Gambia-L:

We had a seminar, a few weeks ago, at Birmingham University, focusing on the
African media. Three papers were discussed. I presented the first paper,
followed by Safiyya Aliyu-Abdullah, a Nigerian journalist, and the final
presentation came from Baffour Ankomah, the Ghanaian born editor in chief of
the well respected London based New African Magazine, who had the task to
contrast the African and the Western media.

Baffour Ankomah's paper, I have to say, was controversial and in fact
provoked intense debate among the audience.

Many in the audience agreed that he had indeed identified the problems, as
it were, vis-a-vis the African and the western media, but debated him
intensely, over some of his conclusions/prescriptions. Anyway, he sent me
his paper yesterday, for our internal publication here, but I thought I
should also forward it to the L, in the hope that some of you might find it
useful.

Enjoy reading the brother's thought-provoking paper, reproduced below.

Ebrima Ceesay
Birmingham, UK

__________________________________________________________________

"Contrasting the African and Western media"

By: Baffour Ankomah,
Editor, New African magazine, London

To: The seminar by The Graduate Forum, Centre of West African Studies,
Birmingham University.



It was the UN Secretary General of long time ago, the Burmese, U Thant, who
once asked: "What is the difference between capitalism and communism?"

He answered it himself: "Capitalism," he said, "consists of man exploiting
man. With Communism, it is the other way round."

If I could pretend to be a UN Secretary General this evening, (don't worry I
don't have the grey hair to go with it, at least I have a natural haircut,
that would do, isn't it?), I would like to ask those, including Lawrence,
who gave me this difficult subject this evening: "What is the difference
between the Western media and the African media?

Please don't give me the answer yet. We will discuss it over coffee. That's
what consultants do, isn't it?

Talking about the Western media reminds me of one Mr Ian Rae, from
Northfield, Birmingham. He wrote a letter to The Times on 6 January 1999,
saying:

"Sir, For once I got a rather good shirt and tie for Christmas, so I tried
them on and showed my wife.

"The verdict? 'You look different when you are clean'."

Isn't that nice?

He signed off his letter: "Yours dazzlingly. Ian Rae".

To  me, The Times has the best Letters Page in the whole of Britain. And I
don't miss it. If I'm unable to read it in the office, I cut the page out
and read it on the train going home. You learn a lot from the views of the
ordinary people who write to The Times.

"You look different when you are clean", Mr Rae's wife told him. That's one
of the major contrasts between the Western media and the African media.

The Western media looks different when they are clean. But are they always
clean? We shall see by the end of the night.

For those who may have underestimated the power of the media, let me start
by quoting the African-American writer and Egyptologist, Anthony Browder:

"Everything you see," he said recently, "whether it is on a billboard, a
movie, video or commercial, has been designed by a person. So every image is
there for a reason."

Browder was speaking in an interview with The Voice, (of London). To him,
"the media are the most powerful forms of communication ever devised by man.
If you are not conscious of that, then you won't know how to protect
yourself from negative images projected through the media", he said.

He is not alone. In a recent leader comment on the sale of The Express, The
Guardian, wrote:

"The Daily Express was once a paper whose journalism thundered out across
country and Empire. For more than 15 years, it sold more than four million
copies a day. Its proprietor, Lord Beaverbrook, liked to think of his main
paper as a weapon.

'When skilfully employed,' he wrote, 'no politician of any party can resist
it. It is a flaming sword which will cut through any political armour. Many
newspapers are harmless because they do not know how to strike or when to
strike... But teach the man behind them how to load and what to shoot at,
and they become deadly'."

This is another lesson that the African media have not learned.

"Many newspapers are harmless," Lord Beaverbrook said, "because they do not
know how to strike or when to strike. But teach the man behind them how to
load and what to shoot at, and they become deadly... When skilfully
employed, no politician of any party can resist it. It is a flaming sword
[that] will cut through any political armour."

To better understand the contrasts between the African media and the Western
media, we must first understand the dynamics and agendas driving both sets
of media.

We may not like it, but the truth is that it is the Western media that today
sets the agenda and tenor of what makes news and how it is reported across
the world (including the slant, the pitch, how it is played and so forth).

The African media is sadly caught up in this web, and having been so
bamboozled, we are reduced to only mimicking the attitude of the Western
media towards Africa and Africans.

In the end, we unwittingly add to the bad reporting of Africa by the Western
media. In the main, we simply follow the lead set by the Western media.

Why this is so is partly due to the training we get in Africa and elsewhere.

"You are what you know", says one of the catchphrases being used by the CNN
in recent months. To me, nothing can better that. We are what we know. All
of us are!

Throughout our days as student-journalists in Africa, we are made to believe
that there is something called "the free press" in the West. Of course all
the textbooks are by Western writers. And they tell us that this "free
press", in the West is so free that they publish whatever is the truth,
fairly, accurately and without favour.

We are never taught what Lord Beaverbrook teaches his editors and
journalists at The Express.

That a newspaper (or the media) is a "weapon, a flaming sword" that must
"know how to strike and when to strike". That, for the journalists "behind"
this "flaming sword" to "become deadly", they must know "how to load [the
weapon] and what to shoot at."

