Between Africa and the Abyss: Globalization, Media, and the Invisibility of a Continent

Julie A. Silva Graduate Student

Elvin K. Wyly Assistant Professor

Department of Geography Rutgers University 54 Joyce Kilmer Avenue Piscataway, New Jersey 08854-8045

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ABSTRACT

Mass communication, perception, and mental maps are pervasive themes in hu­man geography. Yet the role of globali ­zation on our collective mental maps re­mains poorly understood, raising critical questions of theory and policy as flows of capital , people, and ideas continue to blur the boundaries between local and in­ternational events. This paper analyzes these themes in the context of sub­Saharan Africa, focusing specifically on the civil war in Sierra Leone. The nature of armed conflict in Africa has evolved considerably in recent decades, and the globalization of Western media has al­tered the way the region has been por­trayed. As publishers, editors, and jour­nalists search the globe for material to fill the continuous, 24 hour news cycle, Af­rica has been portrayed as an arena of in­cessant crisis and irrat ional violence­even as coverage has remained selective and partial. To document the paradox of this narrow global outlook, we present a content analysis of the New York Times' coverage of the civil war in Sierra Leone. We suggest that human rights abuses in African wars demand a clearly-articu­lated, theoretically-grounded set of prin ­ciples for media accountability in a world of globalized information flows.

KEY WORDS: Africa, Sierra Leone, globali­zation, media, mental maps.

INTRODUCTION

Globalization, the ubiquitous slogan of the last 20 years, presents an evocative image of dynamic change rippling across the planet as technological innovation ac­celerates and borders are erased. Yet the term is inadequate and misleading, stra­tegically crafted and deployed as a means of deflecting accountability for specific economic and geopolitical decisions. For peripheral regions of the world such as sub-Saharan Africa, this rhetorical trope has real consequences: nothing in the word 'globalization ' acknowledges the role of Western capital and politics in the continent's predicament, as do the more politically charged words of the

1960s and 1970s-imperial ism and neo­colonial ism.

The reality of Africa 's collapse is be­yond dispute. Much of the developing world has fluttered on the outskirts ofthe overheated markets of the industrialized countries, but the African standard of liv­ing has declined in real terms during a pe­riod of buoyant growth and prosperity. Castells (1996) argues that Africa has been effectively marginalized by the na­scent system of informational capitalism, cutting these societies off from ever­important flows of technology and infor­mation . As most of the region endured a severe collapse during the 1980s, the po­larization of rich and poor worsened within countries. Western governments, with little geostrategic interest in the re­gion after the end of the Cold War, re­mained silent on the sidelines. Scholars and policymakers, recognizing the altered terms of debate, no longer discussed Africa's progress but rather its survival (Kaplan, 1996; Peters and Richards, 1998). Robert Kaplan might as well have written the continent's epitaph when he penned, "Africa is falling off the world economic map." (Kaplan, 1996, p. 11). The continent remains invisible-unless the subject is war, disease, famine, or ethnic rivalry; then all eyes turn to Africa.

Unfortunately, this "negative selectiv­ity " in Western media portrayals carries with it a vicious penalty. Africa enjoys few of the benefits of globalization while en­during much of the tragedy, and system­atic failures of the region 's political econ­omy have strained the West's capacity to care. Detailed narratives of crisis no longer find a receptive audience in North America or Europe, and the editorial re­quirements appear to have been ratch­eted upward: bad news from Africa has to be really bad in order to merit serious or sustained attention from the mainstream press. The disappearance ofthe continent from the American and European mental map, in turn, further undermines support for investment or development assis­tance, completing a vicious cycle of geo­graphical and economic erasure.

