For decades, concerned Africans have complained about the biased reporting of Africa by the world media. Recently, the British weekly, The Economist, even had the courage to call Africa “the hopeless continent” in its main front-cover headline. Strangely, African journalists have ourselves been micmicking the same language, style, choice of stories and words for years without as much as a thought given to the dynamics driving the Western media. This month, we at New African have devoted 18 pages to examine these important media issues, using the British media (which have a huge influence on the behaviour of the world media) as our main subject of scrutiny.

“You cannot hope to bribe or twist, thank God, the British journalist. But, seeing what the man will do unbribed, there is no occasion to” — Wolfe’s Law of Journalism. The Wolfe’s Law of Journalism may be old, but it is still a correct description of British (and by extension, Western) journalism today. None of them needs a bribe to call Africa “the hopeless continent”, because the system has an in-built mechanism that makes the writing of such stories and headlines perfectly possible. Last year, George Alagiah, the BBC African correspondent who was ending his tour of duty, wrote a piece in The Guardian (London) urging his Western colleagues to change the way they report Africa. Alagiah is of Asian-origin and spent part of his childhood in Africa. His piece deserves to be quoted here extensively: “For most people who get their view of the world from TV,” he wrote, “Africa is a faraway place where good people go hungry, bad people run government, and chaos and anarchy are the norm. “My job is to give a fuller picture. [But] I have a gnawing regret that, as a foreign correspondent, I have done Africa a disservice, too often showing the continent at its worst and too rarely showing it in full flower. “There is an awful lot of historical baggage to cut through when reporting Africa: the 20th century view of the continent is, even now, infected with the prevailing wisdom of the 19th century. “Take this description of an African from a speech given by the explorer John Hanning Speke in the 1860s: ‘As his father did, so does he. He works his wife, sells his children, enslaves all he can lay his hands upon and unless fighting for the lands of others, contents himself with drinking, singing, and dancing like a baboon, to drive dull care away’. “It’s an ugly thought but I would bet one of my new suits that there are many out there for whom those words still have resonance... “I take this personally because I spent part of my childhood in Africa. After Britain, Africa is probably the place I feel most at home. I know it to be a place of great passion and variety. Above all, it is a place where the outsider is forever welcome. In the hardest of times and in the most desolate of places, I have been greeted with a warm hand and an open heart.

“I had reason to remember this when reporting from Albania recently. I am no expert on European affairs, and it came as a shock that there was somewhere as poor as Albania in this continent [Europe]. But what I found more surprising, and disturbing, was the lack of joie de vivre [in Albania]. Whereas even in the most poverty-stricken and politically oppressed corner of Africa, there is irrepressible vein of hope and humour that bubbles to the surface.

“Perhaps this is what Ben Okri had in mind in his poem An African Elegy: ‘We are the miracles that God made/To taste the bitter fruit of time/We are precious/And one day our suffering/Will turn into the wonders of the earth’.

“It is a noble sentiment but not one you will easily glean from my reporting [of Africa]. There has been too much of Africans as victims and not enough showing their daily triumphs against impossible odds...”

Sadly, for years most African journalists have believed, or trained to believe, that the Western media are the very epitome of all that is good and great in our profession. They are independent, privately-owned, accurate, honest, unbiased and free to print whatever they want. In fact we have believed that anything they print is so bang-on that it must have come from the Son of God. But on close scrutiny, you find that among the attributes of this Son of God are two huge clay feet.

The defect, in fact, comes from the way the system is set up and works. Having closely observed the British media from New African’s vantage position in London, we can safely say they (and by extension, the Western) media are guided by a four-point unwritten code:

1. Point one: National interest. This is by farthe most important of the four, in fact all the others revolve round it.
2. Point two: Government lead.
3. Point three: Government leaning
4. Point four: Advertisers/readers’ power

National interest

African journalism schools tend to put too much premium on fair, unbiased reporting, not taking sides, freedom to publish etc. Of course, the textbooks are almost all Western (mainly British, American and French). In fact some of the teachers are Westerners.

