If you say something people may not like in a conference on online journalism such as the one the nine winners of the first TH!NK3 round attended in Kuala Lumpur, you can only expect to be tweeted on that straight away.

That is what happened to me while I was taking part in a panel discussion on ‘how much activism can journalism take‘.

@fenicotterorosa on activism, journalism -- "My job is to inform. If I wanted to support a cause, I would be in development work."

I was quite happy with that, as it summarized in just a couple of words the point I was trying to make.

I was particularly looking forward to this debate, as the topic reminded me of some other discussions I had taken part in. In particular, in December 2007 I attended a conference on African conflicts and resources in Nairobi. The declared purpose of this 3-day event was promoting the African cause among journalists who were invited to participate.

I must say, the attendance of Italian journalists was particularly unusual for an event focusing on Africa and taking place in an African city. There were still 3 years to go before the South African World Cup could take place and Italian media have a particularly bad reputation when it comes to covering news from the developing world unless some major event, like a soccer world cup, attracts their attention.

Why was this conference so packed with Italian reporters? The reason is simple. It was organized by a very active NGO called Koinonia, assisting street kids in Kibera, Africa’s second largest slum after Soweto.

Child in Koinonia's NGO's center in Kibera, Kenya, December 2007. Photo by Tiziana Cauli

Having been founded by a man of the Church, Combonian missionary Kizito Sesana’s Koinonia Community obviously maintains strong relationships with Catholic environments in my home country, and I do not only mean the Vatican. I am also talking about local politicians and parties which are happy to ensure their support to Church-promoted causes.

The media are no exception. In this case, at least this made a well organized and interesting event visible. The only Italian news service entirely dedicated to news from the developing world in Italy is a Catholic one, called MISNA. I am not Catholic and find the Church’s influence on Italian politics and media pretty revolting, but I freelanced for MISNA and, while I was in Italy, that was the only chance I had to write about Africa.

MISNA was among the sponsors of the conference I mentioned, which attracted correspondents from Italian public TV RAI and from RAI’s all news channel Rainews24, a good alternative to news on other national channels, whose coverage of foreign affairs is particularly limited.

Why did I mention this conference? Because while I was there I took part in a debate which came back to my mind again in Brussels, at the launching event of TH!NK 3, as well as in Kuala Lumpur. We were sitting down, journalists, NGO representatives and academics, and suddenly a reporter from a Rome-based news service started complaining about how little her editor would let her write on Africa.

Now, I love writing about Africa, but I am also aware of the fact that my job is different from that of an aid worker, a diplomatic, a politician, a missionary or whoever else can promote the African cause. I don’t promote causes, I report news. And if I worked for a local newspaper in an Italian city, I could not blame my editor for giving a lot of space to car accidents on the nearest highway or a jazz festival attracting tourists from outside rather than to feature stories addressing topics which do not belong to the kind of news the paper specializes in.

Some journalist there shared my view, but the others got very upset. Africa had been neglected for too long, it was ravaged by conflicts nobody knew about, and so on and so forth. Which is entirely true. I just did not think one could blame the media for that.

Only some days later Kenya was going to be in the headlines of almost every newspaper due to the deadly political violence which followed the country’s elections, the first signs of which were already there for us to see.

Ethnic clashes were getting closer to Nairobi, a sort of safe heaven due to a heavy police presence. A priest even had to leave the conference and rush back to his church at the border with Rwanda where about 100 refugees were hiding. Had their persecutors entered the church, they would have massacred them.

While this was happening, journalists who were so mad at their editors for not letting them write about Africa never left the conference venues. There were some interesting and relevant stories out there about Africa, but none of us was able to recognize them and cover them as we should have done.

Why do I say this? Because I think sometimes we journalist are so eager to give visibility to the developing world that we just miss the entire point. We forget about our job’s basic principles and turn into promoters of this or that cause. And in so doing, we sometimes miss some very good stories.

As I said, just days after the conference ended and we all went home, violence erupted. The election campaign had been quite lively with some occasional clashes, but what happened in the days after the elections made the world fear for the economic and political stability of the entire East Africa.

Now Kenya was always in the news, even in Italy, even on local newspapers, even on RAI TV channels. You would wake up in the morning and turn the radio on wondering how many people had died in the country overnight. Coverage of the electoral violence was so broad that at some point international media were accused by some Kenyan columnists of damaging the country by promoting a negative image of it.

Reporting about Africa - not reporting about Africa. In both cases, media seem to be responsible for whatever tragedies are hitting the continent. I actually think these two attitudes are jut two different faces of the same coin. Blaming the media is very easy. Dictators and authoritarian leaders know this very well.

Now, I come from a country where in a conflict of interest of humongous proportion the chief of the government control most of the country’s media. He could - and he did in the past - decide to send journalists home from public television because they are hypercritical of him. He can cancel programs from the schedule of its TV stations, he can use the newspapers he controls to promote himself and his party.

I heard Berlusconi blaming the media for ruining Italy’s reputation many times and that really makes me angry. There is a quote from South Africa’s last white president Friederik de Klerk - which I used in my PhD thesis on press freedom in South Africa -that always comes to my mind in such circumstances. Referring to the attacks faced by both the South African and the foreign press in the country during the apartheid era, de Klerk said: “the press is nothing but the mirror reflecting what is going on in a society… but should the mirror reflect exactly what has been said and done, you cannot blame the mirror if you look at it and the picture you see is a horrible one.”