This paper analyzes Western " geo­graphical imaginations" of African civil

wars in the age of global ization, using the conflict in Sierra Leone as a case study. First we review alternative explanations for the recent increase in armed conflicts over the past decade, and we draw atten­tion to the relationship between Western media and African civil wars. We then conduct a content analysis of newspaper accounts of Sierra Leone's war in order to measure the scope, orientation, and se­lectivity of information presented to American readers. Results suggest a re­markable level of geopolitical marginali­zation, by wh ich events are isolated, di­vorced from historical and geographical context, and interpreted as the latest in­stallments in an inevitable and hopeless African tragedy. To the degree that West­ern investors and governments actively promote and shape the globalization of trade and capital investment, they are morally bound to demand press account­ability in the globalization of media im­ages of the underdeveloped world.

WAR IN THE AGE OF GLOBALIZATION

Conflict is a process and not a one­time event. As such, war is intimately connected to broader societal and eco­nomic contexts at many spatial scales­from the national to the regional to the global (Lee, 1997). Even in Africa, said to have been abandoned by global ization, accelerated flows of trade, migration, and investment have dramatically altered the context for war. Scholarly attention to the increase and changing nature of war in the underdeveloped world emphasizes three broad sets of explanations.

The first and most obvious explana­t ion ties conflict to the increased avail­ability of deadly weapons as the global arms industry has retooled in a rush to find new markets. Pearson (1994, p. 21) identifies the unintended consequence of the peace dividend: "The 1989 Conven­tional Forces in Europe (CFE) Agreement, which closely restricted the number of arms to be deployed on the continent, re­sulted in enough excess equipment in Western Europe to completely saturate the Third World market." The surplus of light-weight weapons made it easier to deploy children as soldiers, enlarging the

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" fighting pool " both of rebel insurgents and ruling regimes. Cross-border flows of weapons increased, creating spillover ef­fects from neighboring civil wars. "Wars in one region generate surplus supplies that can be sold off to other areas, thus precipitating a contagion effect as weap­ons from one war potentially fuel an­other." (Pearson , 1994, p. 26).

A second set of explanations high­lights the link between political instability and environmental degradation (e.g., Lee, 1997). In the 1960s and 1970s, capi­tal -poor nation-states rel ied heavily on debt and aid to pursue import substi­tution and export-led development strat­egies; although some of these efforts succeeded, most in Africa failed, precipi­tat ing a return to aggressive natural re­source exploitation. The resulting ten­sions over land use and land rights sustained broader political conflicts, and sometimes ignited civil wars; Sierra Le­one is simply one example, where intra­class struggle among the political and economic elites has revolved around con­trol of the country's lucrative diamond mines. Some analysts, however, dispute these kinds of interpretations, and argue that environmental degradation is a re­sult of economic and political inequalities rather than a cause (see Lee, 1997, p. 390; ct. Richards, 1996).

Finally, a third set of explanations fo­cuses on political and economic historical circumstances. After a wave of formal in­dependence swept Africa in the 1960s, an exceedingly broad and interdisciplinary literature emerged to evaluate the expe­riences of these new nation-states. Opti­mism faded after the 1970s, as suppos­edly independent countries fell deeper into debt and reliance on trade and in­vestment networks laid down during gen­erations of colonial rule. Scholarly expla­nations of this fate ranged from the simplistic but compelling accusations lev­eled against the British, French , and other European colonial powers, to much more sophisticated analyses of uneven devel­opment, neocolonial dependency, articu­lation of modes of production, and other theories that directly challenged the pre­vailing neoclassical account of compara-

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tive advantage and factor endowments (for some of the best geographical treat­ments, see Amin, 1976; Frank, 1967; Har­vey, 2000; Samatar, 1985; and Smith, 1990).