This is a very important lesson we never teach in Africa. So we come out of
school pumped full with ideas of this Western "free press", and so, we do
our best to reproduce it in Africa often with catastrophic results.

"Publish and be damned" then becomes a principle to die for. It makes us
feel good if we are seen to "uphold" press freedom by being hostile to our
governments. It makes you a "good journalist" whether what you write harms
national interest or not. In fact, many times we are not even conscious that
we are harming national interest.


The free press
But does the West have a free press? If you believe it, you will believe
that gold grows on trees. Why we believe it in Africa, is proof that there
is some magic in Western textbooks.

Having lived in Britain for 14 years as a practising journalist, I can say,
with my hand on my heart, that there is NOTHING like an unfettered "free
press" anywhere in the world! Not the type we read about in Western
textbooks.

It doesn't exist in Britain. Neither in America. Nor in France. Nor in
Germany. Nor anywhere! And I challenge anybody who knows, or has ever met,
this "Mr Free Press" to kindly introduce me to him. Because I would like to
have dinner with this "Mr Free Press".

What is true (and you don't get it in any of the textbooks), is that the
"freedom" of the Western media ends where national interest begins.

The Western media is restricted by national laws and the various agendas
that influence their reporting of the news. In effect, the Western media is
not free to report freely.

Britain, perhaps, has the most laws limiting press freedom in the whole
world. The fact that British journalists are not routinely harassed by the
government, is testament to the journalists' religious obedience to the
restrictive laws, and not to any democratic inclinations of the British
state or establishment.

This is something African journalists must learn - and fast.

Generally, the Western media (and particularly the British media) are guided
by what I call "a five-point unwritten code". Which are:
* National interest
* Government lead
* Ideological leaning
* Advertisers and Readers' power

When it comes to their dealings with Africa, there is one more added to make
it five: Historical baggage.

Besides these "Big Five" points, there are other minor ones that inform the
bad reporting of Africa by the Western media: I will look at two here:

(A) Lack of interest, and ignorance about Africa
(B) The disrespect for Africa, its cultures and institutions.

We have all read articles in the Western media about "half-naked" Africans
walking about in their towns and villages oblivious of their state of
half-nakedness.

What we don't get is the context. Which is that, these "half naked" Africans
live in temperatures so hot that they necessarily have to take some of their
clothes off.

We all know that in summer, when the weather is hot and "the living is easy"
in Europe, it is normal to see some British people walk about in town "half
naked". But we don't see any demeaning articles about them? It is even
considered "fashionable" to expose some flesh in summer. It brings delight
to all, especially the male species.

So then, I ask, what is news about Africans who live all-year round in
temperatures even hotter than the European summer, walking "half naked" in
their villages and trying to get a tan?

To the average Westerner, Africa is just one country where everybody knows
everybody. In fact that is the impression you get from the size of Africa on
an average world map.

Though Africa is said to be the "second largest continent" in the world and
the most variegated, it looks so small on the world map in comparison to the
other continents.

America and Canada together actually look bigger on the world map than
Africa! How this is possible, beats me. Perhaps somebody in this audience
can rescue me on this, how did these cartographers manage to make Africa
look so small on the world map? I look at it, and say no Africa possibly
cannot be the second largest continent in the world?

Whatever the reasons, you can always excuse the ordinary Westerner
(including George Bush the Son) for his inability to pick his Nigerias from
the Ghanas on the map.

But you can't excuse the Western media for treating Africa the way they do,
because the media is not run by average Westerners. Their treatment of
Africa as a small, unimportant place, deserving to be covered by just one
correspondent, or at best two, is inexcusable.

In the past, these "Africa correspondents" were based in Nairobi, Kenya, and
lately in Johannesburg, South Africa.

But how can one correspondent cover the 53 countries of Africa and do the
job well? Britain is the same size as Ghana, where I come from. Can one
correspondent cover Britain, small as it is, and do the job well?

And if you think that Congo alone is bigger than 12 European countries put
together - yes, I have checked my atlas, Congo is bigger than Britain,
Germany, France, Spain, Portugal, Italy, Denmark, Belgium, the Netherlands,
the Republic of Ireland, Switzerland and Croatia all put together, and you
still have four million square miles of Congolese territory to give away to
the sons of King Leopold.

And Congo is not even the largest country in Africa, Sudan is!

Imagine what one correspondent can do if he is assigned to cover Britain,
Germany, France, Spain, Portugal, Italy, Denmark, Belgium, Netherlands,
Ireland, Switzerland and Croatia. And this correspondent is based in the
Irish capital, Dublin, in the far west of Europe. What quality of work will
he or she produce on these 12 countries?

Yet in terms of Africa, these 12 countries translate into just one country -
Congo! Imagine, therefore, the quality of work The Times' correspondent is
producing about the 53 countries of Africa from his base in Johannesburg.


Now let's talk about the Big Five points, and I will start with Historical
Baggage, because it is the one that distresses me most among the five.

