Having worked as a journalist for 33 years and having taught
journalism and analysed the processes and performance of journalism for
the last five, it is very revealing watching and analysing the
development of major stories. There have been two dominant ones in the
news about Africa over the past couple of weeks – the Mali conflict and
the Pistorius-Steenkamp murder hearings. Each in their way tell us
things about the way journalists work, in general, and in relation to
Africa, in particular.
One of the basic ways of looking at how
news is reported, about how journalists select and represent events,
personalities, countries, regions and continents, is through the idea
of ‘framing’. Few journalists think actively as they are doing it –
they may think about the angle to pursue, which actors/participants to
stress, how much prominence to give certain issues, but they rarely sit
back and think about what the frame is and how they are representing
people, countries or events within it.
A frame for a story is a
simple way of looking at what is included in the story, as in the
phrase, “who/what is in the frame”. Imagine a news story as a painting
or a photograph, what is included in that image within the frame that
encompasses it. What a journalist or his or her editor chooses to
include in a story is the framing of that story; but it is also a way of
representing an overall approach to particular types of story or
stories from a region. This is not an approach limited to coverage of
Africa – all journalists wittingly or unwittingly do it – but it can be
very exaggerated or stereotypical when it comes to Africa and can
seriously affect how the readers, viewers or listeners understand a
story and understand the context in which it took place
.
The South African Crime Frame
Take
the Pistorius case: he was an athlete hugely admired around the world,
as well as at home in South Africa. He had fought disability and
become a beacon for those striving to overcome physical injury and for
those who will not (and I would argue should not) accept the limitations
that disability imposes, or which society in various ways imposes on
people with disabilities. Pistorius not only succeeded in para-sports
and the Paralympics but in global athletics and the Olympic Games. He
became a celebrity and the image of fortitude and perseverance, and
rightly so.
When the news first broke about the shooting of Reeva
Steenkamp, people were shocked and journalists represented the shock in
the way they reported it. It was given huge prominence around the world
because of the celebrity framing of the story. It was newsworthy
because he was a celebrity. But there was another frame that was
immediately brought in to play. This one referred to images,
stereotypes and preconceptions (received via the media) of South African
society – the South African Crime Frame. This has developed
progressively and, sadly, is reinforced by the high levels of violent
crime in the country. But in this case, the frame was deployed at
first, alongside celebrity framing, to suggest that Pistorius was
innocent of deliberate murder and had reacted to events because of the
ever-present fear among wealthy (predominantly white) South Africans
about crime.
This frame is something many around the world would
have recognised and it would have helped them form an initial opinion of
what might have happened. That opinion may prove to be justified or it
may be proved to be wrong, but the abiding frame of the first day or
two of reporting – despite police comments to the contrary – suggested
Pistorius had acted almost spontaneously out of fear of crime and so was
guilty only of being a participant in a terrible tragedy caused by this
fear. That frame surfaced again during the bail hearings in
mid-February. The crime frame for South Africa is not necessarily
false, but it is a stereotyped framing of events that may obscure other
motives, circumstances or interpretations. It is gives a very narrow
view of South African society.
Mali:the War on Terror Frame
Moving
to Mali, there has been the regular deployment of another frame that is
used to report Africa (and other parts of the world where there is
violence in some way associated with Islam) – the War on Terror Frame.
This grew out of the US embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania, 9/11,
the rise of al Qaeda as a player in global politics and the role of
Islam in conflicts as far apart as Afghanistan, Indonesia, Chechnya,
Somalia and, now, Mali.
In Mali, there was little interest in the
early stages of the conflict that developed as Tuareg, who had fought
for Col Gadaffi’s forces, returned to the country, bringing with them
heavy weapons and vehicles, which enabled the re-emergence of Tuareg
insurgency aimed at the formation of their own state. This gained
little global attention last year and the coup that followed was not
widely reported – except in specialist media in Africa or covering
Africa. Where it was reported, it was done so in the well-used and
extremely stereotypical African Ethnic/Tribal Frame and the Africa
Failed State frame – a conflict develops based on irresolvable ethnic
differences (forget the socio-economic or political context, that is too
complex to explain to audiences) and brings down a weak and corrupt
government.
Whatever you do, don’t mention colonial borders (that
is very old school) or socio-economic conditions and the use by
political/insurgent leaders of ethnicity as a quick, easy and emotive
way of expressing legitimate grievances. Just say these people live in
endemically weak and failing states that have no one to blame but
themselves and that they have always and will always hate each other.
It’s what we did with the start of the Rwanda genocide and during the
Kenyan post-election violence, let’s do it again now.
But then,
those nasty Islamists hove into view and a new frame that could attract,
scare and hold the audience comes into play – the War on Terror. A
related group of Islamists seizes an Algerian gas installation and kills
Westerners – even more terror to work on. Suddenly Mali is news in the
West and we can explain it through this frame and justify
intervention. I’m not remotely saying it shouldn’t be covered, but
stereotypical frames frequently conceal more than they reveal or give a
distorted picture by excluding too much from the frame or including
things that are not core or more than tangentially relevant. But it
makes a story we can understand quickly and, of course, superficially
and one we can tell to our audience without too much messy context or
complexity. It can also influence the way that public opinion develops
and can be used by governments to justify actions that might otherwise
be viewed as wrong.
Frames have always been used in this way and
they provide a prism through which we view events that does not
necessarily give a true picture, but subtly or not so subtly distorts it
and with it, our understanding. The South African Crime Frame does not
really explain the Pistorius case and War on Terror is only a part of
the picture in Mali and, for Malians, not the key one. But it is one
that can be sold and understood in the West. In the past we have had
the Cold War Frame (every conflict – but notably Angola – was viewed as
part of the Cold War); the Humanitarian Frame, which took the view that
Africa was pretty well helpless and it needed angelic or altruistic
Western aid groups or governments to sort things out, and, as mentioned,
the Ethnic/Tribal Frame, which had lurked behind and then replaced the
Cold war.
My argument is not that framing is totally wrong, but
that journalists and their audiences need to be more sophisticated – you
can’t hammer every story into a set frame – it is better to examine the
context, the circumstances and what has really happened before you
frame it. So, when you read or hear a story, step back and think about
the framing and try to disentangle events from a pre-set interpretation
of them.
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