Each of these sets of publications helps shed light on the intricate history and present condition of Africa and other regions enduring recurrent civil confl ict. In recent years, however, widespread at­tention to the causes and consequences of globalization has ra ised a thorny ques­tion: as trade redraws economic bound­aries between the developed core and the underdeveloped periphery-unleashing capital in the search for low-cost produc­t ion sites-why has most of Africa failed to attract investment and employment? The answer, we suggest, lies in the inter­section of the continent's development trajectory and an intensified Western scrutiny of the world's poorest countries. As real living standards plummeted in the 1980s and civil wars erupted in many Af­rican countries, the discourse of globali­zation was just beginning to gain cur­rency-in part because the term was itself the product of a globalizing service sec­tor. (Harvey, 2000, traces the term to American Express advertising campaigns in the late 1970s.) Moreover, the whole­sale, turbulent restructuring of news me­dia magnified all of these tensions, and portrayed the plight of the periphery in genuinely new ways. Technological pro­liferation created novel distribut ion out­lets and a continuous, 24-hour news cycle with a voracious appetite for "content" of all kinds, including horrific wars and fam ­ines. Dictators tied into the official chan­nels of diplomacy became increasingly media-savvy (Goldberg's 2000 essay re­counts a chilling 1986 tribute by Ronald Reagan to Zaire's President Mobutu, "one of our oldest and most solid friendships in Africa ... ") while the Zapatistas' use of the internet in 1996 has become a legen­dary example of contemporary media tactics for rebel movements. Industry consolidation and intra-subsidiary com­petition blurred the boundaries among news, educational programming, enter­tainment, and shock journalism. The growth of celebrity activism (exemplified

by the famine relief benefit concerts of the 1980s) created new philanthropic ven­ues while sealing the fate of Africa as a " basket case, " until observers suggested that repeated wars and droughts had left Americans in a state of " donor fatigue." Taken together, all of these trends had the effect of pushing Africa into the limelight for the first time-as a hopeless world of poverty, kleptocracy, and war. If the American inheritance of the British colo­nial idiom of "darkest Africa " signified an empty space on our collective mental map during most of the postwar period, the last decade has inscribed a detailed cartography of irrational, inexplicable vi­olence and cruelty.

This, then, is the paradox: a rampant globalization of information that narrows our field of view, and renders large parts of the world mysterious, dangerous, or simply bizarre. And yet the fluid expan­sion of Western media coverage has also had certain predictable consequences. In early 1999 The Economist put a wry twist on the violent clashes:

For a brief moment last week, there was a cease-fire in Sierra Leone's cap­ital Freetown. People there knew about it only because the government had announced it on the BBC's " Focus Af­rica, " a radio program broadcast three times a day from London. They came out into the streets to celebrate. But the rebel commander had also heard the report. Not true, he told the BBC by satellite telephone. Minutes after the third broadcast, the streets were empty (p. 44).

SIERRA LEONE'S CIVIL WAR

With a land area a bit smaller than that of South Carolina, Sierra Leone is situ­ated on the western edge of the broad hu­mid tropical belt south of the Sahel in West Africa (Figure 1). The capital (Free­town) accounts for a tenth of the nation 's total population (4,690,000). The country gained independence from Britain in 1961 , and its key exports are bauxite and diamonds. The familiar roster of geo­graphical trivia takes a disastrous turn,

however, when one considers economic and health indicators: gross domestic product (GOP) per capita is only $140; for­eign debt is $1 .2 billion, twice the annual output of the economy; life expectancy is below 40 years; and the infant mortality rate is an astonishing 169 per 1,000 live births.

Sierra Leone's civil war began in 1991, after more than a decade of economic decline and autocratic rule. The Revolu ­tionary United Front (RUF), an armed in­surgency headed by several exiled intel ­lectuals and aided by the Liberian Army, threatened to mount a war against the government of President Joseph Momoh and the All People's Congress (APC) un­less Momoh agreed to hand over the presidency. The APC had been in power for 23 years, a period marked by collapse in the country's health and educational in­frastructure. Due to low market prices for key exports and economic mismanage­ment, living standards in Sierra Leone had declined dramatically. Initially a very small force , the RUF hired Liberian fight­ers, whose widespread human rights abuses of civilians undermined popular support (Peters and Richards, 1998). The RUF recruited heavily among poorly­educated, unemployed youth; rebel prop­aganda often pinpoints the government's negligence of education as a key basis of armed resistance. The RUF does not pay its soldiers, and thus the troops often en­gage in looting and robbery to provide sustenance for the movement (peters and Richards, 1998). Nevertheless, the RUF portrayed its struggle as a fight for dem­ocratic empowerment against an elite rul ­ing class, and the rebel forces have been able to draw on a broad coalition of mar­ginalized groups. As a consequence, the civil uprising in Sierra Leone did not break along traditional ethnic or tribal lines.

