When gunmen murdered 17 people in Paris earlier this month, it seized the world’s attention. When Boko Haram militants killed hundreds in and around the Nigerian town of Baga the same week, the mass killing scarcely garnered a mention in the Western media.
The contrast between the spotlight in Paris and the blackout in Nigeria resulted in a barrage of criticism charging the international media with a lopsided focus. Those killed in Nigeria, like those killed in Paris, were victims of gunmen espousing an extreme version of Islamism. Those deaths, critics argued, also deserved attention.
The discussion about why the killings in Nigeria were ignored underscored an old problem: News from sub-Saharan Africa is underreported. Whatever the ultimate explanation for the coverage gap, the discussion of the lack of Baga killings coverage offers an opportunity to pivot resources toward Africa, starting with Nigeria. It’s the continent’s most populous country with 173 million people, its largest economy, and as a result of Boko Haram, the arena of one of its deadliest insurgencies. Nigeria is also holding a potentially explosive presidential election next month, a prime opportunity for news organizations to offer robust coverage of a consequential event.
In addition to correcting the disparity in coverage, analysts and Nigerian journalists argue for a transformation in the content of international coverage, going beyond the daily data of killing.
“The international media has failed in terms of really bringing to the fore the important issues of the country in Nigeria, beyond the daily attacks,” says Fidelis Mbah, a television producer now based in Abuja. “Nigeria is the biggest economy in Africa. If anything happens in Nigeria, it affects the entire continent.”
In other words, covering the crisis in Nigeria’s north is crucial, but it ought to be one part of a more complete approach. “In absence of coverage of the ordinary Africa, we get coverage of Africa in crisis,” says Ethan Zuckerman, director of MIT’s Center for Civic Media and the author of a widely cited essay on coverage of the Baga killings. “In 2014, all we know of Africa is Ebola. Now, all we may know is Boko Haram. If we had ordinary narratives to counterbalance the extraordinary, we might see the attacks in Baga as shocking, instead of unsurprising.”
The upcoming presidential election could be a good place to start. It is the country’s most hotly contested race since the end of military rule in 1999, pitting incumbent Goodluck Jonathan, a southerner, against Muhammadu Buhari, a northerner and a former military ruler. In the context of the ongoing Boko Haram insurgency, along with a complex set of tensions along political, regional, religious, and ethnic lines, the election could also be a trigger for violence. According to a recent report from International Crisis Group, this combination of factors suggests “the country is heading toward a very volatile and vicious electoral contest.” Given the risk of conflict, now would be the wrong time for media to look away.
The Paris-Baga comparison underscored this need for sustained reporting. New York Times Public Editor Margaret Sullivan noted last weekend that the paper ran only a four-sentence Reuters brief on the massacre in Baga, in contrast to the “wall to wall” coverage devoted to the Paris attacks.
Times editors explained to Sullivan that there were good reasons for lack of coverage of the Baga events. Journalists have little access to the area where the killings took place, they told her. Trusted sources, moreover, cast doubt on initial reports that the death toll could be as high as 2,000. Regardless of those problems, the paper’s top international editor, Joseph Kahn, said, “It could have had more attention and emphasis.”
The disparity in coverage was dramatic, and it was not unique to the Times. According to data gathered by Zuckerman, on January 4, the day after the Baga attack, 25 top American news organizations ran 1,100 sentences mentioning Charlie Hebdo, the French satiric newspaper targeted by Al Qaeda-affiliated gunmen. The same day, the same 25 organizations published a mere 20 sentences mentioning Baga.
The explanation for the dearth of coverage involves a range of factors. Reporting in remote areas with poor infrastructure is difficult. Many argue that race plays a role. Stories related to US government involvement, or with American or other Western characters get more attention than those without. Relate-ability is also a factor. MIT’s Zuckerman suggests the explanation has to do with “cultural distance.” He says, “It’s a broader sense that stories in Africa are often hard for readers to project themselves into because most readers have so little sense for what life in a West African city is like.”
To some Nigerians, these barriers just read as excuses. “The international media pays more attention to certain countries that matter, like world powers,” said Mbah. In his previous work with the BBC, he said he sensed discrimination in how stories were selected for news broadcasts. “In the UK, if we’re producing a bulletin, if you hear that 20 people died in Nigeria, it wouldn’t even get a news mention. If somebody is knocked over in the UK, it becomes a headline story.”
Last year there was one notable exception to the dearth of coverage of the crisis in Nigeria. The mass kidnapping by Boko Haram of 276 girls from a school in the town of Chibok, in Borno state, triggered an activist campaign centered around the #BringBackOurGirls social media hashtag. Through tenacious tweeting and savvy handling of the news media, the activists behind the campaign managed to bring broad media attention to the issue. But most media soon moved on to other crises, and the girls remain missing. “There’s no follow up. If these girls were Europeans, if these were American girls, I don’t think the limelight, the global attention in the media, would have just died like that,” says Mbah.
Jared Malsin is a freelance journalist based in Cairo