Whether you are an African expatriate hoping to stay in touch
with what is going on in your home country, a potential tourist hoping
to do research on the best place to visit, a political student striving
to understand the development in Africa, or simply well-wisher dedicated
to unload of few bucks to chip in the aid for Africa, translating the
information you read into valuable knowledge is an important task
Like
any other continent, Africa offers a set of complex realities that can
offer conflicting outcome for the party interested; moreover, accessing
the information you need is not always evident between the information
you look for, and the information you find.
Below is a short
description of criteria to consider when reading or researching news on
Africa. While the list is not exclusive, and can certainly be extended, I
believe this initial guidepost may help. Feel free to add or consider
additional helpful points.
1. Consider the source of the information
Africa
is a very complex place, that combines many world and realities, the
gap between the rich and the poor creates in many places two different
societies whose world rarely collide. For that reason, news sources are
often tailored to one group or the other.
Understanding the source
of the information will help you assess the legitimacy of the
information you have. For example, is it a local or foreign news source?
Foreign sources often have greater access to political circles because
the government is more concerned about the way it is portrayed to the
outside world; however, foreign sources rarely give you the real pulse
of the nation. If the source is local, consider the accreditation that
is reflected by interviews or first hand accounts. In Africa, Official
news is often given unofficially, while official news is a front. That
means that those sources that have close access to the government are
more likely to give credible news, compare to unaccredited sources to
whom is given generic news. (More on it further down)
2. Try to capture the perspective of the information
In
Africa, the freedom of the press is not a sacred duty, and as mentioned
above, free and transparent news are not evident. As a result, news
often reflects the perspective of the source. The information you will
get is based on the perception of the source. In the West, Africa is
widely primarily viewed as a continent ravaged by war and diseases,
where impoverished people and government are struggling very hard to
survive, and thus their lives and activities are geared toward Help and
how the global community can help them. As a result, most African news
coming from the West will treat topics such as aid, sanction, peace and
war, and oil discovery. Human rights, rigged election and corruption are
other subjects often treated; in other words, Western media tend to
chronicle Africa's efforts to "join" or emulate them.
When it
comes to local media and news sources, the dilemma is different. Elite
and well positioned news sources depicts the political life of the
country, meaning that their news are mostly geared toward accounts of
big political activities, such as Presidential travels and visits,
opposition complaints, foreign investment, dignitaries visits, Diaspora
news and international events in which the government participate. In
short, those news sources attempts to present information from the
perception of Africa to the rest of the world.
Finally, local
media perception is often directed at the local population, therefore
offers information on issue that matters to locals; energy and gas
issues, employment, government promises kept or not, education,
political freedom, cultural and social safeguard, etc...
3. Acknowledge the Biases
In
the U.S, it is often assumed that CNN is Pro-democrats, and Fox News is
a Republican arm, regardless if true or not, that perception is very
present in Africa as well; not in form of Republican or democrats of
course, but they still play a short role.
From the day of
colonization, Western Nations had strategic interests in Africa, and
Political propaganda has insured that many Westerners view some African
countries internal policies as beneficial or threatening to their way of
life.