By 1992, widespread conflicts had killed more than 10,000, displaced 300,000, and pushed an additional 200,000 into refugee camps in Guinea (Zack-Williams, 1999, p. 149). Amnesty In­ternational accused both the military and rebel factions of serious human rights abuses. The war drained the government

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\ Nouakcholl

MA U RITANI A

Dakar

Atlantic Ocean

. SIERRA LEONE

MAL I

Bamako •

C o T E I V 0 IRE

Abidjan

L IB E R I

o 250 Miles I

FIGURE 1. Sierra Leone in the context of west Africa.

treasury and military salaries went un­paid. In April 1992, a group of relatively unknown military officers, led by Captain Valentine Strasser, deposed Momoh. Strasser governed Sierra Leone until ci­vilian elections in March 1996. During Strasser's leadership, competing rebel factions continued to mount attacks in the interior of the country. For a short period, the government forces lost control of the valuable Kono diamond mines (see Fig­ure 1). The military sought help from the British, and finally, a South African-based mercenary army delicately named Exec­utive Outcomes. The mercenary army succeeded in securing the diamond mines, but were unable to crush the re­bellion in the interior of the country.

Ahmed Tejan Kabbah, a former United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) official, was elected President in March 1996. His government lasted a brief 14 months. The need to comply with

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IMF regulations forced Kabbah to cut food subsidies given to the army. Grow­ing discontent among military ranks forced the Kabbah government to rely more and more on the Kamajors, a civil­ian group of traditional hunters who had mobilized to protect rural areas, and later, the capital. The army resented the Ka­major forces. On May 25, 1997, rebel forces ousted the civilian government.

The West was slow to intervene in the chaos and bloodshed that followed. A Nigerian-led peacekeeping force known as ECOMOG restored the democratically elected government of Kabbah but it could not flush out all the rebels. The re­maining RUF factions hid in the interior of the country and periodically attacked vil ­lages in government controlled territory. In January 1999, RUF rebels again man­aged to take control of sections ofthe cap­ital city Freetown. ECOMOG troops pushed them back but the fighting contin-

ues amidst staggering civilian casualties. Rather than diminishing, the war is in­creasing in numbers and intensity (Peters and Richards, 1998). Moreover, as the war has continued, both the RUF and govern­ment forces have recruited children in combat. Children as young as nine years old were trained and forced to endure all of the risks of mobilization and direct combat (Zack-Williams, 1999).

On July 7,1999, the Sierra Leone Gov­ernment and the rebels signed an agree­ment to end hostilities and form a gov­ernment of national unity. This ceasefire agreement was known as the Lome Peace Accord, named after the Togolese city where it was signed. As part ofthe agree­ment, Foday Sankoh became Sierra Le­one's Vice-President. Unfortunately, San­koh continued to mobilize rebel forces. In October 1999, the United Nations Se­curity Council established the United Nations Mission in Sierra Leone (UNAM­SIL). The goal of the mission was to help the government implement the Lome Peace Accord. Yet, by May of the follow­ing year, the Peace Accord had crumbled, 500 U.N. peace keepers had been taken hostage, and Sankoh was again in police custody.