We are told, and read, about the glorious freedoms that Western journalists enjoy and their high level of professionalism. But never are we told, or find in any textbook, that the Western media look after their “national interests” first and foremost.

So on graduation, the heads of our newly-qualified journalists are full of the idea which was so succinctly put recently by a famous Ghanaian newspaper editor in Accra: “The true professional journalist anywhere in the world will tell you that the relationship between government and the press should of necessity be adversarial.”

Well, by that score, the “true professional” Western journalist is not yet born. Because the relationship between, for example, the British media and the government is not, and has never been, adversarial.

Rather, there is a thick layer of complementarity between them. The one supports the other. In fact, they feed on each other for the betterment of the British nation as a whole.

There is even something (in Britain) called the “Tory Press” and the “Labour Press”.

The “Tory Press” groups the rightwing, conservative papers/magazines — The Daily Telegraph, The Times, The Sun (since moved towards Tony Blair), The Daily Mail, Spectator, The Express etc.

The “Labour Press”, on the other hand, brings together the leftwing papers — The Guardian, The Mirror, The Daily Star, etc.

This is what we, at New African, call “government leaning”. The “leaning” of the “Tory Press”, for example, has traditionally been towards the Conservative (Tory) Party, conservative or rightwing ideas and the Old Establishment. Thus, their treatment of stories and the slant and spin they put on them are pro-Tory/the Old Establishment.

The “Labour Press”, on the other hand, has traditionally leaned towards the Labour Party, leftwing (and now increasingly liberal) ideas such as gay rights, feminism, workers rights and the like. The slant, spin and treatment of stories by this group are totally different from the Tory Press.

On domestic issues, both the Tory Press and the Labour Press behave according to their respective government leaning. But they stick up like glue and sing from the same hymm book whenever any international issue in which Britain has an interest, comes up.

Then at election time, the Tory Press goes back to supporting the Conservative Party, while the Labour Press roots for the Labour Party.

When John Major led the Tories to the 1991 election victory, The Sun (a tabloid, and the largest circulating paper in the UK, with 4m copies a day) famously ran a headline, saying it did win the elections for John Major. Most British commentators agreed.

So, before the May 1997 election, Tony Blair had to go all the way to Australia to court The Sun’s proprietor, Rupert Murdoch, in a desperate attempt to get the tabloid on side. Murdoch obliged. The Sun moved towards Labour. And Tony Blair became prime minister.

So much for “adversarial relationship”. It only exists in African journalism, and this is why African journalists repeatedly fall into trouble with African governments.

Government lead

Contrary to the “fiercely independent” image of the Western media, they usually follow the lead set by their home governments. This is why we have seen the incredibly one-sided reporting of Zimbabwe and Sierra Leone recently.

Western governments are known to set the lead for the media to follow. “Mugabe is a bad guy”, says the British government. And you would think that these “knowledgeable” and “independent-minded” Western journalists would not just parrot the refrain. But they do. “Mugabe is a bad guy”, they chant after the government. So all you see are stories homing in on only the bad side of Mugabe. In this mode, facts and journalistic ethics don’t matter.

Another (typical) example is the reporting of Saddam Hussein. When Ayatollah Khomeni was leader of Iran and it served Western interests to use Saddam as a check on Iran, Saddam was a “very good guy” beloved by London and Washington. They supplied his every military need — including uniform and caps from Britain. For the 10 years that the Iran-Iraqi War lasted, Saddam’s image as a “good guy” was trumpeted from the hallowed pages of the British and the Western media — never mind the atrocities he committed against the Iraqi Kurds.

Sadly, all good things have an end. And so it came to pass that Washington and London declared Saddam a “bad guy”. The rest is history. A salient point in all this, however, is how slavishly the media have followed the “Saddam-the-demon” lead set by their governments. Adversarial relationship?, you bet.

Advertisers/readers’ power

The power exercised by advertisers and readers over the Western media is hardly seen by people outside the industry. Advertisers routinely remove or stop their advertisements if they are unhappy with a newspaper’s reporting of events. Since every medium — print or electronic — relies heavily for its survival on advert revenue, editors are careful not to upset advertisers by the choice of stories and the slant and spin they put on them.