I come from a country where this sentence could be used almost every day as a response to government attacks against the media. National or foreign. As many of you may be aware of, this happens practically every time a newspaper or TV in Italy or abroad criticizes the Italian government and his infamous prime minister.

This is probably why I don’t particularly like it when the media are told what to report and in what way.

When we TH!NK 3 bloggers met in Brussels in March, as I mentioned beforehand, I heard somebody referring to a concept I was familiar with: not only international media should report on Africa. They should focus on good news from Africa, promote a positive image of the continent. I had heard this view expressed by, among others, Thabo Mbeki, one of the main supporters of a movement called African Renaissance. Many of you probably heard about it already.

Although Mbeki’s position, assuming Africa will overcome  all the challenges it’s faced with, was labeled as unrealistic by several scholars and journalists - and sometimes it was harshly criticized (for ex. when the former South African president joined the group of those who deny the existence of HIV/AIDS) - it was shared by part of the local and international media.

 There are websites focusing on good news from the continent. I can mention a South African one in particular called The Good News. But should all media focus on good news from the continent, would this really help Africa.

I may have a cynical vision of the world, but I think journalists are there to expose, not to “help.” Exposing facts generally helps democracy and even development. But if those were the two goals journalists were trying to achieve they may as well enter politics or join an NGO as aid workers. If they don’t do it, it’s because they are busy fulfilling a different mission.

Now, covering success stories (they can be political, economic or anything else) from developing countries obviously boosts  foreign investors‘ mood, it makes people want to visit those countries. But are we really sure that distorting the reality by pushing in as much good news as possible and giving them more relevance than they actually have in a certain contest would – even if accidentally - help the African continent?

I don’t think so. As a journalist, if the ultimate goal I was trying to achieve with my profession was helping Africa’s development, I would not do that. Why? I collected some information that may answer this question.

I checked out the alerts on Africa on Reporters sans Frontieres website. For those who are not familiar with it, RSF is a Paris-based organization monitoring press freedom and attacks against journalists across the world. Their press freedom index is published annually and it is highly regarded internationally.

So the alerts I found about Africa in the past month mentioned:

·    Three journalists, including the editor of a newspaper in Abidjan, Ivory Coast, arrested for publishing the findings of a public investigation into alleged cases of corruption in the trade of coffee and cocoa. As many of you may know, this country is the world largest cocoa producer, and newspapers may as well focus on how flourishing this industry is. They picked the bad news instead, and got punished for that.

·    Another case comes from Sudan, where three editors of an opposition paper in Khartoum were sentenced to jail after being tortured in prison and escaped death sentences on accuses of terrorism. They had exposed controversial issues the government was involved in: namely, a conflict between Sudan and Egypt, the secret presence in the country of Iranian nuclear engineers and the support given by the authorities to alleged terrorists from Yemen. None of the above can be considered as good news, and probably when you work as a journalist in Sudan you do not have much choice but to cover bad news. Still, I am sure it’s better to know it rather than not.

·    Third case: Burundi. The editor of an online newspaper was arrested and charged with treason for publishing a report which indicated the country as a possible target for terrorist attacks from a Somali group. Again, no good news, but if I lived in Burundi I would want to know.

All of this happened in the past 30 days. Now, how would this journalists feel if reports on their countries by fellow journalists sitting in Europe focused on some entrepreneur who managed to make a lot of money and expand his business internationally? We need to pay attention to that too, but if you ask me, I don’t think we can give it the same relevance we would give to a war or massive human right abuses. What reader could take us seriously if we did?

A couple of years ago I covered the European Development Days, the biggest EU event on development, in Strasbourg. A media workshop was organized on the coverage dedicated to development by the Western media.
 
The London Times’ Africa correspondent Jonathan Clayton was among the speakers. He responded to EU officials and African reporters who complained about a lack of coverage of good news from Africa by the Western media.  "There is a limit to the number of stories we can publish on Africa everyday because our readers don't want that many," he said. "That's the harsh reality of the market."

That also need to be taken into account. Journalists know it very well: space on a newspaper is not unlimited. It is actually very little, and one has to choose the most relevant stories.

Zimbabwe's current prime minister Morgan Tsvangirai and former EU Commissioner for development and humanitarian aid Louis Michel address EU Development Days conference in Strasbourg, November 2008. Photo by Tiziana Cauli

I am sure all of us have experienced a sense of frustration, as readers and citizens, when media and newspapers in our home country focus on gossip, the show-business or some horrible crime story with a disturbing attention to details rather than keeping us informed on what dirty tricks our government is playing on voters and tax-payers, on what economic threats we should be worrying about for the near future and so on.

Imagine you lived in a country where the basic standards of democracy and development were constantly under threat or not achieved. Could you really forget about this all just because you see smiling faces and nice reports on TV?

Think about the World Cup in South Africa. Do you think young HIV-positive patients who don’t have access to anti-retroviral treatment just jumped out of bed and went play soccer because all they could see about their country on international news programmes and magazines was kids playing football in the townships?

Do you think mothers who struggle to feed their children every day and are victim of a drunken husband every night just got a vuvuzela, grabbed a beer and went partying outside just because pictures of celebration and euphoria outside stadiums made them think “oh, that’s what I should be doing”?

I doubt that. And I think their stories are more urgent and relevant than a great deal of “good news” we got from the country and the entire continent in the past months.