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Socrates Mbamalu Correspondent
Many Africans grew up with the BBC and CNN as their sources of information. In fact, these stations remain the main news sources for a lot of us.
Are there other options that might serve Africans better?
Many of us on the continent grew up listening to the BBC or watching CNN. Both stations were and still are among the main sources of information for Africans.
The Internet might have diffused that influence a bit, but the question is this: Are there any other options for Africans besides government stations, which are mostly pro-government?
Recently, Burundi’s President Pierre Nkurunziza revoked the BBC’s licence and extended the suspension of the Voice of America.
Both media stations were accused of portraying Burundi in a bad light. In addition, the BBC and CNN (among other Western media houses) have also been accused by Africans for their sweeping, biased headlines and for portraying the continent in a bad light.
This is understandable, given that most of the editors at such media house are not African.
Unfortunately, many African media houses seem to play the same ball as their Western counterparts.
While the revocation of the licence of the BBC and the extended suspension of the Voice of America should be condemned, the move does raise the question of how African media practitioners could fill that gap.
Covering 54 countries on one continent is a mammoth task, but it is hugely important to cover each story properly.
The task for a digital media platform such as This Is Africa is therefore great and can only be supported if fellow Africans contribute to it.
There is no lack of talent or manpower on the continent; what, then, is lacking? Willpower? Finance?
Would Africans contribute to a crowdfund to get their own media up and running?
The answers to these questions lie in the urgency with which we view the creation of our own media.
But also, for a continent that hardly consumes most of what it produces, will it consume its own stories? This Is Africa could be such a platform that, with an extra push from fellow Africans, could bring about that turnaround. But are Africans ready for this alternative?
The Western media is Africa’s number one enemy.
Its reportage on Africa is consistently biased, cementing stereotypes that Africa has a leadership crisis, and the continent is incapable of producing outstanding leaders.
Several African countries have been left in crisis after military interventions and biased reporting by the western media, which cements stereotypes that Africa has a leadership crisis and the continent incapable of producing outstanding leaders. If the western media has done anything for Africa, it has tarnished her image and causing more havoc for it.
The Western media is ultimately Africa’s first enemy and the biased reporting must be countered by Africans retelling their own stories.
Ultimately, Africans have learnt from the past and current mistakes and hopefully will not allow that pattern to continue.
By 2011, enough damage had been done to Gaddafi and Libya by the Western Press. Libya and Congo are in the same state of chaos, politically unstable and insecure.
In an article, how the West murdered Gaddafi twice it states, “Gaddafi was typically portrayed in Western media as a rambling, delusional dictator . . . Western nations accused Gaddafi of everything from blowing airplanes out of the sky to sexual assault and crimes against humanity. At the time of his death, he was wanted by the international Criminal Court . . . for crimes against humanity and stifling political opponents and ordering attack on civilians during uprising against his rule.”
Hugh Roberts, in his article who said Gaddafi had to go? wrote, “The overthrow of Gaddafi & Co was far from being a straightforward revolution against tyranny, but the West’s latest military intervention can’t be debunked as being simply about oil.
Presented by the National Transitional Council (NTC) and cheered on by the Western media as an integral part of the Arab Spring”.
“The Western media generally endorsed the rebels’ description of themselves as forward-looking liberal democrats, and dismissed Gaddafi’s exaggerated claim that al-Qaida was behind the revolt. But it has become impossible to ignore the fact that the rebellion has mobilised Islamists and acquired an Islamicist tinge,” Roberts says.
Analysts have written a lot about how the Western media continue — and will continue — to get coverage of African issues wrong because of their inability to confront this unspoken hierarchy of knowledge and the barriers it generates.
Under this scheme, The Rest is necessarily set up in opposition to The West in resulting coverage, and issues or situations are rarely, if ever, analysed for their intrinsic impact or worth.
They further suggest that events or situations are therefore analysed as what the West is not, and so articles are a process of either reifying or undermining pre-existing assumptions that are either set up in history books or in other literature about Africa in general or the phenomenon at hand.
So the coverage of the crisis in South Sudan is either used to reiterate or undermine beliefs about ethnicity and its role in conflicts in Africa: where “ethnicity” is a trope that can easily distinguish “Africa” from The West but is now a shorthand so overused and misused that it’s lost its explanatory value.
All this point, to the need to create our own platform, that will help the continent to tell its own story and fight negative stereotypes in the Western media. — This is Africa-The Herald.
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