On 3 May 1999, George Alagiah, the BBC's former "Africa correspondent",
returning to base in London, after his tour of duty in Africa, wrote a
heart-touching article in The Guardian, which has since become my benchmark
for assessing "historical baggage".

We all know Alagiah to be of Asian origin, but also as a man who spent part
of his childhood in Africa. Let me quote portions of what he wrote:

"For most people who get their view of the world from TV," he began, "Africa
is a faraway place where good people go hungry, bad people run government,
and chaos and anarchy are the norm.

"My job is to give a fuller picture. [But] I have a gnawing regret that, as
a foreign correspondent, I have done Africa a disservice, too often showing
the continent at its worst and too rarely showing it in full flower.

"There is an awful lot of historical baggage to cut through when reporting
Africa: the 20th century view of the continent is, even now, infected with
the prevailing wisdom of the 19th century.

"Take this description of an African from a speech given by the explorer
John Hanning Speke in the 1860s:

'As his father did, so does he. He works his wife, sells his children,
enslaves all he can lay his hands upon and unless fighting for the lands of
others, contents himself with drinking, singing, and dancing like a baboon,
to drive dull care away.'

"It's an ugly thought but I would bet one of my new suits that there are
many out there for whom these words still have resonance...

"I take this personally because I spent part of my childhood in Africa.
After Britain, Africa is probably the place I feel most at home. I know it
to be a place of great passion and variety. Above all, it is a place where
the outsider is forever welcome. In the hardest of times and in the most
desolate of places, I have been greeted with a warm hand and an open heart.

"I had reason to remember this when reporting from Albania recently. I am no
expert on European affairs, and it came as a shock that there was somewhere
as poor as Albania in [Europe].

"But what I found more surprising and disturbing [in Albania] was the lack
of joie de vivre. Whereas even in the most poverty-stricken and politically
oppressed corner of Africa, there is an irrepressible vein of hope and
humour that bubbles to the surface.

"Perhaps this is what Ben Okri had in mind in his poem, An African Elegy:

'We are the miracles that God made/To taste the bitter fruit of time/We are
precious/And one day our suffering/Will turn into the wonders of the earth'.

"It is a noble sentiment but not one you will easily glean from my reporting
[of Africa]. There has been too much of Africans as victims and not enough
showing their daily triumphs against impossible odds..."


Anybody who knows Africa will agree with every sentiment in Alagiah's
article. Yet The Guardian, in its infinite mercy, chose to headline
Alagiah's article: "New light on the Dark Continent".

There you have it! Alagiah is pleading that the Western media should drop
the "historical baggage" nonsense. And yet The Guardian insists on calling
Africa "the Dark Continent" in the very headline of the very article in
which Alagiah is asking for the very "Dark Continent" nonsense to be
dropped!

So where did this "historical baggage" come from? Simple, it comes from
history. My good friend, Milton Allimadi, a Ugandan who edits his own paper
in New York, has traced it all the way to the 5th century when Herodotus
wrote The Histories.

"Europeans in those days," says Allimadi, "regarded the African continent as
backward and inhabited by at worst savages and at best unintelligent and
cruel people."

Never mind the great empires our ancestors built. Never mind that when the
African ancestors were building great pyramids, the ancestors of the Greeks
did not know what a window was.

Anyway, in the 18th and 19th centuries, the journals of the European
travellers became the main medium of disseminating this stereotypical image
of Africa.

As Allimadi has shown in his major series starting in New African next
month: "In the early part of the 20th century, negative characterisations of
Africa were pervasive in American publications such as The New York Times,
National Geographic, Time, Newsweek, The New Yorker and many European
newspapers and magazines."

In 1959, when The New York Times sent Homer William Bigart (a Pulitzer Prize
winner) to cover events in West Africa at the start of the independence era,
he left New York with "historical baggage" coming out of his ears. Bigart
was soon writing back to his foreign news editor, Emmanuel Freedman, after
visiting Ghana and Nigeria, in these words:

"I'm afraid I cannot work up any enthusiasm for the emerging republics. The
politicians are either crooks or mystics. Dr Nkrumah [who was then the
president of Ghana] is a Henry Wallace in burnt cork. I vastly prefer the
primitive bush people. After all, cannibalism may be the logical antidote to
this population explosion everyone talks about."

When The New York Times foreign news editor, Freedman, received those
reports, he was so thrilled that he sent this note back to Bigart:

"This is just a note to say hello and to tell you how much your peerless
prose from the badlands is continuing to give us and your public. By now you
must be American journalism's leading expert on sorcery, witchcraft,
cannibalism and all the other exotic phenomena indigenous to darkest Africa.
All this and nationalism too! Where else but in The New York Times can you
get all this for a nickel?"

Where else, indeed!

But wait for this one from Bigart in 1960, written four weeks before Congo's
independence. He complained to Freedman in a letter from Kinshasa (then
Leopoldville), thus:

"I had hoped to find pygmies voting and interview them on the meaning of
independence but they were all in the woods. I did see several lions,
however, and from Usumbura I sent a long mailer about the Watutsi giants."

