Witness

July 28, 2005

(Editor’s Note: The Carpetbagger Report, as regular readers know, has joined the Coalition for Darfur, a bi-partisan online initiative created to raise awareness and resources to address the crisis. This is the latest in a series of posts from the Coalition.)

Two weeks ago, the Center for American Progress and the Genocide Intervention Fund launched a joint initiative known as “Be A Witness” built around a petition calling on television networks to increase their coverage of the genocide in Darfur.

As “Be a Witness” noted:

During June 2005, CNN, FOX News, NBC/MSNBC, ABC, and CBS ran 50 times as many stories about Michael Jackson and 12 times as many stories about Tom Cruise as they did about the genocide in Darfur.

This week, tireless Sudan advocate Nicholas Kristof took up the call and chastised the press for its lack of Darfur coverage.

If only Michael Jackson’s trial had been held in Darfur. Last month, CNN, Fox News, NBC, MSNBC, ABC and CBS collectively ran 55 times as many stories about Michael Jackson as they ran about genocide in Darfur.


Shortly thereafter, Editor and Publisher printed a piece reporting:

New York Times Columnist Nicholas Kristof’s attack on the press for underreporting the atrocities and genocide in Darfur, which ran in today’s paper, has drawn the ire of some newspaper editors who said they are doing the best they can with what they have.

In this piece, USA Today Foreign Editor James Cox offered a partial but important explanation for the dearth of coverage

Cox pointed to a two-day series USA Today ran in May on Darfur, stressing the difficulty the paper had in even getting a visa for reporter Rick Hampson to travel there. “It was excruciatingly difficult to get the permission,” he said. “We had an application that had been stalled for months.”

Sudan does not want journalists freely traveling around Darfur for the sole reason that their reports are going to reveal the true nature of Khartoum’s genocidal campaign.

Considering this basic fact in conjunction with the efforts currently underway to expand the African Union mission in Darfur, it might behoove all involved to consider embedding journalists with the AU just as the US did during the initial weeks of the war in Iraq.

People want information about Darfur; journalists want access to Darfur; and the UN and AU want (or at least should want) to disseminate information regarding to crisis in Darfur as widely as possible.

The US and NATO are currently providing key logistical support to the AU mission and ought to insist that any reporter who wants access to Darfur be assigned to and granted protection by an AU patrol force.

Brian Steidle served with the AU in Darfur for six months before eventually resigning his position so that he could share his photos with the world.

Steidle is a hero for doing this – but it shouldn’t take personal acts of sacrifice and courage to make the world aware of the genocide in Darfur.

There may be some basis in fact that getting information out of Darfur is difficult, but it certainly is not impossible; after all, CNN is doing it on their international noonday show out of Niger regarding the starvation there. Your idea, CB, of having the journalists imbedded with the AU or NATO is a great idea IF — and we all know here just how big that “IF” is — the CCCP (Compliant Complicit Corporate Press) would get off its collective ass and do some real work.

Notwithstanding the access difficulties you note, the CCCP is appallingly disingenuous if they expect us to believe that “we really, really want to report to you what is going on in Darfur, but we just can’t get in there to do it” horseshit.

What might the CCCP do instead of whine about “its hard work, really hard work”?

How about maybe: (A) They could get other media reports — there are plenty, especially out of Europe — and comment on that for us. Or (B) they could highlight the efforts made to get into Darfur to do some reporting, which efforts they claim are being blocked by Khartoum or Washington, D.C. Or (C) they could have a series of segments on the ongoing failures of BushCo, of the U.N., of the EU and the AU, to address this situation. Or (D) they could put this genocide in context with other similar atrocities in the recent past. Or…..

The problem is that Darfur does not easily — or profitably for the corporate bottom line — translate into “entertainment masquerading as news” for the CCCP. So, since this is not a fun topic, and it would require the big media companies to actually spend money to GATHER news instead of READ the AP and UPI and Reuters sloppy-at-best and biased-as-hell-at-worst storylines off the wire, we will all see elephants flying before this happens.

It’s “really hard work” is such a lame excuse for the CCCP to use. In a really twisted way indeed, it is also a damning confession of the choices they make for why they won’t practice real journalism — and aren’t likely to ever again when the bottom line is the driving force for their existence. Damning indeed.

  • Somewhat off-topic but I heard on NPR this morning that some US states and universities are starting to pull their investments out of Sudan. I was suprised to find that they actually had any investments in Sudan, but it’s an encouraging sign to see them take a principled stand on blood money.

    And, another Bush connection, there was a motion to ban companies that invest in Sudan from trading on Wall Street. The president shot it down. Hmm…

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