BY MULUGETA GUDETA
The African media has long remained under the tutelage of Western media organizations that shaped the form and contents of news and control their means of dissemination. Most African countries were under colonial rule for the best part of the 20th century and when they gained their independence back in the 1960s, they came under the direct or indirect control of Western media organizations that had relatively advanced knowledge and technology of modern communication infrastructures.
It would be relevant here to ask how the media in developed countries generally portray Africa. Many studies found that “America and European media portray Africa as a poverty-stricken, war-ravaged, and disease-ridden continent, which also reinforce other negative stereotypes (Wallace 2005; Michira 2002).”
With the exception of Ethiopia and perhaps Liberia, the two African countries that were free from colonialism, the rest of Africa had to start from scratch to build their media outlets, such as radio, television and the newspapers. According to one study of the history of Ethiopian media, “The first Amharic language newspaper was started by a certain Blata Gebre Egziaber before 1890. It was not a newspaper in the modern sense of the term. It was rather a weekly hand-written sheet of which 50 copies were distributed each week in the capital.”
According to the late professor Pankhurst who studied the history of Ethiopian press, “The first duplicated publication in Ethiopia was produced in 1900 by the French Fransiscans who had founded a leprosium in Harar. The journal which was “polygraphed”, was edited by a priest, Father Marie Bernard and was called Bulletin de la Leproserie de Harar; it continued until 1905 when its editor purchased a small printing press from the French firm of Raguenot and a small fount of Amharic type. He now printed a small Mission publication, Le Semeur D’Ethiopie. (Pankhurst, 1962: 260)”
Pankhurst further noted in his study that, “Although the technique of printing made some advances in the first twenty years of the 20th century, the number of newspapers and magazines brought out by private printing shops was limited because most of the job was done by hand.” adding that, “In 1922, the then Regent Ras Teferi Mekonnen, later on Emperor Haile Sellassie, allocated his own money for the purchase of modern printing machines and established Berhanena Selam (Light and Peace) printing press.”
Other sources indicate that Ethiopia for instance had established a radio station back in the 1950s while newspapers started to be printed during the reign of emperor Menelik at the turn of the 20th century. After the Italian occupation in 1935 and their expulsion in the 1941, two dailies, Addis Zemen and the Ethiopian Herald were established in 1941 and 1943 respectively. the 20th century has nevertheless witnessed the fast growth of Ethiopian and African media as well.
Having modern media outlet did not however mean that the media were independent in these African countries. They had nominal or legal ownership of the media outlets but they did not fully have control over the contents and direction of them. The media in Ethiopia for instance were largely geared towards promoting the personality of the emperors and rulers while giving smaller attention to the challenges of economic and political developments.
As most journalists and media managers under strict government control were trained in Western countries and mainly in the United States, there was no room for the birth and growth of the private press in Ethiopia and in much of Africa. The ideological orientation of foreign educated journalists had impacted the growth of the media in the subsequent decades. In Africa most of the radio and TV stations as well as the newspapers were run by foreign editors who tried to shape them in the image of western media outlets that were also outlets for the dissemination of Western ideology as well as news and entertainments shaped by these same people.
Even though the end of the 20th and the beginning of the 21st century saw the formidable growth in media technology and dissemination, otherwise known as the globalization of the mass media and the birth of new technology such as the Internet and social media, African countries continue to be imitating Western media models instead of shaping their own voices that reflect their interests.
The global mass media thus became to battle ground of ideas between the developed Western countries and the developing African states, a process that is still under way at this time of writing. The development of the information and communication technology has not helped Africa find its own voice and disseminate it in the wider world without any infringement. This is sometimes referred to as ‘media imperialism’ which is defined as, “Media imperialism is a theory based upon an over-concentration of mass media from larger nations as a significant variable in negatively affecting smaller nations, in which the national identity of smaller nations is lessened or lost due to media homogeneity inherent in mass media from the larger countries.”
The powerful transnational media corporations have not given space or opportunity to emerge as free agents of African interests. Although private media outlets such as radio and television stations have proliferated throughout many African countries, the media in Africa is not yet free from foreign influences that often go counter to African visions of democracy, economic development and cultural emancipation.
