REUTERS
Bulle Hussein, 34, father of six, whose family is displaced from Kamor Village, fetches water from a tank provided by the Red Cross Society at a camp in Garissa, 390km (242 miles) north-east of Nairobi, on November 22. Pictures like this one are standard fare from international wire services.

John Cornwell, Contributor

Press obsessions with starvation and corruption in Africa are masking more positive images of the continent, according to development workers, and this diet of 'bad news' is putting off outside investors and stunting local self-confidence.

City University, London, was the scene recently of a startling confrontation over the depiction of African poverty in the British media. Catholic diocesan development workers and partners of the Catholic Agency for Overseas Development (CAFOD) from north Kenya met with a wide range of academic and institutional development professionals to discuss the realities of poverty in a region long stricken by drought and famine.

Tempers flared during a session on the press, when Kenyan students, supported by Cambridge development academics, lambasted two senior British journalists. The British media, they charged, were guilty of patronising the poor of their continent. One student spoke of her shame when seeing clichéd pictures of starving African children; another objected to the depiction of Africa as a 'slum'. The journalists, John Vidal, environment editor of The Guardian, and Michael Holman, formerly Africa desk editor of the Financial Times, vehemently defended their papers' coverage, arguing that Africa's problems needed to be reported frankly along with the underlying causes.

The nub of the argument, as presented by critics of the Western media, has long been familiar: our media allegedly report only the calamities of Africa because this is what sells newspapers and gets space. The tendency, moreover, is given further impetus, goes the charge, by charities and aid agencies in their publicity campaigns to raise consciousness and funds.

However, a growing constituency, including development academics, Britain's Department for International Development (DfID), African governments and African nationals studying development in Britain, insists that the media are constantly failing to report those positive stories that would attract investment and endow Africa with a sense of growing success and self-confidence in the eyes of the world. Journalists, not surprisingly, respond that they are not in the business of propaganda.

Need for public understanding

What gives this row significance, at a time when development is inseparable from complex environmental considerations, is the urgent need for public understanding of the causes of poverty and underdevelopment in Africa. The impact of such understanding - on donors, government decision-makers, charities, economists and NGOs of various kinds - is crucial. Yet, the views of the experts - on issues such as water, agriculture, health and climate change - are varied, sometimes contradictory, putting an onus on the media not only to report but to discriminate between contrasting conclusions. An example of this is Bjorn Lomborg's objection, in The Wall Street Journal last week, that the economics in Sir Nicholas Stern's 700-page report on climate change is 'rubbish'.

"Despite using many good references," writes Mr. Lomborg, "the Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change is selective and its conclusion flawed. Its fear-mongering arguments have been sensationalised, which is ultimately only likely to make the world worse off." Mr. Lomborg achieved widespread notoriety in 2000 on the English publication of his book, The Skeptical Environmentalist. But who is right? Mr. Lomborg or Sir Nicholas Stern? And how does the non-specialist reader judge between the two without guidance from an independent expert source?

Confrontations over Africa coverage and charges of 'development pornography' last erupted in the late 1970s when the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation - or UNESCO - joined forces with the Soviet Union and many African countries in denouncing the Western media. UNESCO accused Western 'media managers' of treating information as a commodity, and of exercising a new form of damaging information colonialism. The free-enterprise media, moreover, were inherently prone to trivialisation and distortion. UNESCO called for a New Information Order, comparable to a New Economic Order, advocating that journalists should carry passports that could be withdrawn if they wrote inaccurate reports of developing countries.

The world moved on, following the fall of the Berlin Wall. There is a New Economic Order and it is called globalisation; and there is indeed a New Information Order which is the IT revolution. China and India are setting the pace of globalisation; but while Africa is hardly a beneficiary of globalisation (in fact, it is worse off as a whole now than it was 20 years ago), the reasons for its plight remain poorly understood. Hence the importance of the media in promoting public awareness and understanding of development, especially in relation to Africa.

While the BBC and the Financial Times maintain extensive coverage of Africa, others appear to have lost interest. The Guardian has only one correspondent, in Johannesburg; The Sunday Times has only one correspondent, in Cape Town. Papers send journalists out on an ad hoc basis to trouble spots, and their journeys are often funded (including air fares) by charities.

A more recent development is the coverage of celebrity appearances in hot spots, such as George Clooney's recent trip to the Sudan, or Madonna's adoption of a baby in Malawi. Papers are also increasingly engaged in 'sponsorship' exercises. An example of this, according to John Vidal, was Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger's recent suggestion that the paper should adopt and sponsor a "slum". This does not appear to be a form of newspaper self-promotion, but it does overlook the wisdom of treating a community differently from the context of its local politics, economics and culture.

The City University conference highlighted two stories, moreover, that demonstrate classic underlying tensions in public understanding of development. John Vidal cited a recent story he wrote about the abuse of water by flower companies in Kenya. "Mega operations on the slopes of Mount Kenya," he said, "are nicking water from villages and getting away with it ... this is at the root of so many Africa stories: the conflict over resources ... the reality is that the river stops 100 miles off where it used to be, as a direct result of abuse by Western companies."

Mr. Vidal's story, however, was challenged by an NGO worker who argued that "the fresh flower, fresh fruit industry in Kenya and other parts of Africa has been a vital factor in economic reconstruction of the country ... we should be concerned about corporate abuses, but it is easy to overlook how important is the economic contribution to economic growth overall."

Mr. Vidal, however, was having none of it. "I think it is an outrage," he riposted, "and if anyone is trying to defend these people then I think that's an outrage."

A telling example from the opposite direction involves mounting concern over the imminent launch of a new Hollywood movie, The Blood Diamond, starring Leonardo di Caprio. The story is set in Sierra Leone during the decade-long civil war, and depicts the role of diamond smuggling as a cause of horrifying conflict. Following several years of aid and mediation, not least by the DfID, the conflict is now at an end, and there are fears that the film (actually made in Mozambique) will set Sierra Leone back four or five years in its attempts to attract investors and tourism.

Area for discussion

The clashes, and frank misunderstandings, which pervaded the discussion of public understanding of development at the City University meeting, reveal ample scope for wide-ranging debate. A fruitful area for discussion, and future action, must surely involve the exploitation of the internet in public information about developing countries. While the British newspapers are less influential, and active, in covering Africa, a huge and varied circuit of information is available on the web (including the sites of local papers such as The Standard and The Nation in Nairobi), with ample connectedness through interactive sites.

As Dr. Shailah Fennell, director of development studies at Cambridge University, reminded the conference: "Development and its public understanding is a process that links different parts of the world. The drivers of poverty in the U.K. are not entirely different from the drivers of poverty in Africa and elsewhere. Public understanding is not just how we report Africa in the U.K., but how we allow the voice of Africa to come through us, and to China and everywhere else." May the debate commence.

John Cornwell is director of the Science and Human Dimension Project, Jesus College, Cambridge. The article was first published in 'The Tablet' ,the weekly newspaper of British Roman Catholics. Web address : www.the tablet.co.uk