Poor bigot (sorry Bigart). Having failed to see any pgymies voting, he chose
to dig deep into his suitcase full of "historical baggage" and came out with
even a winner that thrilled the folks at The New York Times. It was printed
on 5 June 1960 under the headline "Magic of Freedom Enchants Congolese".

Bigart wrote from Leopoldville:

"As the hour of freedom from Belgian rule nears, 'in-de-pen-dence' is being
chanted by Congolese all over this immense land, even by pgymies in the
forest. Independence is an abstraction not easily grasped by the Congolese
and they are seeking concrete interpretations. To the forest pygmy,
independence means a little more salt, a little more beer."

Foreign news editor Freedman loved it! It was him who four years earlier, on
25 July 1956, had written to the then New York Times Africa correspondent,
Leonard Ingalls, in these famous words:

"We read that in Black Africa, where the principle of the wheel was scarcely
known a generation or two ago, there is now a great demand for bicycles, a
trend is underway toward two-bicycle families. Is there a light economic
air-mail feature in the increasing mobility of the aborigines?

"Where do they buy their bikes? What do they cost? How long does it take a
man to earn enough money to buy one? Is his status advanced? Does he have
roads or bicycle tracks, or does he ride through the bush? What is the usual
biking costume - robe, breach-cloth, animal skin or birthday suit? How is
the bicycle business? Are dealers getting rich? Are there bicycle garages in
the bush? What social effects is the bicycle having?"

Historical baggage. It's pure madness!

But nothing has changed since the days of Freedman and Bigart. It still
rules Western newsrooms. After the recent assassination of President Kabila
in Congo, British newspapers could find no appropriate headline than rush
back to the tired, old one: "In the heart of darkness".

Alex Duval Smith, a woman (and women usually know better) wrote from her
African base in Johannesburg for The Independent, the day after Kabila's
assassination. And please listen to this:

"The heart of darkness was never darker. President Laurent Kabila, the
latest in an uninterrupted line of pillagers of a territory the size of
Western Europe is dead. Now the vultures are massing for the next round of
Africa's First World War."

But what has "darkness" got to do with assassinating a president?

If Alex Duval Smith were similarly reporting about the assassination of
President J.F. Kennedy in Dallas (and more than one Kennedy has been
assassinated by the Americans), she would never had dared to describe it in
those "dark" tones.

Yet when it comes to assassinations, the Americans lead the Congolese by a
good mile. From the Kennedys to the Martin Luther Kings and the Malcolm Xs!
But nobody describes America as "a dark" place.

In effect, this is what you get when "historical baggage" rules your head as
a journalist.


Now let's go to National Interest:

By far, national interest is the most important factor that drives the
Western media and determines whether a story is printed or spiked, whether
it is on the front page or buried inside.

African journalism schools tend to put too much emphasis on fair and
impartial reporting, and nothing on national interest. I don't remember
myself ever being told by my journalism teachers in Ghana, about national
interest. We don't have it, do we? It is simply not in the curriculum. But
my 14 years in Britain have taught me that we ignore the importance of
national interest in news coverage at our peril.

As Ronald Spark, former chief lead writer of The Sun put it in 1991: "Truth
is sacred, but a newspaper that tells only part of the truth is a million
times preferable to one that tells the truth to harm his country."

Strangely, you don't get Mr Spark's remarkable insight in any textbook.
Hence, African journalists are full of the idea that was so succinctly put
last year by Kofi Coomson, editor of The Ghanaian Chronicle in Accra.

"The true professional journalist anywhere in the world," he told a media
conference, "will tell you that the relationship between government and the
press should of necessity be adversarial."

I say, if that is true, then "the true professional" Western journalist has
not yet been born. Because the relationship between, for example, the
British media and the government is not, and has never been, adversarial
throughout the centuries.

Rather, there is a thick layer of complementarity between them. The one
supports the other. In fact, they feed on each other for the betterment of
the British nation as a whole.

And the thread that binds them is national interest. Any story that risks
harming the interests of Britain is treated with utmost care, and this care
includes the dustbin. Conversely, any story that enhances Britain's national
interest is given a big play. "Adversarial relationship" does not come in at
all.

This actually fits so well with the "Wolf's Law of Journalism", which says:
"You cannot hope to bribe or twist, thank God, the British journalist. But,
seeing what the man will do unbribed, there is no occasion to."

In fact, it is not only the British journalist who is guilty of this crime,
his American counterpart is equally as bad. Let me quote you some portions
of Victor Marchetti and John D. Marks book, The CIA And The Cult of
Intelligence. They wrote:

"In a recent interview, a nationally syndicated columnist with close ties to
the CIA was asked how he would have reacted in 1961 if he had uncovered
advance information that the Agency was going to launch the Bay of Pigs
invasion of Cuba.

"He replied somewhat wistfully, 'The trouble with the Establishment is that
I would have gone to one of my friends in the government, and he would have
told me why I shouldn't write the story. And I probably wouldn't have
written the story'."

