adrian monck

Do African governments deserve to be taken at face value?

The news out of Zimbabwe in the Times has a friend of mine in Angola complaining:

…the paper fails to point out that the Angolan government has denied this story as ‘a gross lie.’ If the US government made such a denial would the Times omit it? … The Angolan authorities might not be telling the truth – they are not well known for transparency – but then nor is the US, nor the UK for that matter. Remember Iraq and that dossier?

But that is not the point: at least do them the favour of representing their version of events. If it turns out they have lied, you can still have a field day reporting that.

Reuters does report the Angolan response from Luanda. Should the Times have tried to do the same?

Adrian Monck

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3 responses to “Do African governments deserve to be taken at face value?”

  1. I think the problem is not only that rich-world journalists feel they don’t need to accord the same respect to African governments as they do to their own lying leaders – it’s that they choose to base stories on one unreliable source while ignoring another. This story appears to have reached the floor of the House of Commons on the basis of a single quote in a story that surfaced in the UK on Wednesday morning and had been denied by the Angolans by midday. No one has actually reported the fearsome Ninjas hogging the departure lounge at Luanda airport. There seems to be a special school of foreign reporting south of the Sahara in which the standards applied in one’s own country can be dropped when a juicy story beckons.

  3. Hi Adrian,
    Coincidentally, we had a conference with African journalists at the LSE yesterday. There was an interesting argument between two of them about whether the Western media was any ‘better’ than African media apart from the obvious huge differences in resources. One of the quoted the Times as an example of professionalism to be aimed for. Perhaps it wasn’t quite up to the mark on this occasion. Of course you should always include denials.
    There’ll be more on the conference at http://www.lse.ac.uk/collections/polis/