African Media and Conflict
By Abiodun Onadipe and David Lord
Part Three - Strengthening the Media in Conflict
In Parts One and Two of this paper we have tried to situate the media within society by highlighting its role in Africa's prevalent conflicts. Below we look at possible options for further development of the media in Africa, particularly in relation to analysing and responding to different levels of conflict. These suggestions primarily stem from Conciliation Resources' media-related activities in Africa and elsewhere to date supported by comments and suggestions of media practitioners who have been involved in those activities, especially during the series of consultations with journalists and other organisations working with the media.
It should be noted that there is a wide range of approaches and specific types of expertise available to media practitioners seeking to increase their understanding and capability to deal with conflict, including professional training organisations or those with training mandates such as the Thomson Foundation, Panos Institute, Radio Netherlands and the International Federation of Journalists. There are also organisations dedicated to supporting independent media development, such as the Zambia Institute of Mass Communication Educational Trust, the Independent Journalism Centre in Nigeria, the Media Institute of Southern Africa and the Institute for War and Peace Reporting, to name a few.
There are also a number of journalists' protection organisations: Reporters sans Frontieres, the Committee to Protect Journalists; and human rights organisations of considerable relevance to journalists, including Article 19, Amnesty International, and Human Rights Watch. Conflict resolution organisations with a specific media focus, such as Search for Common Ground, are another resource, as are more general conflict resolution organisations such as Conciliation Resources, the African Centre for the Constructive Resolution of Disputes, the Nairobi Peace Initiative, and Vuleka Trust.
The first step in determining the needs of African communicators should be for them to assess what their priorities are within their own particular environments. Based on local training experiences and other input from African media practitioners, it is possible to identify several general areas of relevance to media development in Africa:
- specific professional training;
- opportunities to explore important issues in greater depth;
- technological development;
- and institutional development.
These needs have been borne out by the assessment Conciliation Resources completed in collaboration with journalists’ associations in Africa.
Underlying these preoccupations have been the historical lack of professional training, day-to-day economic and technical constraints that make the African media's work extremely difficult and, at times, impossible, and over-dependence on non-African sources of expertise, technology and information.
Training
As the processes of information-gathering and communicating are complex and ever-changing, working journalists need to constantly sharpen and upgrade their expertise. However, the vast majority of African journalists go through their careers without any formal training, mainly because the costs are prohibitive to the journalist or their employer, and because training opportunities that do exist come sporadically and lack continuity in content and participation.
In addition, capable, seasoned journalists are scarce and their impact diluted in the proliferating, ephemeral media outlets in many countries. Many younger African journalists, who have suffered from the decline in educational standards in recent years, need basic training in language and communications skills, particularly where they are working in a second or third language. Those who have had a poor formal education and no real training in journalism before they entered the profession are the most disadvantaged. Much the same can be said about media managers and technicians who lack basic training and opportunities to upgrade their proficiency in hundreds of organisations throughout the continent.
Another factor is the culture of disinterest in training among many editors and top media managers, which has had a demoralising effect on editorial and other staff. The lucky few who get to attend training courses are usually unable to impart their newly acquired skills to other members of their organisations. This short-sightedness of media managers needs to be overcome to ensure that the impact of training on individuals has a wider benefit within organisations. In fact, it is readily apparent that professional training should not be limited to basic training and specialised skills acquisition, but should also focus on those in mid-career.
Training needs vary enormously between individuals, but some basic categories are writing and editing skills, news values, coverage planning, interviewing and investigative techniques, photojournalism, layout, programme editing for electronic journalists, media ethics, legal frameworks, marketing and distribution. With many of the basic skills lacking, more specialised tasks suffer such as political reporting, conflict reporting, legal affairs, financial and economic reporting, and social development reporting.
The need to train journalists in the use of technology cannot be overemphasised. "Many journalists are not computer-literate, talk less of accessing the Internet. Ghana Broadcasting Corporation (GBC) news is posted on the Web," said one GBC radio reporter in Ghana, "but we don’t know how to use it. It is very unfortunate." Training for broadcasters is often considered unattractive because of the cost of equipment needed for such courses and the necessary equipment is not available in most radio stations to facilitate in-house training.
In severe conflict situations, very few working journalists have had exposure to any kind of war reporting training, any instruction on how to protect themselves and their sources in a conflict situation, instruction in how humanitarian law and human rights law should apply in conflicts and how conflict resolution theory and practice can be of relevance to the media and the events they are covering. The opinion of one Liberian journalist about the performance of the media during the Liberian civil war bears noting: "As we in Liberia have had no formal training in providing coverage in [the Liberian] conflict....necessity has been the mother of invention. Pretty dangerous."
Where non-journalists are involved in communicating issues related to conflict, or seeking to make their voices heard in a conflict situation, co-operation with media professionals and technical training can also be crucial to maximise the impact of the message. This can involve working with local groups and local media in planning and producing community public affairs programming aimed at issues such as development or reconstruction priorities, inter-group relations, reconciliation, local governance and public participation issues, conflict and conflict resolution.
Training Outputs
One vehicle for improving professional output is short-term, focused training through workshops that reach substantial numbers of media practitioners. The experience of Conciliation Resources and others in training exercises with the media has shown that integrating professional skills training -- practices of collecting, editing, and disseminating information -- with discussion and hands-on work with substantive policy issues -- such as election or constitutional coverage, governance issues or developmental priorities and practices -- is one of the most effective training methods. This is mainly so because such exercises provide journalists with the space and time to reflect on the broad context within which they work, brings together peers with valuable insights to share, and involves hands-on learning rooted in the issues of the day.