British forces are currently stationed in Sierra Leone, and the United Nations Se­curity Council passed a resolution insti­tuting an embargo on the nation's dia­monds. The United States brought its policy into line with the U.N. resolution through a Presidential Executive Order banning the importation of rough dia­monds from Sierra Leone, issued in the barrage of last-minute actions on Bill Clin­ton's last day in office in January, 2001 (Clinton, 2001). Funds from the diamond trade are widely believed to finance the rebels' operations and procurements of weapons. Meanwhile, the fighting continues.

THE NEW YORK TIMES' PORTRAYAL OF THE CONFLICT

Our account of Sierra Leone's civil war was necessarily brief and synthetic, dis­tilled as it was from a diverse selection of secondary sources. Daily news accounts of the conflict, by contrast, are based on

field reporters' intimate familiarity with the details of a fast-changing and violent situation. Yet reporters and editors must filter this information for consumption by Western audiences with limited under­standing of distant, complex circum­stances. The pressures confronting jour­nalists in the field , and the constraints faced by editors in the newsroom, place severe limits on the scope, depth, and complexity of coverage. It is our conten­tion that these constraints reflect and re­inforce the distorted worldview in the collective American mental map. The re­sulting journalism provides richly de­tailed accounts of the latest rebel ad­vances, but does little to illuminate the causes and consequences of the conflict. This dynamic explains the paradox of in­creasingly selective and partial news cov­erage in an age of incessant hype about globalization .

To test this hypothesis, we conducted an analysis of the New York Times' cov­erage of the Sierra Leone conflict. We se­lected a 12-month time period, balancing the need for a manageable research task with the need to gain a comprehensive view of how different events have been portrayed . For the purposes of this study, we analyzed a single publication rather than a random sample of news outlets. In light of its broad circulation and influence among U.S. and international policy an­alysts, the New York Times provides an essential barometer of Western media coverage. The Times mentioned Sierra Leone 103 times between April 9, 1998 and Apri I 1, 1999. Figu re 2 classifies these references by type of coverage. Most ref­erences to Sierra Leone were found in ar­ticles that mentioned the nation briefly while reporting on a different subject or on the "world briefs" page. For example, Pope John Paul II mentioned Sierra Leone in a mass he gave in Mexico. Therefore, this article appeared during a search through the Times archives but it did not contribute to the focus of this paper. A to­tal of 28 articles, each averaging approx­imately 600 words in length, reported specifically on the Sierra Leone conflict; these articles were read, and a content analysis designed to gauge the scope,

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References 31%

Letter to Editor 5%

Other 5%

Briefs 31%

Articles 27%

FIGURE 2. Categories of Sierra Leone coverage in the New York Times. (Source: Authors' analyses of New York Times coverage between April 9, 1998 and April 1, 1999).

depth, and emphasis of each article was documented (see Table 1 for a complete list of the items analyzed). Table 2 sum­marizes the findings from our content analysis instrument, which was a simple array of binary, "yes/no" questions re­garding the content and focus of each article.

RESULTS

The results ofthis analysis are striking. Taken as a whole, the Times coverage of Sierra Leone tends towards the strategic and military: articles usually recount the most recent strategic advances of the var­ied warring factions, or detail the military tactics used in different skirmishes. Rela­tively little attention is paid to the sys­temic roots of the conflict, or its wide­ranging consequences for groups and civil society. Even those articles that dis­cuss human rights violations usually present them in isolation, thereby rein­forcing Western stereotypes of mindless African brutality. More than 60 percent of the articles carried an explicitly negative headline, ranging from the measured, ob­jective tone ("Hundreds die fleeing Sierra Leone, officials say," in an unsigned Reu-

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ters dispatch from April 8, 1998) to the compassionate lament (Jan Goodwin 's "Sierra Leone is no place to be young," on February 14, 1999). There is every in­dication that th is tone has worsened since the time period included in our study, and pervades other venues for discussion of the conflict. James Traub, writing in the June, 2000 New York Review of Books, begins his magisterial review of the best scholarly histories of the subject this way: "Sierra Leone is a tiny West African coun­try famous now only for its evil." (Traub, 2000, p. 61). Even in the highbrow New York Review, the art and science of craft­ing headlines requires the painfully con­cise: Traub's (2000) piece is titled simply, "The worst place on Earth."