Marchetti and Marks commented: "It was rather fitting that this columnist,
when queried about exposing a CIA operation, should have put his answer in
terms of the 'Establishment' (of which he is a recognised member) since much
of what the American people have learned - or have not learned - about the
Agency has been filtered through an 'old-boy network' of journalists
friendly to the CIA."

"With the pronounced Anglophile bias and envy of Britain's Official Secrets
Act so common among high CIA officials, Robert Amory, former deputy director
of Intelligence, compared the situation to our 'free motherland in England'
where if a similar situation comes up, 'everybody shushes up in the interest
of national security and...what they think is the interest of the free world
civilisation."

The American media, like their Western counterparts, often allow
intelligence agents to write under false names when it suits their national
interests.

"The identities of these 'reporters' are closely guarded secrets," say
Marchetti and Marks. "According to Oswald Johnston's Washington Star-News
report (confirmed by other papers), in 1973 there were still about 40
full-time reporters and freelancers on the CIA payroll.


"In 1960 when the Soviet Union shot down the American U-2 spy plane over
Russia,  Chalmers Roberts, long the Washington Post's diplomatic
correspondent, confirms in his book, 'First Rough Draft', that he and 'some
other newsmen' knew about the U-2 flights in the late 1950s and 'remained
silent'.

"Roberts explains: 'Retrospectively, it seems a close question as to whether
this was the right decision, but I think it probably was. We took the
position that the NATIONAL INTEREST came before the story because we knew
the United States very much needed to discover the secrets of Soviet
missilery'."

Marchetti and Marks continued: "As the date for the [Bay of Pigs] invasion
[of Cuba in 1961] approached, the New Republic obtained a comprehensive
account of the preparations for the operation, but the liberal magazine's
editor-in-chief, Gilbert Harrison, became wary of the security implications
and submitted the article to President Kennedy for his advice. Kennedy asked
that it not be printed, and Harrison, a friend of the President, complied.

"At about the same time, The New York Times reporter Tad Szulc uncovered
nearly the complete story, and the [paper] made preparations to carry it on
7 April 1961, under a four-column headline. But [the paper's] publisher,
Orvil Dryfoos, and Washington bureau chief, James Reston, both objected to
the article on NATIONAL-SECURITY grounds, and it was edited to eliminate all
mention of CIA involvement or an 'imminent' invasion.

"The truncated story, which mentioned only that 5,000 to 6,000 Cubans were
being trained in the United States and Central America 'for the liberation
of Cuba', no longer merited a banner headline and was reduced to a single
column on the front page.

"The New York Times editor, Clifton Daniel, later explained that Dryfoos had
ordered the story toned down 'above all [out of] concern for the safety of
the men who were preparing to offer their lives on the beaches of Cuba'.

"Yet, less than a month after the invasion, at a meeting where he was urging
newspaper editors not to print security information, President Kennedy was
able to say to The New York Times' man, Catledge: 'If you had printed more
about the [Bay of Pigs] operation, you would have saved us from a colossal
mistake'.

"The failure of the Bay of Pigs cost CIA Director Dulles his job, and he was
succeeded in November 1961 by John McCone... In McCone's first weeks at the
Agency, The New York Times got wind of the fact that the CIA was training
Tibetans in paramilitary techniques at an agency base in Colorado, but,
according to David Wise's account in 'The Politics of Lying', the Office of
the Secretary of Defence 'pleaded' with The New York Times to kill the
story, which it did.

"From the days of Allen Dulles, Time magazine had always had close relations
with the CIA. In more recent years, the magazine's chief Washington
correspondent, Hugh Sidey, relates: "With McCone and Helms, we had a set-up
that when the magazine was doing something on the CIA, we went to them and
put it before them... We were never misled'.

"Similarly, when Newsweek decided in the winter of 1971 to do a cover story
on Richard Helms and 'The New Espionage', the magazine, according to a
Newsweek staffer, went directly to the CIA for much of its information. And
the article, published on 22 November 1971, generally reflected the line
that Helms was trying so hard to sell...

"The CIA is perfectly ready to reward its friends. Besides provision of big
news breaks such as defector stories, selected reporters may receive
'exclusives' on everything from US government foreign policy to Soviet
intentions.

"Hal Hendrix, described by three different Washington reporters as a known
'friend' of the [CIA], won a Pulitzer Prize for his 1962 Miami Daily News
reporting of the Cuban missile crisis. Much of this 'inside story' was truly
inside: it was based on CIA leaks."

Some may say, but Marchetti and Marks were writing in 1974, it's pretty old
stuff. I can tell them that nothing has changed in American newsrooms.

During the Kosovo War last year, it was reported by The Guardian that CNN
allowed two CIA men to come and work with them in Atlanta and "look after
the news".

Only last Monday, 19 February, 10 days ago to be precise, William Rees-Mogg,
writing in The Times under the headline, "When Uncle Sam was a drugs runner,
provided a damning example of how national interest still rule American
journalism.

He told of how "the biggest scandal in modern American history" - the Meana
Airport Scandal in Arkansas - was ignored by the big newspapers and TV
networks of America on grounds of national interest, while Monica Lewinsky
was trumpeted as the ultimate scandal to hit America.

