stopped. Politicians Ð I remember because I originate from this area, I am from Serbia. In communism, President Tito was very close friends with Prince Haile Selassie so we knew very much about Ethiopia. Then because of Lemunda and what he did in Congo and because Yugoslavia supported it, again we knew so much but this is when we talk about non-democratic societies Ð what do you do with politicians coming from democratic societies and really not going there with empty hands and coming back with empty hands. My question is actually to Azeb Ð how much has the fact that you are actually joined to such a big television station and you originate from Africa changed the view of your television station towards Africa and what is happening there. When you bring someone from ethnic minorities to your newsroom, certainly other colleagues see that region in a different way from what that person brings to the newsroom.
AWG: Well I hope that people see Africa differently after they have viewed my reports. When I cover a tragedy, either a famine or a war I think there are different ways of covering it. We can try to find a doctor who is from the country, either an Ivorian or a Congolese expert, it doesn't have to be somebody who comes from Europe or America. I think in that sense people don't only see African people as victims but they also get a sense of the problem of the country. I also think that for example, Ethiopia, every eight to ten years I am sure some of you have covered the famine there. We return to Ethiopia and we cover the famine and we say the same things. We never ask ourselves the question Ð why is there a famine every eight years and how can this country which has got great potential which can export food to the Middle East and the whole of Africa Ð how can it always have this kind of problem. I think we have to change the way we cover things. We have to be rigorous journalists in Africa Ð somebody was telling me while I was in London that if you cover the funeral of the Queen Mother, then everybody is watching you and if you make a single mistake, you get the wrong castle, you get a lot of phone calls and people react Ð when it comes to Africa, nobody really knows, nobody really checks, therefore journalists can pretty much say whatever they want. And I think we have to change that kind of attitude to give a more realistic picture of the continent.
PV: I'd like to go to the next video clip. I prepared a small feed from the 17 May 1997 which is the moment when the rebels of Laurent Kabila entered Kinshasa. The other things that have been set up till now were no longer applicable because at that moment we were with 10s of crews in Kinshasa and they were more or less within the liberty of movement and we could do our work and this was the result.
(runs video footage)
PV: What we saw there was the liberation of Kinshasa. We saw a lot of people that were happy that Kabila had arrived but what we did not see was that less than 200 kilometres there had been very hard battles with a lot of deaths and we couldn't reach those spots so there was another element that I want to introduce now which is a language problem. At that moment I remember very well that I was in Kinshasa during many weeks and I met so many crews from all over the world with 90% of them not speaking one word of French. Of course I can very well understand that people going and working in Kinshasa don't speak the local language but if you don't speak French I just don't understand how you can work. I want to raise that point about language that encountered so many times.
Salim Amin (SA): You're absolutely right we have to cover the content ourselves, the problem is that even when we did cover it nobody wants the pictures that's the biggest problem we face we get a great story it may not be bang bang I hated doing that video in the beginning because that's not the type of video or imagine that we are trying to portray of the continent either but the reason African broadcasters don't cover each other well is one they don't have the experience and they don't have the knowledge and the know-how and the training and secondly when they try and sell their material or pass it on to internal broadcasters they don't get any response they always say 'oh we need to send our own people in because you guys aren't good enough Africans can't shoot or edit. We need our own people there, we need our own correspondents, our own editors. Our people believe our correspondents, not what you people are saying. So what do you do even if you have the access, the knowledge there is no substitute for local knowledge no matter how long a foreign correspondent spends in the country they cannot ever have as much background information as a local journalist.
I am going to show a video now which films something that we have heard was very important to do it is a world exclusive nobody had ever covered the Liberian rebels the rebel army that are fighting President Charles Taylor and trying to get him out of power. There had never been any pictures. We managed to get access with the only organisation that has access and probably will ever have access should they take Monrovia. It was a vastly expensive story to do and stupidly, we did it without a client simply because we felt we had to do the story so we didn't have a time to resell it and frankly there has been no interest. It's not a story we like doing because it is a lot of bang bang the producer who worked on this put his life on the line numerous times during the month that he spent there in the field and yet you can't even give it away basically almost but it is a story that we felt had to be told and we were the only people on the ground that could tell it.
(runs video footage)
AWG: Seline you were saying that you had tremendous difficulty getting this film.
SA: We need to put this in context the whole documentary that goes into the background to the war and the famine and you have regional instability with Codevwa the largest single peace keeping force in history in Sierra Leone next door who are doing nothing about this conflict the rebels are being backed by the US government there is a lot of background to this and it's a story that nobody is telling but when we try and do it its seen as not worth viewing.
AWG: I think we have some reaction from the audience.
