Redacting: Hidden Violence
The other side of this coin is that much violence is overlooked or hidden in the news media. The recurring, daily violence against women around the world, the hidden, ongoing war between the Turkish government and Kurds, and the regular strafing by helicopters of villagers in central or southern Sudan to clear the way for oil exploration rarely make it into the frames of Western news channels.
There are exceptions. Some commentators write about the ‘Hidden truth of violence against women', or the ‘Hidden violence blighting women's lives'.[1050] Nevertheless, celebrity stories take priority. For instance, in June 2005, CNN, Fox News, NBC, ABC and CBS ‘collectively ran 55 times as many stories about Michael Jackson as they ran about the genocide in Darfur', leading one writer for the New York Times to muse: ‘If only Michael Jackson's trial had been held in Darfur.'[1051] Likewise, the war in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, described by Fergal Keane as ‘Africa's Forgotten and Hidden War',1[1052] supposedly claimed over 6 million lives in two decades, but received limited coverage in Western media. Even a small fraction of this number of casualties in North America or Europe would have received far more global media attention. Consider, for example, the extensive coverage of the lorry attack in Nice on Bastille Day, 2016, as opposed to the near silence regarding the ongoing conflicts and violence in parts of North and sub-Saharan Africa and Yemen. If such violence is covered in the West it is often towards the end of news bulletins in abbreviated reports, or hidden away inside broadsheet newspapers or specialist sections on news internet sites.Journalists repeatedly use the phrase ‘Africa's Forgotten War' to describe these and similar conflicts. Even coverage of violence in Syria and Iraq commonly eclipses most stories from Africa.
At times during 2016 the bombing of east Aleppo or the struggle for Mosul dominated many Western news reports. Aid workers often describe the country where they work as suffering from a ‘forgotten war' as a way to wrench the West's attention onto potential humanitarian disasters. For example, in 2016 Amnesty International described the conflict between Saudi Arabia and the Huthi in Yemen as ‘the Forgotten War'. Over ten years earlier the British development charity Action Aid's chief executive Salil Shetty claimed that ‘Liberia is Africa's forgotten war.'[1053] Or more recently Radio Free Europe described the ‘simmering conflict' in Donbas as ‘Ukraine's Forgotten War' (26 July 2016). Such descriptions and predictions are then used by journalists or NGOs to frame particular conflicts, as they attempt to awaken Western public opinion.Religious leaders have sometimes made use of the ‘forgotten war' motif as a way of pleading for aid, dialogue and peace-making. Under the headline ‘John Paul II Recalls “Forgotten Wars”', the Vatican's international news agency Zenit described how the then pope, during one of his general audiences in Rome, reminded his audience of around 25,000 that, while the media may have forgotten them, there are conflicts ‘lacerating Africa' which are sowing death, hatred and poverty:
From Angola to the Great Lakes, from Congo-Brazzaville to Sierra Leone, from Guinea Bissau to the Democratic Republic of the Congo, from the Horn of Africa to Sudan, there is a long and bitter series of internal conflicts, as well as inter-Nation conflicts which, above all, strike innocent peoples and affect the lives of the Catholic communities.[1054]
Earlier studies show that ‘Third World' coverage in the Western press has a long-term tendency to focus on violence, conflict and disorder. On rare occasions where African conflicts are covered, reports tend to highlight brutality and the predicament of victims.
African countries are often caricatured as isolated places of little hope whose troubles are homegrown, ignoring how inextricably connected the continent is with the rest of the global and political economy. In a brief news report it is hard to investigate whether violence has roots in the colonial divisions of the nineteenth century, the Cold War hostilities of the twentieth century, or the economic power exerted by multinational companies in the twenty- first century. Exceptions can be found in documentaries, weekend newspaper supplements or alternative news websites: but news which focuses on the spectacular or proximate contributes to forgetfulness of other places.The redaction of violent events ‘elsewhere' is the other side of the focus on spectacular violence closer to home. In a well-known piece of research, ‘The Structure of Foreign News',[1055] Galtung and Ruge suggest that if a news story is culturally proximate, concerned with elite nations or elite people, and is negative and unexpected, it is more likely to be selected for coverage by journalistic gatekeepers than a story that is not. While Galtung and Ruge's work has been both criticised and developed, with political, cultural, economic and geographic factors being included in explaining why news tends in the West to ignore African wars, their work is still widely cited; 9/ 11 fulfilled all their criteria, whilst the civil war in the Congo and other chronic violent stories fulfilled few, if any. Journalists rarely reflect formally upon news criteria, relying on ‘gut instinct' and ‘local debate', which has been described as their habitus, doxa or lifeworld: but that does not mean that implicit criteria are not applied. African wars are seen as ‘business as usual' among elite audiences, so senior journalists and editors perceive audience interest as lacking, and such stories fall out of the dominant Western news frames. Even with the apparent democratisation of news, through many internet sites and citizen journalists, Western news organisations remain dominant in many parts of the world because of the economic power they hold, allowing them to dictate what makes it into the news.