The Meana scandal involved "the wholesale route of cocaine importation into
the US in the 1980s", Rees-Mogg wrote. "The cocaine was turned into crack;
the crack epidemic ravaged the black districts of the big American cities as
badly as Aids ravaged the homosexual communities in the same period."

At the time, William Jefferson Clinton was the governor of Arkansas. Somehow
his state government allowed (or just played blind to) planes loaded with
guns from Meana Airport flying to South America, and returning with drugs
that found their way into the black neighbourhoods of America, all under the
watchful eyes of agents of the US Drug Enforcement Agency."

The operation, according to Rees-Mogg, was spearheaded by one Barry Seal who
"flew the weapons in violation of US foreign policy and, in return, the US
federal government secretly allowed Seal to smuggle drugs back into the
US... Seal was [later] murdered by Colombian gunmen while in US federal
custody."

When the Arkansas Congressman, Bill Alexander ("at the time the Democratic
whip in Congress in Washington DC, and the senior Democrat of the House
Appropriations Committee") tried to investigate the Meana Scandal, "his
inquiry was sidetracked both in Arkansas and in Washington".

After Seal's murder, his friend Jerry Parks, a private detective in Little
Rock, Arkansas, became Governor Clinton's security chief in Little Rock,
during the 1992 presidential election campaign.

Later, Parks confessed that "Vince Voster - Bill Clinton's lawyer - paid him
$1,000 in cash for each [drugs] trip".

In 1993, Parks was murdered by two still unidentified gunmen. Later Vince
Voster himself was found dead in a park in Virginia.

Though there is no evidence that directly implicates Bill Clinton in the
affair, "he did not respond," as Rees-Mogg says, "to the concerns that were
expressed to him, by Congressman Alexander and others. He allowed a
catastrophic event to happen."

Yet nobody in America wants to talk about Meana. "The Republican silence is
explained by the fact that Meana was connected to the Iran Contra Affair",
says Ress-Mogg.

The big question is: What did the "free press" of America do with the Meana
story. Remember, national interest was at stake. The US federal government
was at risk of being exposed as having deliberately imported drugs to
destroy the African-American community. The political fallout was
potentially explosive.

So, although some little newspapers ran bits of the story in April 1988,
September 1991, and April 1992, America's finest and heavyweight papers,
magazines and TV networks such as The New York Times, The Washington Post,
Time magazine, Newsweek, CBS ABC and CNN, simply refused to investigate the
story further for publication.

Rees-Mogg says: "It is the US press which should most blame itself. Where
were The New York Times, The Washington Post, Time, Newsweek, or the main
television networks of that period? Virtually silent."

Rees-Mogg finished off his article by saying: "In 1994, I remember reading a
thorough Meana investigation by two American journalists prepared for The
Washington Post; that was never published... In the years, when Clinton was
still a candidate, Meana was not included by The New York Times among 'All
the News That's Fit to Print'."

Does the same thing happen in Britain? You bet!

In June last year, David Leigh, writing in that month's issue of the British
Journalism Review, provided valuable insight into how British journalism is
still manipulated by the intelligence agencies.

He wrote: "The manipulation takes three forms. The first is the attempt to
recruit journalists to spy on other people, or to go themselves under
journalistic 'cover'. This occurs today and it has gone on for years. It is
dangerous, not only for the journalist concerned, but also for other
journalists who get tarred with the espionage brush...

"The second form of manipulation that worries me is when intelligence
officers are allowed to pose as journalists in order to write tendentious
articles under false names. Evidence of this only rarely comes to light, but
two examples have surfaced recently...

"The third sort of manipulation is the most insidious - when intelligence
agency propaganda stories are planted on willing journalists, who disguise
their origin from readers.

"There is - or has been until recently - a very active programme by the
secret agencies to colour what appears in the British press, called, if
publications by various defectors can be believed, 'Information Operations'
or 'I/Ops'. I am - unusually - in a position to provide some information
about these operations."

Leigh went on to show that "false information where the source is disguised"
by the press has been a tool of British intelligence since World War II. He
gave examples of stories planted by the intelligence agencies in various
British papers, including The News of the World, The Observer, The Sunday
Telegraph and The Spectator in which the "sources were members of the MI6".

Leigh continued. "In August 1997, the present foreign editor of The
Independent was also in contact with the MI6 while he was at his previous
post at The Observer. I know, because I became involved in an MI6-inspired
story as a result...

Leigh goes on to show how they "were supplied with a mass of apparently
high-quality intelligence from MI6, including surveillance details of a
meeting in an Istanbul hotel between a pizza merchant [who lived in Glasgow]
and men involved in Iranian nuclear procurement.

"I should make clear," he said, "that we did not publish merely on the
say-so of MI6. We travelled to Glasgow, confronted the pizza merchant, and
only when he admitted that he had been dealing with representatives of the
nuclear industry in Iran did we publish the article. In the story we made it
plain that our target had been watched by Western intelligence.

"Nevertheless, I felt uneasy, and vowed never to take part in such an
exercise again.

