23 November 2004 Blog Home : November 2004 : Permalink
Comparing three recent stories from Africa with stories from Iraq makes me wonder whether, just possibly, the world's journalists would rather concentrate on news that they can use against President Bush instead of the UN, France or African dictators.
First up is the UN rape and abuse scandal in the Congo, which Michelle Malkin calls the UN's Abu Ghraib.Funnily enough this is not getting story after story coverage by the BBC, Reuters, AP etc. Most of them have one article which has now slid down the bottom of the page. As Reuters notes somewhere in the middle of its piece:
The revelations of peacekeeping abuses is usually kept quiet at the United Nations until reporters or individual countries disclose the news, as happened in Cambodia in the early 1990s and later in Somalia, Bosnia and Ethiopia. But in this case the world body released some details.
This has happened before. Many times apparently. Does anyone give a toss? apparently not. And yet we saw month long wall to wall coverage of the Abu Ghraib affair even though by the time the story broke the US military had already produced a report and begun appropriate criminal proceedings.
Next up we have the situation in Zimbabwe where Comrage Bob is busily starving his people and lying about it as well as banning sports journalists from coming to cover the cricket. Admittedly the BBC has done a fairly good job of getting out the word about Comrade Bob, most other news organisations seem more concerned about malnutrition in Iraq, where the rate has risen and aid agencies are targetted by ungrateful Iraqi "insurgents". Somehow this is the fault of the US and is therefore more important that Comrade Bob's driving out of aid agencies and journalists from Zimbabwe.
Finally there is the ongoing "Blood for Chocolate" war in Côte d'Ivroie. In this case all sorts of insurgents are protesting the high handed actions of the French peacekeeping force who are alleged to have committed various war crimes. Now I suspect that the French are actually justified in most of their actions but they have been remarkably unilateral about the whole thing. Likewise I seriously doubt their soldiers have in fact done any of the acts allaged but I do wonder why we can see front page after headline scoop about a marine in Fallujah and bugger all about the French.