My name's Rodney Pinder formally of Reuters (RP): Terrific piece of film Salim but surely argues against the very point you are trying to make its more killings its more death its more famine and stabbing and tribal atrocities out of Africa we've seen it is been done and precisely as you said earlier the world has gone tired of it because there are other conflicts Afghanistan, Iraq, Looming so its not really surprising that not a very new story out of Africa doesn't get any exposure. I would be more interested in seeing the panel address why are the stories from Africa are not shown on a routine basis. We have the same problem with Reuters we have a programme called Africa Journal which was created to tell development type not a good news programme exactly but to look at aspects of Africa that are not commonly recognised. We cannot sell it outside Africa despite strenuous efforts the world isn't interested. Why is that? I think it might well get back to the point our colleague from France was making earlier but there is no support effort if you like from a network of African stations and broadcasters who support something like this with routine reporting of their own which gives you a foundation from which to project this that foundation just isn't there.
SA: One of the points is exactly that I said right at the beginning we don't like doing stories like this we have been trying for the last three years to do development stories success stories business successes entertainment, fashion all sorts of things arts and culture we can't make a living nobody is interesting. I don't know why they are not interested having travelled all over the world. I have never met anybody who isn't interested in where I come from what the continent is like what it is all about does it actually boil down to news editors making decision about what the public wants to see about whether they want to see that side of Africa. In which case we are talking about a handful of people that make decisions for their audience.
Unidentified Indian Participant: I would say that there is a very serious fatigue factor about pictures that come in from Africa even in Asia people to tend to turn off the TV and say 'oh no, Africa, not again'. Either these are failing states, I mean let's see a once successful country like Rhodesia it's not Mugabe. Zimbabwe today lies in shambles. I think somewhere in the continent one of the countries has to make a successful go of it and then the rest of the world would sit up and take notice. International interest would always be limited because disaster is the same the world over. Why is there so much interest in Afghanistan because of disaster I think there is a fatigue factor.
AWG: Let's go to our last but not least panellist Fiona Anderson, Assistant Editor Training and Development BBC news gathering.
Fiona Anderson (FA): When we set out on an audience research project it was really tackling these issues that Salim has been raising the issue of fatigue are people sick of watching the sort of coverage that we saw in the first clips and yes they told us that they were and there is a lot of lessons from our audience about how we can change our storytelling and give them a more realistic and profound impression of Africa. Its not about being positive about a story that is negative, but it's finding different ways of telling it and I don't think we are going to have time to show you the whole video because we are running short of time. We didn't just do focus groups we had nine focus groups across Britain but afterwards we put the research together and presented it to a group of journalists whose pieces had been shown to the focus groups and some of the programme editors and it was the lessons that those individuals took from what the audience told them but they are now applying in their work that I think was the most valuable to us. I am just going to ask Judy Connor who I have been working with who is a media consultant for the department for International Development she will tell you about the background to the research.
Judy Connor (JC): The video that we are going to watch and I hope we can see most of it, it actually describes the study that BBC news carries out which is about to be published to the video saves you reading it but it will be available on the website and I think it really contributes quite an optimistic note to this rather bleak picture that we've had painted today just a very brief background because we are short of time. In the UK this was carried out particularly with British audiences in mind we have the situation where persistent public surveys have told us and continue to tell us that the vast majority of the public get their information about international affairs from the television still its still a prime medium beyond the internet and other media to get information about the world and yet it's also very well documented that across the board across all the channels output about the developing countries is on the decline so we have these huge mismatch of public expectation from the TV and also what they are getting so it was against this background that the British Department for International development has commissioned a series of research reports into this whole area and the previous report a couple of years in the TV news area identified that there really was quite a strong problem of audience comprehension which is getting back to the audience issue that we were discussing this morning there was a huge blocking point of the viewers that we spoke to in our research simply didn't understand what they were being told and so this recently completed study carried out by BBC news it has a couple of very unique points about it.
One is that it is very audience centred and after our interesting discussions this morning about the audience it is interesting to see that the about of time that was spent in a lot of people's living rooms watching some of this output with them and seeing their perceptions. It struck me very much this morning where every time we saw viewers or so called ordinary people interviewed on the screen it struck me that there was a huge cultural gap between the type of people who were speaking from their homes about their ordinary interests and us here the middle class media professionals who make the decisions about the programming that they watch and what was very special in this project was that we totally focused on the audience perception what they want to see what do they engage with and also this unique collaboration that Fiona mentioned between journalists working with the audience together in workshops to find out how to make stories better told so I think the reason that there is a cause for optimism is that on the one hand you see a news organisation that's actually doing something constructive about these issues and also its quite clear that the issue is not, there is no problem about viewer interest in Africa.
Viewers in Africa really do care about Africa and the developing world and they just want the stories to be told a told better and that's what we will see on the video now.
FA: I think the key point with this is that the audience did want to know across the focus groups I spent a lot of time with them and they really did want to know what was happening in Africa they wanted a more balanced picture, they wanted to know what people were doing to them for themselves, they wanted to know how they could help they were really very positive particularly the young ones you saw taking part in that parallel workshop there they were absolutely hungry for information ...........
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