Africa and the news on Yahoo! Japan
Stealth Conflicts Forum has become a stealth blog, and it is time to revive it! Hopefully this post will help. I look forward to reading comments on the content, and to hearing from those who wish to contribute posts themselves – this is an open blog, and anyone with thoughts of their own on the issue of conflicts that are marginalized (and related issues) are welcome to write and submit posts of their own.
This post aims to cast light on the state of the mass media in Japan. As in many other wealthy countries, news consumption in Japan is increasingly moving to the internet. This does not necessarily mean, however, that the sources of news are changing, or becoming more global. The bulk of the news that people access online is coming from news aggregators, and their sources are the traditional newspaper and television companies. In any case, looking at the content of such news aggregators is a good way to see the type of news that people are being fed.
Below are some of the results of a recently completed study of all (20,233) news stories provided by Yahoo! Japan (in Japanese) for the year 2010. As can be expected, the news was dominated by ‘national’ news stories. International news stories made up just 10 percent of the total (and many of those were about issues related to Japan or Japanese people in the world, rather than the world per se). Entertainment stories (celebrity news and gossip) made up 15 percent of the news and sports news made up 22 percent – 37 percent of the news was of the ‘soft’ variety.
As seen in the traditional media, the African continent was thoroughly marginalized on the Yahoo! Japan news website. Of the 10 percent of the total number of articles devoted to international news, just 2.4 percent (or 49 articles) were focused on Africa. Let’s see how this compared to some other important objects of media interest:
While this is hardly an exhaustive search, it is clear that the leading figures in many sports were each able to garner far more coverage than all of Africa’s countries combined (even the women’s curling team didn’t do badly in terms of coverage). The same can be said for other celebrities embroiled in a scandal of some sort. Part of the coverage of the Kabuki actor Ebizo Ichikawa was because of his wedding to a famous newscaster, but the bulk of it came after he was injured in a fight while out drinking. Coverage of Manabu Oshio centred on his trial for his failure to help a woman who died of an overdose of ecstasy in 2009 (they were taking the drug together). Coverage of Erika Sawajiri was largely related to the question of whether or not she was going to get a divorce, and on her possible return to acting/singing. The rapid rise of globalization notwithstanding, infotainment at the national level is going strong.
Of all the stories devoted to Africa, 28 percent were related to the 2010 FIFA World Cup (soccer) hosted by South Africa. These were stories in the international news section, not the sports section, and were articles not about the action on the field, but about the state of crime in South Africa (particularly foreign victims), the vuvuzela (plastic horn used by supporters at games) and other related stories. Only three articles about South Africa were not related to the World Cup.
If we exclude South Africa’s World Cup related stories, the most covered African country was Sudan, with six stories in total – about developments in Darfur and a man who was fined for wearing make-up. Post-election violence and the rarity of two candidates claiming the title of president put Cote d’Ivoire at second with five stories, while Nigeria and Libya were at third place with four stories each.
It is interesting to note that (with the exception of South Africa and its World Cup news) no African country could attract as much coverage on Yahoo! Japan as could US celebrity Paris Hilton (nine articles), or Paul the Octopus in Germany, the aquarium attraction that appeared to correctly predict the winner of several World Cup matches (eight articles).
As in most countries, media coverage of the world in Japan is in a sad and sorry state, and Africa is perhaps the greatest victim.
November 7, 2011 at 4:59 pm
Oh the Death Metal layout~
November 7, 2011 at 7:22 pm
I think the same situation about Africa in the media happens in other countries as well. Since recently, in ARG news Africa was pretty absent.
November 7, 2011 at 11:01 pm
I would like to add some topics for discussion about Africa’s media coverage.
Probably due to its geographical distance media coverage about Africa is considerably lower in East Asia, when compared with other regions of the Globe. Of course, it seems that Japanese media is even more self centered when compared with other countries. But for example, in Portugal, due to it’s History or proximity with some portuguese speaking african countries, Africa ends up having some attention in the media. Even one branch of the National TV is called RTP Africa (it would be like having NHK Africa). So my point is that history and cultural exchanges between one country and a determined region can promote more or less media coverage. Also geographical proximity can be an important factor.
Another issue I would like to underline is why most of the time when there is media coverage about Africa in the west, it is mainly appealing more to our emotions and less to give a clear and global picture of the situation there. It is hard to find “good news” about Africa. As it is said by Karen Rothmayer: “between May and September 2010 the ten most-read US newspapers and magazines carried 245 articles mentioning poverty in Africa, but only five mentioning gross domestic product growth”. In this regard here it is the link for Columbia Journalism Review article: “Hiding the Real Africa”.
http://www.cjr.org/reports/hiding_the_real_africa.php?page=all
November 8, 2011 at 10:54 am
Thanks for the comment Mathias. Yes, most media in most countries tend to marginalize Africa, but few go as low as 2 or 3 percent of the total international news space. A study I did many years back found that Africa got somewhere between 6 and 9 percent in other sources like the New York Times and BBC. Pretty low, but nothing like the blackout on African news in Japan.
