Broadcast TV reporting in Africa quirkier than in U.S.

By Taylor Pool

Covering a story in Africa is largely the same as broadcast reporting in the United States, except, of course, that it’s in Africa making the experience a bizarre one every time.

During my first day with reporters, we managed to land ourselves in a near-death situation while covering the first of our two assignments on my first day as an intern. I say “our” because in Niamey, a reporter never does the job alone. The term “multi-media journalist” translates into the language of Niger, but normally, the journalists work as a team. In fact, there are generally five of us crammed inside a tiny car covering multiple stories each day: two reporters, the camera man, the chauffeur and me, the intern.

Before I explain my near-death experience, it is important to understand that roads in Niger are not like roads in the U.S. In Niamey, lanes are non-existent and traffic rules are merely suggestions. Getting through intersections is game of survival of the fittest and if you are not careful, you might run into a donkey or camel who uses the road as if it, too, were a car. 

Of course, the team happened to choose one of the busiest round-a-bouts in the city to conduct “man on the street” interviews. Naturally, the chauffeur decided to park the car on the opposite side of the round-a-bout that we were standing on. What did we do to get back? We walked and then ran when traffic didn’t wait for us back to our car, where I was welcomed by the second reporter. He told me, laughing, upon my arrival that he hoped I liked sports. 

Our second story assignment for the day involved finding a Malian citizen living in Niamey. We would try to find out his or her perspective of the conflict in Niger’s neighboring country. After exhausting all of our attempts to find a source, which included visiting the Mali embassy in Niger, paying a home visit to a woman who knew someone who knew a Malian and stopping at several merchant stands on the road, we found ourselves in the office of the chief press secretary for the city. He found out I was American and promptly handed me a sandwich.

My initial shock drastically diminished my ability to understand French in that moment, so I was incredibly unsure of what to do with the sandwich at first. I finally decided that I would rather risk food poisoning than risk being rude to a national authority figure, so I ate the sandwich, while four Nigeriens watched me with wide, anticipating eyes waiting to find out whether I would like the spicy Nigerien specialty. To my luck, it was a good sandwich. Finally, after a few more futile stops to find a Malian, we put the story on hold and made it back to the TV station. 

I learned my first day that it is legal in Niger to shoot video and ask for interviews in public locations, just like it usually is in the U.S. I discovered in the editing room that in Africa, reporters make VOSOTs and packages complete with anchor intros and tags just like it is done in Western countries. I also learned that my first day that Africans have just as much difficulty as Americans at finding sources to interview. What differs, I learned, is that in Niamey, the reporters are still writing story scripts by hand, there is no such thing as “live” newscasts and weather segments do not exist six months out of the year because, well, in the dry season it is always hot, dry and dusty.

Since my first African reporting adventure, I have run across the unpredictable Niamey roads on more than one other occassion in order to snag the all-important “man on the street” interviews. I have sat in on a practice session of an African dance and drumming team as they prepared for their performance during the national wrestling championship and I have consumed more free food given to me before interviews, which I had to accept against my Western better judgment that told me to avoid accepting gifts from sources. Most importantly, though, I’ve had the chance to see that journalism is journalism, no matter where it’s happening, even if the method of getting the job done in Niger is a bit quirkier than what I'm used to.

Special Correspondent Visits Scripps

By Andreya Carlson
Executive Member, SGMD

Rebecca Hamilton, author and Washington Post special correspondent, discusses the current situation in Darfur and U.S. involvement over the years.

The genocide in Darfur may have ended, but international correspondent, Rebecca Hamilton, argues that there are still major problems in this western region of Sudan.

Rebecca Hamilton, special correspondent for the Washington Post, spent four years reporting and writing her book, Fighting for Darfur: Public Action and the Struggle to Stop Genocide. Hamilton spoke at Ohio University on Tuesday, March 1st, 2011, in the E.W. Scripps School of Journalism. Her visit was sponsored by the Institute for International Journalism and the African Studies program at Ohio University in collaboration with the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting.

In an interview with this author, Hamilton said that now her focus is “to get people interested in actually learning the lessons that are there to be learned from our engagement with Darfur – what worked, what didn’t work, and what that means for how we can do better next time.”

The American public’s interest in the Darfur conflict dramatically increased after former Secretary of State Colin Powell in 2004 referred to the situation as genocide during his address to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

“That determination was pivotal as a catalyst for the formation of what can broadly be called the ‘Save Darfur Movement,’” Hamilton said. “I think the use of the word ‘genocide’ resonated very, very strongly for many communities in the United States.”

During her speech at Scripps Anderson Auditorium on Tuesday evening, Hamilton said several factors contributed to the genocide in Darfur, including land disputes as a result of desertification in the area, a pan-Arab ideology, and arms flows as a result of the Cold War.

Click Here to Watch her Video Interview

The Sudanese government in Khartoum fed off of an already existing inter-ethnic conflict by providing weapons and monetary aid to the Janjaweed, a nomadic Arab group at odds with the generally sedentary non-Arab Sudanese in Darfur. This was done when non-Arab groups known as the Sudan Liberation Army and the Justice and Equality Movement rebelled against the government on the grounds that they were socio-economically marginalized and were not being represented in power sharing.

The Janjaweed are responsible for such atrocities as looting and ravaging towns and for abducting, sexually assaulting, gang raping, and murdering non-Arab Sudanese citizens on a mass scale.

The Sudanese government signed a ceasefire agreement with the Justice and Equality Movement in February, 2010.