Readers, too, exercise their power by voting with their feet if upset by a particular medium. The (almighty) Sun, the giver of electoral victories in Britain, is still suffering from the effects of a boycott by readers in Liverpool and its environs when they were upset by The Sun’s reporting of the Hillsborough football incident in Sheffield in 1989 in which 96 Liverpool fans died.

Readers are a vital component of the industry and editors pander to their every whim to keep them on side. This, again, affects the choice of stories and the slant and spin put on them. If you are looking for the now increasingly-important gay readership, you can’t afford to print anti-gay stories.

Therefore, the notion that the Western media is free to print whatever they want is the biggest hogwash to be found this side of Heaven. They regularly refuse to print letters and articles that oppose their viewpoints or impinge on their national interests.

That is why the British media, for example, have been largely silent over the recent initiative by President Thabo Mbeki to bring some rationality into the Aids debate by appointing an International Expert Panel to look at all the issues concerning Aids and its treatment. The media fear that too much publicity to Mbeki’s initiative might bring the whole Aids edifice down, and, of
rse, there are the profits of the British and Western pharmaceutical companies, the jobs of Aids researchers and the media’s own integrity at stake.

Back to national interest

Ivor Agyeman Duah (see p28) quotes Ronald Spark, the former chief leader writer of The Sun as saying: “Truth is sacred, but a newspaper that tells part of the truth is a million times preferable to one that tells the truth to harm his country.”

This is how important “national interest” is to the British (or Western) journalist. Remember you don’t need to bribe him because “seeing what the man will do unbribed, there is no occasion to.”

In reality, in Britain, the state has run rings of laws around the media to keep them in check.

(For the purposes of this article, I will concentrate solely on Britain’s Official Secrets Acts; I will leave the laws of libel and defamation to take care of themselves).

In May, Ray Choto, one of the two (now famous) Zimbabwean journalists “arrested and tortured” by the Mugabe government in January 1999, wrote in the London-based Press Gazette about how Zimbabwe’s Official Secrets Act and other laws make “it difficult for any journalist to operate”. He forgot, however, to say that the Official Secrets Act is a British imposition on Zimbabwe and the other British (former and present) colonies.

In fact on close scrutiny, one will find that there are more laws in Britain restricting press freedom than there are in Zimbabwe, yet British journalists “are able to operate” because they obey the rules! In Africa, the training we get tends to make us disobey the rules. There lies the problem.

In addition, in recent years, African journalists have been unwittingly encouraged by some Western human rights groups to think that the right to freedom of expression gives us journalists the licence to publish whatever we please, damn the harm to national interest.

Strangely these same human rights groups are not fighting for the same rights for the British journalist who has to contend with a maze of restrictive Official Secrets Acts and other laws.

What we seem to miss, as African journalists, is the fact that every nation, like every individual, deserves to keep some secrets. It is vital for national and individual survival. Western nations and their journalists have long recognised this vital truth, and it has worked for them. It is only in Africa that journalists are made to think that the right to freedom of expression supersedes the right of our nations to keep secrets.

The British example

Britain currently has five Official Secrets Acts in force — 1889, 1911, 1920, 1939 and 1989.

The 1889 Act was replaced by the 1911 Act, which was supplemented by the 1920, 1939 and 1989 Acts.

The 1889 Act was originally called the Official Secrets Bill. It was enacted to prevent civil servants from leaking information to the press and other unauthorised recipients.

For the avoidance of doubt, Sir Richard Webster, the attorney general in 1889, moving the second reading of the Bill in parliament, said it had been prepared “in order to punish the offence of obtaining information and communicating it against the interests of the state.”

Tony Bunyan writes in his book, The History and Practice of the Political Police in Britain (published in 1977): “A major failing of the 1889 Act was that it did not punish the recipient of information (except proven spies). Hence a civil servant might be charged, but no action could be taken against the journalist and the paper responsible for receiving and publishing the information. This mistake was not to be repeated in 1911.”

