An Unseen World: How the Media Portrays the Poor

From Web World, UNESCO
http://www.unesco.org/webworld/news/2001/011127_philo.shtml

An Unseen World: How the Media Portrays the Poor

By Greg Philo

For over 30 years, numerous academic studies of how news flows between the developing and the developed world have reached the same conclusion: far from being two-way, news circulates in a deeply uneven and distorted manner. "Not only is there a quantitative imbalance in news flow, with the Third World receiving far more material about the First World than vice versa," says media theorist Annabelle Sreberny, "but the continual coverage of the global centres of the industrial world contrasts with the intermittent images of the south in crisis."

One frequent criticism has been that news focuses on disasters and conflicts without explaining the complex social and political histories behind them. The role of the West also tends to be ignored-notably when African countries were deployed as pawns in the Cold War.

Major news services such as BBC, ITV, Agence France-Presse and Reuters have all been accused of offering very limited accounts of the developing world. In the U.S., journalist Mort Rosenblum has attacked the obsession of media controllers with ratings and their promotion of what they see as entertainment rather than reliable information. A study by Steve Askin found that in 1992, the story of hunger in Africa was only deemed suitable for U.S. coverage when it was discovered that elephants were also dying in the drought.

But are TV audiences really this shallow? It is a critical question that very few studies have tackled. One survey in Scandinavia found that press coverage of the developing world was dominated by war and conflict, but that readers actually said they wanted more on local culture and "normal" life. In Britain, meanwhile, a major project was recently commissioned by the Government¿s Department for International Development out of concern over how TV¿s depictions of the developing world could affect public attitudes. (*)

A companion study by the Third World and Environment Broadcasting Trust (3WE) interviewed 38 senior broadcasters and programme makers, helping bring to light the assumptions made about reports from poor countries. As the Director of Programmes at Carlton Television in London commented: "I know from past experience that programmes about the developing world don¿t bring in the audiences. They¿re not about us, and they¿re not usually about things we can do anything about."

A negative diet of images

It is not hard to see the effects of such assumptions on coverage. A report for 3WE concluded that the total output of factual programmes on developing countries by the four terrestrial channels in Britain dropped by 50 percent in the 10 years after 1989. Our own study showed that when the developing world is featured on British news, a high proportion of the coverage is related to war, conflict, terrorism and disasters.This is especially so for the main television channels, with over a third of coverage on BBC and Independent Television News (ITN) devoted to such issues.

Much of the remaining coverage is given over either to sport or to visits by westerners. For example, in our sample the Bahamas were in the news because Mick Jagger and Jerry Hall had paid a visit there, and some countries were featured simply because the balloon belonging to Virgin¿s boss Richard Branson had floated over them.