Other findings from our analysis shed light on different facets of the Western geographical imagination of Sierra Leone and the rest of sub-Saharan Africa. Fewer than half of the articles quoted an African, and fewer than 40 percent quoted anyone from Sierra Leone; journalists are equally likely to quote Western analysts or aid workers. Only one article discusses the economic roots of the conflict (which lie in the complex, long-running struggle for

•

TABLE 1 New York Times Article Database, April 9, 1998-April 1, 1999

Publication date Headline Byline Words

April 9 1998 Hundreds Die Fleeing Sierra Leone, Reuters 309 Officials Say

May 13 1998 US Reportedly Backed British Mercenary Raymond Bonner 1,001 Group in Africa

May 201998 UN Gives its Big Grants f rom Big Ted Barbara Crossette 706 Turner Gift

June 51998 When Children are Soldiers Editorial 628 June 301998 In West Africa, a Grisly Extension of Rebel Barbara Crossette 1,474

Terror August 2 1998 A Policy of Mutilation Barbara Crossette 145 October 20 1998 24 Linked to Coup Execution in Sierra Reuters 202

Leone December 21 1998 Sierra Leone Rebels Gain Reuters 164 December 261998 Fighting is Reported in the North of Sierra Reuters 497

Leone December 27 1998 Violence on the Rise in Sierra Leone AP 360

Rebellion December 281998 Peacekeepers Battle Rebels in Sierra Reuters 124

Leone January 7 1999 Armed Rebels Rampage in Sierra Leone AP 521

Capital January 8 1999 Sierra Leone Rebels Assault Capital AP 483

District January 11 1999 A.P. Television Producer Killed in Sierra AP 281

Leone January 12 1999 Sierra Leone Rebels Kidnap 2 More Ital ian Agence France-Presse 466

Missionaries by Trickery January 12 1999 UN Monitors Accuse Sierra Leone Judith Miller 910

Peacekeepers of Killing January 13 1999 Seirra Leone in Cease-fire Reuters 144 January 14 1999 2 Missionaries Rescued from Sierra Leone AP 305

Rebels January 15 1999 Rebels in Sierra Leone Proposing a Cease- AP 397

fire January 16 1999 Sierra Leone in New Fight over Roles of AP 328

Aid Groups January 19 1999 Sierra Leone Rebels Start Truce with a AP 537

Warning January 21 1999 Q&A: The Rev. John Thompson; Battling Donna Green na

for Children 's Lives amid a War January 261999 A Brutal War's Machetes Maim Sierra Norimitsu Onishi na

Leone January 28 1999 January Toll in Sierra Leone is put at 2,700 Agence France-Presse 234 January 31 1999 What War has Wrought: Sierra Leone's Norimitsu Onishi 1,616

Sad State February 41999 Saving Sierra Leone, at a Price Elizabeth Rubin 1,224 February 7 1999 Sierra Leone Exodus Grows Agence France-Presse 129 February 14 1999 Sierra Leone is No Place to be Young Jan Goodwin 2,385

(Source: New York Times) .