Leigh now believes that the British media "ought to come clean about these
approaches, and devise some ethics to deal with them. In our vanity, we
imagine that we control these sources. But the truth is that they are
deliberately seeking to control us."

Now, what does all this amount to? Very simple. It shows that when it comes
to national interest, the so-called "free press" of the West is prepared to
throw every journalistic principle out the window and work with the
government and its agents for the general good of their countries. In
African journalism, this vital ingredient is sadly missing.


Government lead
Contrary to the "fiercely independent" image of the Western media, they
often follow the lead set by their home governments.

For example, if the British or American government targets a particular
country or its leader, and bestows good or bad accolades on it or him, the
Western media obediently follow the lead set by the governments,
irrespective of the facts on the ground.

A good example is Saddam Hussein and Iraq. In the 1980s, when it served
Western interests to use Saddam as a check on Ayatollah Khomeni's Iran,
Saddam was a "good guy" beloved by the West. Britain, America and their
Western allies supplied Saddam's every military need. From the pages and TV
screens of the Western media, dripped fawning articles about Saddam the good
guy.

After the Iran-Iraqi War, when the West had no more need of Saddam, the same
Western governments pronounced him a bad guy. And like sheep, the media
followed the lead set by their governments. Today, the evidence is there for
all to see.

The same thing happens in Africa. During the 1960s, pan-African leaders such
as Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana, Lumumba of Congo, Sekou Toure of Guinea and
others were pronounced bad guys by Western governments, and the media
dutifully followed the lead set by the governments.

Today, Presidents Mugabe of Zimbabwe and Charles Taylor of Liberia have
become Africa's top-shelf  "bad guys" merely on the say-so of the US and
British governments. As expected, the Western media are slavishly following
the lead set by the governments and is reporting Mugabe and Taylor in the
most negative terms.

In contrast, the media's current treatment of Presidents Museveni of Uganda
and Paul Kagame of Rwanda as "new breed African leaders" is also a
reflection of the lead set by the Western governments.

Two days after President Kabila's recent assassination, The Independent
reported that Rwanda "is secretly funded by the CIA", and as a result,
Rwanda "has military operations [in the Congo] far above its means. [It] has
10,000 troops in [the Congo]."

What the paper refused to add is that America has a military base in the
Bugesera district of Rwanda ostensibly to train the Rwandan army. But why is
America still training an army that has 10,000 troops fighting in a
neighbouring country?

In August last year, the African-American Congresswoman for Georgia, Cynthia
Mckinney, attacked the American dirty tricks in Congo, in an interview first
printed by the East African based in Kenya, and later reproduced by New
African:

The Congresswoman said: "It is unfortunate that US policy in Africa has been
such an abysmal failure. It is true that Bill Clinton is the most friendly
US president to Africa in several generations, but how can someone so
friendly end up with such an outrageous, atrocious, horrible policy that
assists perpetrators of crimes against humanity, inflicting damages on
innocent African peoples? The whole world knows that Uganda and Rwanda are
allies of the United States and that they have been given a carte blanche
for whatever reason to wreck havoc in the Congo."

Western NGOs have recently estimated that about 1.7 million Congolese have
been killed in the past three years. But to the Western media, that does not
pass for news so long as the killing is being done by the "good guys"
supported by America and its Western allies.


Ideological leaning
Ideological leaning is another interesting aspect of the media that we never
teach in Africa.

In Britain, the media is split into two ideological halves - "The Tory
Press" and the "The Leftwing (or Labour) Press". I won't bore you with the
details because you already know how on domestic issues, the Tory Press
support the Conservative party and right wing views, and the Leftwing Press
support the Labour Party and leftwing views.

Yet when it comes to international issues that affect the British national
interests, or Western interests, both The Tory Press and The Labour Press
stick up like glue and sing from the same hymn book. Ideological differences
go out the window, and a united front is erected to "bat for Britain" or the
West.

This explains why there is a broad, hyper-negative tone across the British
(and the Western) media in the reporting of President Mugabe and the
Zimbabwe land issue.

The Laws
In African journalism, we pay little attention to the laws of our land. Our
laws were, in the main, inherited from the colonial masters, but while the
British media religiously obey the laws limiting press freedom in Britain,
African journalists don't give a bother. In fact we are not consciously made
aware of any law, apart from the laws of libel.

Britain, at least, has five Official Secrets Acts in force - the 1889 Act,
the 1911 Act, the 1920 Act, the 1939 Act and the 1989 Act.

The 1889 Act was replaced by the 1911 Act, which was supplemented by the
1920, 1939 and 1989 Acts.

The most interesting thing here is that the 1911 Act which is the central
law governing this field today was passed into law in a mere 30 minutes
because "national interest" was at stake.

The MI5 (then called MO5), which was only two years old at the time, played
a huge rule in the drafting and passing of the Act.

A year later, in 1912, the Act was supplemented by the introduction of the
Admiralty, War Office and Press Committee to ostensibly "advise" the press
on sensitive matters of state.

This committee is now known as the Services, Press and Broadcasting
Committee, or, more popularly, the "D-Notice Committee".

It is made up of senior civil servants, government officials and media
executives, including editors.