Millions of the Sudanese people are currently displaced as a direct result of the conflict in Darfur.

Hamilton has met some “phenomenal” women at these camps who are raising children in “conditions that are totally unacceptable, and still retaining – trying to retain – some hope for the future because they just have to keep going for their kids as much as anything else.”

The displacement camps are heavily skewed toward women because often during the violence women were raped and men were killed, and those men who were not killed were often part of a rebel group.

“But now the world is starting to walk away from Darfur, even though the situation there is not resolved,” Hamilton said.

Hamilton noted that the situation is actually much worse now than it has been in many years, as there has been more displacement in the past two months than in the five years before that.

“Today, I think people have started to realize that it’s not the 2003, 2004 situation,” Hamilton said. “But they sort of think that if there are not these huge massacres occurring, that somehow the situation is fine, failing to appreciate that when you still have 2.7 million people who can’t return to their homes, this is not a situation that is okay and that still needs a huge amount of work.”

Another part of Sudan has been in the news recently. A referendum occurred in January, resulting in the decision to have an independent South Sudan.

Hamilton said a lot of people know that there was a referendum in southern Sudan and that it went peacefully. “What’s frightening is that very many people think that that dealt with the situation in Darfur, failing to realize that South Sudan is a completely different part of the country.”

Southern Sudanese have decided to make English the official language. Since the official language has long been Arabic, these Arabic-speaking teachers are now struggling to teach their students in English.

A language barrier in Sudan is not the only obstacle in the classroom – there are also a disproportionate number of boys to girls in school.

Certain economic situations further complicate relations between northern and southern Sudan. The government in Khartoum has gathered a $35 billion debt, and they want the Southern government to take on a piece of that debt.

Part of this debt was incurred from fueling the military budget for the long war against southern Sudan in which 2 million people died.

“What does it mean for 2 million people to die?” Hamilton asked during her public lecture. “Every single person I interviewed had a family member who died. That’s the only way that I could wrap my head around it.”

There are also questions of citizenship rights in the new two-state Sudan, and an agreement needs to be reached concerning the sharing of oil wealth.

There has been a great deal of media attention on the referendum that passed in January in southern Sudan, but this has detracted from the media coverage in Darfur.

“It seems we can only focus on just the South, or just Darfur, and never able to put the whole picture together,” Hamilton said. “That’s what really needs to happen.”

Stine Eckert Epitomizes the Institute’s Mission

By Yusuf Kalyango, Jr.

One of our graduate students actively involved in the activities of the Institute for International Journalism (IIJ), Ms. Stine Eckert, has received the inaugural international reporting fellowship from the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting. Stine will travel to Bangladesh this summer to investigate food security issues or the rights of women rights in that country. Stine joins five other journalism students from other universities across the country to investigate international crisis issues in Bangladesh, India, Kenya, Honduras, Ecuador, and Denmark.

Stine’s interest in global issues and her unerring desire to confront international crises as a correspondent is an exemplar of the mission of the IIJ, which is to promote the mediation and resolution of conflicts through a well intentioned global “media agenda”. One of the reasons she was selected was because of a story she reported in our Foreign Correspondence course about the struggles of women in that country.

Stine came to the E. W. Scripps School of Journalism as an exchange undergraduate student from Leipzig University, Germany. The exchange is part of a special arrangement between the two journalism schools at Ohio University and Leipzig University. The IIJ has played a central role in that exchange of journalism students and faculty visits.

As a reporting fellow for the Pulitzer Center, Stine will have an opportunity to spend several weeks in Bangladesh investigating food security challenges and the rights of women in that developing nation. Expenses for that international assignment are provided by the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting. She will also receive a cash award of up to $2,000 from the Pulitzer Center.

Stine was one of the IIJ director's brightest and most engaged students in the foreign correspondence class. She was also the editor-in-chief of the first volume of The Globetrotter international newsletter, published by the IIJ. Stine also contributes international stories to the IIJ’s online edition of the International Special Reports project. In April 2009, Stine was announced as one of three recipients of our competitive John R. Wilhelm Foreign Correspondence Internship scholarship, which is a separate international reporting opportunity administered annually by the IIJ. Stine will spend another three months reporting for Aljazeera international television from Washington, D.C. to complete her IIJ Foreign Correspondence scholarship. She plans to undertake this latter project when she returns from Bangladesh.

The Scripps College of Communication at Ohio University is a member of the Pulitzer Center’s Campus Consortium. The IIJ is the primary coordinator of the Campus Consortium between the Pulitzer Center and the Scripps College of Communication. The E. W. Scripps School of Journalism with the support from other departments in the Scripps College of Communication contributes $10,000 to the Campus Consortium of the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting. The role of the IIJ in that partnership is to fulfill the Pulitzer Center’s educational outreach programs by fostering the debate on global crisis issues through OU campus visits by international journalists fresh from the field; and to enable student interaction and engagement in international issues reporting.

Prof. Kalyango Talks to OU-SPJ Chapter about International Reporting

Professor Yusuf Kalyango, director of Ohio University's Institute for International Journalism, recently spoke about international reporting with OU's Society of Professional Journalists chapter. He specifically addressed the challenges and risks of international correspondence. You can view excerpts from the video interview below.

Dr. Kalyango explains one of the biggest challenges impacting international journalists.

Dr. Kalyango speaks about the impact that ethnocentrism has on international reporting.

Dr. Kalyango talks about the treatment of foreign correspondents in developing countries and gives advice to people who wish to report outside of the United States.

Filmed and Edited by Taylor Mirfendereski