TABLE 2 Content Analysis of New York Times Coverage of Sierra Leone Conflict,

April 9, 1998 through April 1, 1999

Is the headline generally negative in tone? Are women mentioned in the lead paragraph? Are men mentioned in the lead paragraph? Is the Sierra Leone conflict the main focus of the story? Does the article

provide background information on the conflict? discuss economic causes of the conflict? discuss ethnic tensions behind the conflict? describe the general economic conditions of the country? quote an African? quote an African from Sierra Leone? quote a Western specialist or aid worker? discuss how the conflict affects women and children? describe human rights abuses? describe women's human rights abuses? describe the types of atrocities committed or alleged? mention women specifically when describing atrocities? mention children specifically when describing atrocities? include estimates of the number of war casualties? include estimates of the number of female casualties? include estimates of the number of male casualties? include estimates of the number of child casualties? mention corruption? mention legacy of colonialism? speculate that the conflict will conti nue far into the future? link the conflict to unrest elsewhere in Africa? urge Western intervention? mention investor climate or business environment?

(Source: Authors' analysis of 28 New York Times articles) .

Yes No

23 5 0 28 7 21

21 7

14 14 1 27 1 27 6 22

12 16 11 17 12 16 7 21

13 15 6 22

17 11 7 21 9 19

10 18 2 26 1 26 0 28 3 25 0 28 7 21 5 23 2 26 0 28

control over the diamond trade), and only a handful of stories describe the general economic conditions of the country. Gen­der issues are also absent from most cov­erage. Not one of the articles mentioned women in the lead paragraph . Almost half of the articles discuss human rights abuses, but fewer than one-quarter men­tion the widespread violence against women and children. In conflicts with a high proportion of civilian casualties, press attention to the strategic and mili­tary facets of war essentially hides the ef­fects of violence on families and com­munities (Tickner, 1999). Dead children and raped women serve as shock value in a weird, brutal war (note that more than

one-third of the stories mention children when describing atrocities) but there is lit­tle reporting on the consequences for women and children as members of so­ciety-as victims, mothers, widows, sis­ters, and orphans.

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It is crucial to understand what is and is not being claimed here. The intent of this research is not to diminish the bru­tality of the civil war in Sierra Leone, or to criticize journa lists working under ter­rible conditions to document the intricate and bloody web of attacks and retribu­tion. The findings simply suggest that a long history of Western ignorance of Af­rica makes it extremely difficult for re­porters or editors to explain the how and

why after they have fin ished writing their accounts of the latest barrage of atroci­ties. Press coverage descends into a world of the macabre and mysterious. Of the 21 stories focusing directly on the Si­erra Leone war, four-fifths carried explic­itly negative headlines; approximately two-thirds of these negative stories pro­vided background information on the his­tory or circumstances of the conflict. By contrast, articles with more neutral head­lines were equally likely to provide con­textual information (two articles did, two did not) . Put another way, 12 of the 14 ar­ticles providing background information carried negative headlines. Although our sample size is too small to support any rigorous conclusions, these results may reflect a tendency to allocate in-depth coverage of background circumstances only to those events judged to be suffi­ciently shocking to cry out for some kind of explanation . Unfortunately, the tor­tured postcolonial history of Sierra Leone provides only too many such examples. The single most frequent reference in the articles analyzed was to the types of atrocities committed or alleged. Almost half provided information on human rights violations, and more than one-third included estimates of the number of war casualties.

Any reader following the New York Times between April , 1998 and April, 1999 would have seen a succession of shocking headlines for stories detailing the atrocious violence of competing fac­tions in a war in which the United Nations attempt to restore order and move "to­ward democracy has disintegrated, as practically everything seems to do in Si­erra Leone." (Traub, 2000, p. 61). But readers would see few references to the complex postcolonial history behind the current war-unless the atrocities de­manded some kind of rational explana­tion . There would be not a single refer­ence to the English colonial legacy. An incessant barrage of shocking words and images reflects and reinforces the West­ern mental map of Africa as a brutal and irrational world , in which the fighting has become so fierce because the stakes are so low. Globalization has broadened

historically national problems to the re­gional, continental, and worldwide scale. But explanations of these problems re­main surprisingly parochial : what is viewed as an unacceptable and intolerable human rights situation in Europe is dis­missed as tragically inevitable in Africa.