It is supposed to be "a voluntary system of self-censorship whereby editors
agree not to publish information about subjects relating to defence and the
activities of the security and intelligence agencies". But in reality,
editors break the D-Notice rules at their peril.

From time to time, the D-Notice Committee issues notices to editors of all
national, regional and local media "requesting" them not to publish this or
that, in the "interest of national security".

As a result, it was not until fairly recently (in the late 1990s) that the
British media was able to publish such a mundane thing as the photograph and
name of the head of MI5, or photographs of their buildings in Theobalds Road
in Holborn, central London. Yet British journalists go round giving lectures
about the free press in Britain.

Today, the regime is a lot more relaxed in Britain because the authorities
cannot help as the advent of new technology has made it impossible to keep a
tight lid on "secret Britain".

Until 1992, there were about 50 secret sites in Britain (a good number of
them American military bases and listening posts) were covered by
"D-Notices" and no British editor could publish anything about them. Yet
they had a free press.

Section One of the 1911 Official Secrets Act opens with the pointed
statement: "If any person for any purpose prejudicial to the safety or
interests of the state..."  In 1964, the House of Lords ruled that "the
national interests of the state" were "defined by the government of the day
and not the courts."

Under the Act, "official information" is defined as "anything which relates
to or is used in a prohibited place" or "which is entrusted to a state
employee".

Sir Martin Furnival-Jones, when head of MI5 told the Franks Committee set up
by parliament, that: "It is an official secret if it is in an official
file."

Section 3 of the 1911 Act defines a "prohibited place" as "every building
which the state chooses to define as such."

In addition to the Official Secrets Acts, Britain and all its Western allies
have the Public Records Act which ensures that public records are kept
closed or classified for 30, 40 or 100 years at the discretion of the
government.

The question arising here is: Why does Britain need all these laws? The
answer is simple: The state, like you and I, needs to keep some secrets to
survive. You just cannot wash all your dirty linen in public. And the laws
help in achieving this goal for the general good.

African journalists will have to learn this lesson fast.

In Britain, there is even the Treason Felony Act of 1848 that decrees that
anyone imagining or publishing anything which might lead to the downfall of
the monarch should be deported for life.

Western countries take themselves seriously, and their journalists take
their countries seriously. African governments and journalists sadly do not
take our countries seriously.

In conclusion, while the Western media routinely bend the knee to the laws
limiting press freedom in their respective countries, African journalists
mimic the Western  media in all aspects except protecting national interest,
and the patriotism that makes British journalists "bat for Britain" or the
West.

To think that we can have an unfettered "free press" in Africa, when it
doesn't exist anywhere in the world, is a bad mistake we should redress
quickly.

For years, African journalists ourselves have added to the bad reporting of
Africa by just repeating what the Western media puts out about our continent
and people.

We use the same words, the same style and print the same doom and gloom
stories! In fact, we think that once it is on the BBC or in Newsweek or The
Economist, it must have come from the Son of God himself.

As Mr Alpha Lebbie, a Gambian freelance journalist, wrote in criticising my
last July article on Reporting Africa:  "And frankly," he wrote, "every
journalist needs to know that it is bad news that sells, in as far as news
connotes the bad and ugly."  I nearly wrote back to him saying, Mr Lebbie,
that's why you will ever remain a freelance journalist.

To redress the imbalance, it is desperately important (I can't emphasise it
enough) that African journalists know what our national interests are and
learn to protect them.

If it is good for Britain and other Western countries to have a maze of laws
to keep the media in check, it is equally good for Africa to do the same.
There is no shame in borrowing good ideas. It has worked for them, it will
work for us too.

At the moment, there are no clear cut laws in many African countries about
where press freedom ends and national interest begins.

There are no D-Notice rules, there are no 30-year rule about classified
information (if it is there at all, we don't obey it). In short, we have
this big grey area where anything goes.

Last June, at the height of the Zimbabwe election crisis, a Harare-based
newspaper, the Independent, ran a story about the Mugabe government having
placed a "$72m order for military hardware with China."

This gave The Times (of London) the misplaced satisfaction of writing a
leader comment on 3 June lambasting Mugabe on the basis of the revelations
in the Zimbabwe Independent.

Said The Times: "The privately owned weekly said China North Industries
Corporation, based in Beijing, had been asked to supply hand grenades, rifle
grenades, shoulder-fired rockets and tank ammunition.

"The newspaper said that a 5% down payment had been made in early April. It
quoted from correspondence in its possession which gave the numbers of the
Chinese arms manufacturer's bank account, telegraphic transfer orders and
import licences."

The strange thing is that The Times itself, despite all the press freedom
they claim to have in Britain, could not have printed the same story about
British military imports without first clearing it with the D-Notice
Committee. And the Committee would have certainly turned The Times down
because the story would have been covered by D-Notice.

Yet in Zimbabwe, such an important national security issue like military
imports is fair game. The newspaper did not even stop to think for a moment
about national  security. And The Times of London that should know better,
applauded that crime against the state and people of Zimbabwe committed by
the newspaper.

Need I say more?


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