Africa is My Home: Children’s Africana Book Awards Weekend

Learning About Africa: How Does The US Media Represent Africa?

Taken together, this anachronistic style of coverage reproduces, in condensed form, many of the worst habits of modern American journalism on the subject of Africa. To be clear, this means that Africa only warrants the public’s attention when there is disaster or human tragedy on an immense scale, when Westerners can be elevated to the role of central characters, or when it is a matter of that perennial favorite, wildlife. As a corollary, Africans themselves are typically limited to the role of passive victims, or occasionally brutal or corrupt villains and incompetents; they are not otherwise shown to have any agency or even the normal range of human thoughts and emotions. Such a skewed perspective not only disserves Africa, it also badly disserves the news viewing and news reading public.

Please go read this “Letter of Concern to 60 Minutes” from a huge group of academics, journalists, and others about the narrow viewpoint of the continent being represented on the show. I think it is all too true throughout the US.

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