What’s really wrong with media coverage of Africa? What representations of the 1984-5 Ethiopian Famine can still teach us.

Debate about the representation of development and of the Global South in the Western media has reached a high water mark in recent months, with the publication of a number of influential books.

Earlier this year Nandita Dogra published Representations of Global Poverty which drew attention to the increasingly significant role of NGOs as mediating institutions. A few months later, Linge Manyozo published Media, Communication and Development which attempted to integrate debates about media representations of development into a broader account of the role of media in development more generally.

The most high profile recent contribution is Lilie Chouliaraki’s The Ironic Spectator which was published in the last few days and follows on from her highly acclaimed, Spectatorship of Suffering. In The Ironic Spectator she argues that mediated solidarity is now characterised by a ‘narcissistic disposition of voyeuristic altruism’, or a focus on the self, rather than the ‘other’. Shani Orgad’s book on Media Representation and the Global Imagination, launched at the same time, considers, amongst other things, the value of media narratives of the Global South which refuse completeness, closure and clear causality and instead accept ambivalence, contradiction and ‘non-endings’.

Finally, David Lewis’s forthcoming edited volume on Popular Representations of Development draws attention to the significance of more popular understandings of development in shaping agendas and priorities, such as in literature, cinema and even reality-television.

It is in this context of a plethora of new theoretical and empirical work that Professor Suzanne Franks of City University opened the ‘media and development’ speaker series at UEA on the topic of ‘the de-politicisation of media coverage of famine’. Drawing on some of the material from her own forthcoming book; Reporting Disasters, Franks situated these current debates in a historical perspective – reminding us in particular of the central failings of media reporting of the Ethiopian Famine in 1984-5. It is this ‘transformational moment’ in the Western representation of the Global South that most contemporary literature takes as its starting point. For Franks the central issue was the way in which this famine was de-politicised. The news media at the time failed to report on the political causes of the famine or to report critically on the nature of the humanitarian response. This matters because it structures the nature of both short term responses (in the form of air drops as opposed to sustainable, long term development) and long term responses (in the form of the apparent ‘compassion fatigue’ of Western publics).

As debates about media representations of development broaden to consider questions of ‘irony’ and cosmopolitanism and to focus on an increasing number of texts and actors, the reporting of the 1984-5 Ethiopian Famine still has much to teach us. Primarily, it provides us with a stark reminder of what’s really wrong with media coverage of Africa.

More details about the media and development speaker series .

Image:
1985 Pulitzer Prize, Feature Photography, Stan Grossfeld, The Boston Globe