He continues: “By 1910, the capitalist nations of Europe were seeking to challenge Britain’s dominance, on the continent and elsewhere in the world, the [German] Kaiser’s obvious militaristic ambitions finally impressed upon Britain’s rulers the need to take action against foreign spies.

“The 1911 Official Secrets Act is the central law governing this field today, yet it passed through parliament in a mere 30 minutes, occupying less then eight columns in Hansard.

“To understand how this came about, it is necessary to go back to 1909. It was in this year that the Committee for Imperial Defence [which became the Ministry of Defence in 1964] decided to set up a small unit (MI5, then known as MO5) under Captain Vernon Kell, to collect information on German spying activities in Britain.

“Kell found evidence of holidaying German officers gathering information on harbour plans and the like. However, he soon realised that the 1889 Official Secrets Act was quite insufficient to deal with these German spies and raised the matter with Sir Henry Wilson, the director of military operations... The question was referred to a sub-committee of the Committee of Imperial Defence, which drafted a new bill with the aid of the various intelligence services, the War Ministry, the Admiralty and the Home Office.”

And parliament turned the bill into law in a mere 30 minutes! Because “national interest” was at stake.

A year later, in 1912, the Official Secrets Act was supplemented by the introduction of the Admiralty, War Office and Press Committee to “advise” the press on sensitive matters of state. This committee is now known as the Services, Press and Broadcasting Committee, or, more popularly, the “D-Notice Committee” (more on it later).

As Bunyan shows in his book: “The Official Secrets Acts not only deter mischievous ‘leaking of information’, but also underpin the traditional secrecy of the workings of the [British] state... By this means, information is so restricted as to guarantee an ill-informed parliament, press and people on the central issues of the day.”

Section 1 of the 1911 Act opens with the statement: “If any person for any purpose prejudicial to the safety or interests of the state...” Again, for the avoidance of doubt, the House of Lords ruled in 1964 that “the interests of the state” were “defined by the government of the day and not the courts”.

Under the Act, “official information” is defined as anything which “relates to or is used in a prohibited place” or which is entrusted to a state employee. Sir Martin Furnival-Jones, when head of MI5 told the Franks Committee set up by parliament, that: “It is an official secret if it is in an official file.”

Section 3 defines a “prohibited place” as every building which the state chooses to define as such.

In addition to the Official Secrets Acts, Britain also has the Public Records Act which ensures that public records are kept closed for 30, 40 or 100 years at the discretion of the government.

“This is not all,” writes Bunyan, “there is another method which is occasionally employed — Crown Privilege, which is judge-made law. This gives the Crown (the state) power to withhold documentary evidence from any court.

“The central ruling on Crown Privilege was given by Lord Simon [in 1942]. He said it could apply ‘where disclosure would be injurious to national defence, or to good diplomatic relations, or where the practice of keeping a class of documents secret is necessary for the proper administration of the public service’.”

Records show that the two central Official Secrets Acts, 1911 and 1920, were both passed in haste by parliament and with the direct intervention of the intelligence services. “Despite its [then] comparatively small strength,” Bunyan writes, “MI5 [which came into being only on 28 August 1909] was the instigator of the 1911 Act and during the war was to pioneer the art of mass mail-opening.”

The D-Notice Committee

Perhaps, for British journalists, the most interesting bit of this array of laws and control measures is the D-Notice Committee. Set up in 1912, its main duty is to “advise” the media about which sensitive information they can or cannot publish.

The Committee is made up of senior civil servants, government officials and media executives, including editors. It is supposed to be “a voluntary system of self-censorship whereby editors agree not to publish information about subjects relating to defence and the activities of the security and intelligence agencies”.

But in reality, the media breach the supposedly benign D-Notice rules at their peril. They could be punished by being denied “first-source” official government information. And, in a highly competitive media industry as the British, where the government makes the most news, it is suicidal for any medium to put itself in such a situation. So every editor toes the line.

Though said to be “a voluntary system of self-censorship”, the D-Notice Committee is known to issue, from time to time, “private and confidential” notices to editors of all national, regional and local media (radio, TV, and print) “requesting” them not to publish this or that, in the “interest of national security”.