In the last few years, new phenomena and practices started to appear in Western multinational media outlets mainly in the United States where domestic politics had taken a radical turn to the right and the American values of freedom, fairness and compassion were often ignored and power struggles started to be promoted aggressively by the media as powerful tools of promoting any point of view. Even American president used it so extensively to defame its opponents and defend its platforms under former president Donald Trump, the White House displayed unprecedented passion in turning the media as a foreign policy tool to promote American interest in the world.
It was at this particular juncture that the negative phenomenon known as Fake News started to emerge under Donald Trump who blamed the major conventional media outlets as “enemies of the people” while using social media such as Tweeter extensively to make his point, so much so he was at one point given the nickname of “twitter-in-chief”. Social media exploded into the world and ordinary citizens started to take the places of the conventional journalists as the new citizen journalists.
Almost anyone with a mobile phone in their hands were dubbed members of the fraternity of citizen journalism while journalistic ethics or professional integrity were ignored altogether. The chaos that was born of this process caught African countries unprepared. The negative developments proved detrimental to Africans while they empowered Western countries that used the new technological tools to subvert them. The Western powers that invented fake news became the most powerful practitioners of the new trade around the world, including Africa.
How Africa has suffered from the dissemination of fake news from within and outside the continent is a subject that requires impartial examination. This is a new subject for investigation and it demands serious consideration. Fake news is probably born of the crisis of conventional media practices and its devastating impacts may be averted by reclaiming the tested and trusted conventions of traditional journalism. In other words, the combination of new communication technology and advances in media operations and the ethics of traditional journalism could be a potent chemistry to discredit, denounce and abandon fake news practices and their subversive outcomes wherever they manifest themselves.
As far as Africa is concerned, one way of combating fake news would be to develop the culture of transparency and freedom of information for all citizens within Africa and request the same from foreign media. The second alternative might be for Africa to achieve full ownership of the news contents that emanate from the continent in order to show the full picture rather than partial falsehoods that tend to tarnish its overall images. News cannot be both true and false at the same time. This is what fake news creators are trying to do.
When reporting about Africa, western news organizations usually take some truth from an event as a starting point and then they combine it with a lot of falsehood and the outcome is fake news that has some truth in it but is not the truth but an illusion of truth. Western governments and the media use a lot of fake news when reporting about events from Africa. Otherwise they keep silent while they should report about the side they do not sympathize.
This kind of partisan behavior which contrary to one of the pillars of genuine reporting, i.e. impartiality was clearly seen during their reporting of recent events in Africa. Partisan reporting skews the news content in favor of one side against the other. This has become a characteristic behavior of big media in the West that is increasingly reflected in government policies towards specific African events. In this way Western media and governments become the creators and perpetrators of fake news.
Fake news is bad for Africa because it distorts reality and creates the wrong pictures about developments there. Fake news is bad for journalism in Africa because it undermines true journalism and journalistic ethics and responsible reporting. Fakes news is bad for Africa because it gives government and the public false information and impacts policy negatively. Fake news is always partisan while true journalism is impartial, objective and verifiable. By turning almost everybody into self-styled journalism, fake news undermines the positive role that news media could play in Africa’s economic and political developments and undermines the dignity, respectability and the role of news media and belittle their importance in the eyes of the public.
In order to withstand all these challenges the news media in Africa should fight for transparency and plausibility while reporting about specific events. They have to challenge the distortions and partisanship fake news with truth and impartiality. They need to develop and defend the culture of transparency both in government and the public spheres.
For this to be realized, African news outlets need to enjoy full freedom of reporting and the privilege to become the first outlets to break the news to the world instead of waiting Western news media do the job for them. Western media fight to promote the national interests of their respective countries.
African media should fight to defend Africa from all kinds of subversive news that run against African interests. The 21st century is going to be the century of the struggle between truth and falsehood that compete to reclaim the public attention and impact government policies. This, in turn would determine the outcome of the fight between the armies of false messengers and truth tellers.
The Ethiopian Herald March 13/2022
