Unfortunately, neither the CBC nor the established Africa advocacy organizations can force the media to focus on Africa when Tony Blair and Bono are not around. When the tsunami in Southeast Asia killed an estimated 300,000 people, there was an outpouring of media coverage. Tsunami victims told their stories of loss and triumph and the media was there. The civil war in the Congo has claimed the lives of four million people and few have heard the story of children who are cooked and eaten as a result of vicious warfare tactics. The Michael Jackson trial consumed the American public during the summer, while the war in northern Uganda has gone virtually unnoticed.
In an interview in the July/August edition of the Columbia Journalism Review, Jan Egeland, the United Nations undersecretary-general for humanitarian affairs, attributed the lack of coverage to African crises to what he called “an endless cycle of misery.”
“People do not like endless cycles of misery, they like a beginning, and they like an end. … It’s not so clear who’s the good and the bad as it may be with the tsunami. Nature is bad, people are good and aid workers succeed. It’s a good story to tell. In Uganda, its incomprehensible terror carried out by an elusive rebel force,” Egeland said. “Northern Uganda and eastern Congo are among the losers of our attention lottery, and I find it incomprehensible because in terms of drama, needs, cruelty, human touch and heroic efforts to help, the situations there are on par with the tsunami and northern Iraq and Afghanistan and Darfur.”
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