One such notice (D-Notice No.10 dated 16 August 1971) became famous when it fell into the hands of non-editors. John Bunyan publishes it in full in his book (The Political Police In Britain).

It says in part:

“Attempts are made by foreign powers to plant stories in the British press. A variation of this technique, which must be taken into account where the activities of foreign intelligence services are concerned, is the planting in an overseas newspaper or other publication of a piece of information about British intelligence matters with an eye to stimulating the British press not only to republish the story but to expand on it.

You are requested not to publish anything about:

a. Secret activities of the British intelligence or counter-intelligence services undertaken inside or outside the UK for the purposes of national security.

b. Identities, whereabouts and tasks of persons of whatever status or rank who are or have been employed by either Service [MI5 and MI6].

c. Addresses and telephone numbers used by either Service.

d. Organisational structures, communication networks, numerical strengths, secret methods and training techniques of either Service.

e. Details of assistance given by the police forces in Security Service operations

f. Details of the manner in which well-known intelligence methods (e.g. telephone-tapping) are actually applied or of their targets and purposes where these concern national security. Reference in general terms to well-known intelligence methods is not precluded by this sub-paragraph.

g. Technical advances by the British Services in relation to their intelligence and counter-intelligence methods whether the basic methods are well-known or not.

h. You are also requested to use extreme discretion in reporting any apparent disclosures of information published abroad purporting to come from members or former employees of either Service. If you are in any doubt, please consult the Secretary [of the D-Notice Committee].

i. You are also requested not to elaborate on any information which may be published abroad about British intelligence.

j. On all these limitations, some relaxation may be possible: please consult the Secretary.”

As a result of these “requests”, it was not until fairly recently (in the mid-1990s) that the British media were able to publish such a mundane thing as the name of the head of MI5, though the “enemies” (ie, the Russians) had for years known the names of the various heads of both MI5 and MI6. In fact the names had for years been published by foreign newspapers, but no British paper dared to print it in Britain — all “in the interest of national security”.

Britain today

Today, things are much better in Britain, but the improvements have been forced on the authorities by the advent of new technology that makes it impossible to keep a tight lid on “secret Britain”.

As The Guardian said in a major article on 27 January this year, headlined “Lifting the lid on secret Britain: “The rules about secrecy, about what we are allowed to see and publish, have been left trailing behind as commercial organisations exploit great leaps of technology. A pillar of ‘national security’, and the long-standing system for protecting Britain’s most sensitive sites, appears to be crumbling before our eyes.”

Until 1992, about 50 secret sites in Britain were covered by “D-notices” and no British editor would publish anything about them, not because the sites (which are mainly British and American listening posts scattered all over the UK) did not exist, but because it was in the “national interests” of both Britain and America that the media kept silent about the sites.

In early 1999, a company, UK Perspectives, in which the Queen has shares and is also the chief patron, had to seek permission from the D-Notice Committee to be allowed to photograph some of these 50 secret sites as part of a “Millennium Map” project — a photographic record of the whole of Britain, covering every piece of land and building. In fact every outdooor object larger than 10 inches is visible.

In the 27 January article, The Guardian capitalised on the Millennium Map project to splash photos of some of the listening posts obtained from UK Perspectives.

Not to let its sudden liberation go unnoticed, The Guardian trumpeted:

“The defence and security establishment now realises that past attempts to control what we can and cannot see are doomed to failure in the light of new and increasingly available technology. This fact is being recognised by Nick Wilkinson, a retired admiral and the new secretary of the D-Notice Committee...”

As I write, news is just surfacing about a documentary film that nobody wants to show about British complicity in covering up World War II crimes.

Made by Julian Hendy, a British TV writer and historian, the hour-long documentary tells how in 1947 the Labour government of Clement Atlee had secretly shipped a whole division of the Nazi Waffen SS (about 8,000 men) and settled them all over Britain.

Despite the fact that there were “eyewitness accounts and documents” showing the SS men to have committed “murder by shooting, fire-bombing, hanging, mutilation and appalling torture” (according to Geoffrey Goodman, editor of the British Journalism Review, who has seen the film), the British government protected them and later used some of them to spy on the Soviet Union. Currently, according to Goodman, there are 1,500 of them still living in Britain.