I would be interested to see how it is in ARG. If any major newspapers have archives online it could be relatively easy to find out.
November 8, 2011 at 11:05 am
Thanks for the thoughts/addition to the discussion, Rui.
I certainly agree with what you say. There are many reasons why Africa does or does not get ignored by the outside world, and geographical distance and historical/linguistic connections are big ones. But there are many others.
One other interesting piece of information that I didn’t put in the article, for example, was that Chile got more coverage in 2010 than did all of Africa’s 54 countries, primarily because of the earthquake and the dramatic mining rescue. Chile is more distant from Japan than Africa is, but it was the entertainment value of the mining disaster – like a Hollywood movie – that got it coverage. News these days is more about entertaining than informing.
The issue of positive news about Africa is also an important one. The negative image of Africa may also be something that prevents coverage. I haven’t look all that much into it because my priority is to try to get Africa on the agenda to begin with (there is no positive or negative when the coverage does not exist), but I know it is something that needs to be brought out as well.
I would love one day to see NHK Africa come into being, by the way!
November 15, 2011 at 2:42 pm
Going back to some of the previous comments (Rui and Virgil), I agree on the fact that linguistic and cultural links are important when it comes to the presence of Africa-related news in Western/Japanese media. In addition to that, i would argue that historical links also play a major role. Taking as an example the Spanish case, which is the one I know best, when Africa appears on the news, and leaving apart the Maghreb region, that has its own specific problems and logic, coverage is mainly related to three issues: illegal immigration, the Polisario-Morocco conflict in Western Sahara, and much less often, Equatorial Guinea.
In all three cases, it can be easily argued that the interest on such news for the Spanish public are due to historical links or direct domestic impact. For example, as illegal immigration from Africa has increasingly become a problem in Spain, news related to these topics make it more easily to the media. However, after an agreement was reached with Morocco on the repatriation of illegal migrants that arrived to Spain via Morocco, and beyond a few scandalous episodes on human rights violations by the Moroccan government (such as abandoning repatriated African immigrants in the Sahara, beyond Moroccan border), this sort of news has decreased in presence, in my perception. This also links to the Western Sahara conflict. The main bulk of news in the Spanish media related to this issue, nowadays are mainly linked to consular protection issues of Spanish citizens of West-Saharan origin. However, and like in the former case, as Morocco has become a top-priority security concern for Spain (mainly due to the territorial claims and immigration cooperation), the Spanish government and media have become less critical of the country, and have disengaged from supporting Western Sahara. In the third case, Equatorial Guinea makes it sometimes to the news mainly due to the political regime in the country. In this case it also seems obvious that if this country is mentioned in the media, despite being one of the smallest African states, it is because it was a colony of Spain until 1968.
Thus, I believe that historical links, language and cultural proximity are important in such cases. It could be interesting to look (and I will try to do so and post later), whether countries with stronger historical ties with Africa, such as France, have a greater coverage in their media of what occurs in the continent.
Finally, I would also like to make an observation. Unfortunately, the lack of coverage of Africa might also be explained by the fact that media groups, etc., have to sell news to make their profits. Since people take for granted that miseries occur in Africa, and this situation does not improve, such news do not sell well or are not ‘catchy’ for potential viewers/readers, and thus, do not become headlines or do not even appear in mainstream media. Nowadays competence is very strong, particularly among TV broadcasters, so what is or is not covered is strongly dependent on estimations of how ‘interesting’ (in a very broad sense) a piece of news can be for its potential public. This is the logic that explains how the Chilean miners’ rescue became one of the top news of 2010, despite objectively seen this was a minor or even trivial event. I can also recall the coverage in 2009 of the crash in the Atlantic of Air France flight 477 en-route from Rio to Paris: after the initial reports of the accident, the Spanish media immediately switched a good deal of attention to reporting banal details of the lives of those Spanish citizens killed on that accident. Once more, a particular tragedy was turned into a good deal of hours of TV infotainment.
November 15, 2011 at 10:22 pm
Thank you for the lengthy and thoughtful comments, Just. It could well have been a post in itself rather than a comment.
I agree with what you say about the historical aspect, and the Spanish example is a very interesting one. I have looked at the UK and French examples briefly in studies before (of BBC and RFI radio). The historical connection was certainly present. I think it was a little more subtle with the BBC than it was with RFI. Former French colonies had more coverage than other African countries on RFI, and to a lesser extent there was more coverage of former British colonies than others on the BBC.
The link between profit calculations and coverage of Africa (or the lack thereof) is also certainly true, and your final point about the focus on the Spanish victims of the plane crash fits into this – nationalism sells. We see the same pattern in most countries to varying degrees.
I look forward to an article of yours on this blog!