CONCLUSIONS

Reflecting on the science and specta­cle of video game-like smart bombs and live CNN feeds of midnight missile at­tacks on Baghdad, Neil Smith (1992) fa­mously declared the Gulf War the "first GIS war." Today we might well be wit­nessing the advent of the "infoedutain­ment war," where media conglomerates survey the globe to fill their content port­folios while achieving the proper balance of description and analysis. Unfortu­nately, some parts of the world seem to be judged beyond rational explanation. Nigeria's elected president, Olusegun Obasanjo, captures the problem when he asks, "What is it that Americans call Af­rica? A 'basket case'? And why is it a bas­ket case? How did it come to be this bas­ket case?" (quoted in Goldberg, 2000, p. 13). Unfortunately, any place tarnished with this label is, by definition, beyond the realm of explanation and (Western) understanding. Media coverage of the basket case evolves into a macabre im­age of disasters of unknown origin .

The content analysis of press coverage of the Sierra Leone war presented and evaluated in this study, based on a full year's worth of stories published in one ofthe nation's preeminent newspapers, is sobering . The quality of coverage of mili­tary and strategic facets of the conflict, in­cluding the staggering variety of ways people can be killed or mutilated, is un­paralleled; but intense pressures in the field and the newsroom, and the per­ceived apathy of American readers, im­pose severe limits on attempts to explain why. Only a handful of articles hazard any sustained attempt at explaining the roots of the war. The American mental map is inscribed with an image of yet another mindless African tragedy. Moreover, this is not simply a matter of the distinction between reporting and analysis: for years,

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the daily editions of the Times and scores of other newspapers have devoted con­siderable space and resources to lengthy, careful explanations of an equally com­plex history of equally tragic violence. It is simply unacceptable for press cover­age of Europeans (even in the obscure corners of the former Yugoslavia) to la­ment atrocities as inevitable or inexpli­cable. Sadly, Western media coverage of African wars renders Africans invisible: in some strange way, Americans try to un­derstand the Armani -clad evil of Milo­sevic, while Zaire's Mobutu and Sierra Leone's Foday Sankoh are beyond com­prehension-as mysteriously evil as Pol Pot or Idi Amin.

Globalization is a struggle over geog­raphy: who gets to define it, to use it, and for what purposes. To the degree that we now live in a world of globalized flows of people, capital , and products, it is essen­tial to forge principles for the global flows of information that reflect, sustain, and explain these interdependencies. In no way do we mean to advocate any kind of effort to control, or even to influence, the substantive content of press coverage of wars in Africa or elsewhere. Rather, we wish to open debate on the foundational principles ofthe Western media generally and the American press in particular. To the degree that publishers, editors, and reporters revere the public's right to know, globalization has advanced a welcome outpouring of description and documentation across the world, into many places that were once completely ignored by general media outlets. Butthe public's right to understand distant, com­plex events is recognized only when trag­edy strikes a society or culture where an easy explanation will suffice-or where, as in the case of the Balkans, the image of Europeans committing mindless atroc­ities cannot go unexplained. Ultimately, if the advocates of globalization are correct and we do live in an age of information and knowledge, then media accountabil­ity requires a clearly-articulated set of principles by which we construct our geo­graphical understanding ofthe world. It is necessary to document and understand the achievements, and the violence, of all

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societies. There are tragic wars and shocking genocides, but there are no bas­ket cases.

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Frank, A. 1967. Capitalism and Underdevelop­ment in Latin America. New York: Monthly Review Press.

Goldberg, J . 2000. " A Continent's Chaos." New York Times Magazine, May 21 , 13- 14.

Harvey, D. 2000. Spaces of Hope. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Kaplan , R. 1996. The Ends of the Earth. New York: Random House.

Lee, S. 1997 . " Not a One-Time Event: Environ­mental Change, Ethnic Rivalry, and Violent Conflict in the Third World." Journal of En­vironment and Development, 6(4) : 365- 396.

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