Last year, Yorkshire TV arranged with Julian Hendy to show the documentary but at the 11th-hour Yorkshire pulled out, promising rather to show it this year. Then the BBC became interested but it, too, backed off after entering into discussions with Hendy. So the film is gathering dust while “independent” British TV executives look after the national interest.

In fact, they cannot be blamed much because throughout the history of the Official Secrets Acts, the British government has routinely prosecuted offenders (included in this lineup is the now disgraced Tory MP, Jonathan Aitkins in his former profession as a journalist, see p28).

Last year, Tony Geraghty became the first British journalist to be charged under the 1989 Official Secrets Act, for writing a book, The Irish War, in which he reveals the British army’s extensive surveillance operations and MI5 dirty tricks in Northern Ireland.

At the time of writing, charges against Geraghty had been dropped but Col Nigel Wylde, said to be one of Geraghty’s sources, was still facing the prospect of a criminal trial, according to The Times (of London).

The Times also reported in mid-May that:

“Martin Ingram, the pseudonym of a former member of the army’s force research unit...has been arrested under the Official Secrets Act, his house has been burgled and a manuscript of a book he was writing went missing. The manuscript turned up a few days later in the hands of the prosecution at a court hearing, when government lawyers obtained an injunction preventing him from publishing his book.

“The Ministry of Defence has also obtained an injunction preventing The Sunday Times from publishing [Martin Ingram’s] information. Liam Clarke, the newspaper’s Northern Ireland editor, now faces the prospect of being arrested under the Official Secrets Act. He has been summoned by the police special branch and advised to bring a lawyer with him. The police want to question him, not about the truth behind the allegations of wrongdoing by army intelligence officers, but for revealing the allegations.”

The African experience

In its recent article headlined “The Hopeless Continent”, The Economist, even though appearing to support the outrageous notion that “Africans have some inherent character flaw that keeps them backward and incapable of development”, yet admitted that: “The most damaging impact of imperial rule on Africa was neither economic nor even political. It was psychological.”

The “psychological” job done on Africa is still, today, very much reflected in our daily lives, including African journalism. We mimic the language, style, and the negative images so often published about Africa by the Western media.

We don’t think much (when copying the Western media) about words and phrases such as: Brazilian rainforest, African jungle. Buddhists monks, African witchdoctors/fetish priests. British atheists, African animists. The IRA decommissions its weapons or puts them beyond use, African rebels disarm. The Greeks have gods, Africans have idols. Zimbawean “squatters invade and grab” land, Brazilian “protestors and activists invade and reclaim” land.

If only we can stop for a moment and ask why Brazil has rainforests and Africa a jungle, or the difference between a Buddhist god and an African idol, we will be pleasantly surprised by the answers we get.

I have been to several Buddhist temples in Japan and Taiwan, and I can’t honestly see the difference between a Buddhist “god” and an African “idol”. Why one is a “god” and the other is an “idol” is the challenge facing African journalists today.

The idea of lumping all 53 African countries together and declaring them a “hopeless continent” is another challenge facing African journalists.

I have recently been marvelling (and seeking answers in vain to) how and why, on every world map, Africa is depicted to be smaller than North America when, in reality, Africa is the world’s second-largest continent.

Somebody has said it is due to some cartographer’s scale? But how can the same scale show Western Europe to be bigger when in reality you could fit the following 12 European countries — UK and Northern Ireland, Germany, France, Spain, Portugal, Italy, Denmark, Belgium, The Netherlands, Ireland, Switzerland and Croatia — into DRCongo alone and still have 4 million square miles of Congolese territory to spare? And Congo is not even the largest African country.

It’s time we, African journalists, opened our eyes. “Adversarial relationship” with our governments will keep our nations and people down forever. After all, which investor in his right mind would want to invest his money in a “hopeless continent”? Which tourist in his right mind would want to take his holiday in a “hopeless continent”? And every nation is now clamouring for the tourist dollar.

Let’s think about it.

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