Dark. As in no light, opaque. It’s truly amazing to me how little significant news in Africa is being covered by U. S. major media sources. It is as though the continent barely exists. For example, are you aware that there are presently four major areas of armed conflict in Africa at present: Sudan, Ethiopia, Democratic Republic of Congo, and the Sahel, particularly Mali and Burkina Faso?
Here’s another. The outbreak of Ebola presently going on in eight provinces of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) with nearly 10,000 infections and 4,500 deaths is the largest in its recent history. And it has spread beyond the DRC: Kenya and Uganda have experienced deaths from Ebola.
To me this is an illustration of the weakness of our journalistic profession. It’s news. It’s a story. And an important one.
I don’t know if its so much its journalistic profession as the big english news organizations (NYTimes, AP, WSJ, Bloomberg, Reuters, BBC, CNN), they have few journalists assigned there. And most of the population is still rural, whereas the journalists are in urban areas.
With that, what happens in Africa won’t get through to english news consumers.
Give it time, modernization and urbanization means a lot of catch up growth in the next 20 years — and economic growth will make Africa more relevant to the developed world.