Effective learning processes for working journalists are a rarity. Many people attend short courses or seminars but do not benefit from them because of their content and the process used. Ideally, seminars should be organised for small groups so that there is a high level of interaction and participation by those in attendance. Elicitive techniques -- drawing on the existing skills, experiences and insights of participants and facilitating discussion of improved practice, alternative perspectives and evolving subject areas of public interest -- appear to be considerably more effective in engaging participants and enabling a more profound learning experience, than prescriptive teaching techniques, in which participants are merely presented with information.
The optimal structure of training sessions depends on a range of variables such as the number of participants, existing skills levels, availability and interest, the range of subject matter to be discussed, and the possibility of further training in particular areas -- all of which can be determined at the planning stages, with major input from potential participants. One important aspect of the workshop approach to training is the need for follow-up and refinement of lessons learned when the media practitioner is back on the job. To provide continuity and support in the workplace one possible option is the establishment of mentoring systems, whereby senior practitioners agree to be "on-call" to provide professional advice and constructive criticism to a number of junior colleagues. This could involve overseeing their output, transmitting their own skills, and suggesting areas for further development related to previous training. This kind of on-the-job support could provide continuity and reinforcement of the initial training and a means of monitoring its impact and shortcomings. Another option is to split workshop learning into modules -- two or more segments, if necessary -- with intervals of several weeks or months in between, where issues tackled in the first segments are adequately followed up and fully discussed.
Workshops can also provide opportunities for bringing together professionals from different areas within a country and within regions to share experiences and broaden their knowledge of relevant professional and contextual developments. International participation of trainers and other specialised resource persons is also a means of improving comparative information-sharing, international networking and broadening the perspectives and knowledge base of local practitioners and the outside specialists.
On policy issues, substantive briefs can be developed from the discussions within workshops and seminars. These can be tailored to the local context and the specific concerns of working journalists in relation to the particular issue, but draw on comparative experiences and background information from the region and elsewhere. Such briefs provide a record of the substantive issues discussed, serve as a reference on particular issues and are a means of reaching journalists and others unable to attend individual workshops.
One approach to closing the training gap for African journalists is to increase the available pool of competent trainers in both professional practice and conflict issues, so that support is readily available for individual media organisations, professional associations, networks and freelancers. Ideally, working journalists, managers and technicians should have a choice of affordable, accessible, high- quality training opportunities, which are tailored to local conditions and individuals’ professional level of development.
Improved Conflict Analysis
In various parts of Africa, communicators attempt to deal with a wide variety of issues directly affecting the lives and livelihoods of millions of people. At one extreme are countries caught up in widespread violent conflict, social dislocation and economic upheaval. At the other end of the spectrum are societies in which a climate exists for social and economic development, as well as general respect for human rights. Ranged between these two poles are societies facing different levels of intensity of institutional repression, violence, inequality and blocked opportunities.
Whatever the relative degree of peace within a society, conflict -- and the potential for conflict to escalate -- exists. At the national level in Africa, broad conflict categories can include governance and political organisation issues, democracy and pluralism, corruption and accountability, economic disparities, ethnicity, competition for natural resources, conflicts over development and environmental priorities, ethnic and religious competition, gender and inter-generational issues.
Although journalists are constrained by time, editorial space, mobility and a range of other factors in what gets on air or into print, minimalist reporting is generally insufficient for the general public or decision makers to become adequately informed of the events and personalities affecting their perspectives and options. On the other hand, it would be a virtually impossible task for any journalist to adequately contextualise important events or trends if the objective is to understand and take into account: historical events; ideological positions; judicial/constitutional structures and practices; institutional structures and practices; structures/processes for accumulating or redistributing wealth; political alliances, elite networks and social exclusions; characteristics of civil society in general, elite networks and social exclusions; human geography and demographics; relative economic and social well-being, economic opportunity, educational opportunity, access to social services, access to justice. Somewhere between the superficial and minimalist and the wide scope of knowledge and understanding portrayed above, communicators can and should be provided with opportunities to explore the multitude of influences on the day-to-day events they report on.
Specific conflict analysis can be almost as broad when one looks at the origins of a particular conflict, its nature, characteristics and impacts, the main internal and external participants, their positions and known interests, the possible negative outcomes, and existing mediatory mechanisms or processes.
For those who have taken on the responsibility of reflecting African societies, few opportunities exist for focussed discussion and debate on these types of issues and trends or for cross-fertilisation of ideas about the media's role in rapidly changing African societies. The view, however, persists that African journalists -- and even those displaced by violent conflicts -- are well aware of the causes of conflicts and their background, as well as their short- and long-term implications. The question is, to what use is this knowledge shared and used?
One option for improved discussion and analysis of crucial policy issues is local, regional or national fora, either exclusively for media practitioners, or which bring media practitioners together with experts in other fields. Such structured fora could include expert local or international resource people and provide a space for in-depth examination of near- and longer-term issues.
Another option is the combining of professional training for working journalists with a specific substantive focus on local, national, and international conflict issues, their causes, consequences and possible means of resolution or transformation.
Technological Development
Technology is altering the work style of journalists: changes in style affect content, and changes in the content presented to the viewers, listeners and readers ultimately alter their view of the world. As pointed out earlier in this paper, many African media organisations lack the resources to equip their personnel adequately for even routine assignments. Equipment such as tape recorders, cameras, facsimile machines, word processing and graphic design and layout equipment -- which should enhance the output of journalists -- are in short supply or unavailable. Training in the use and maintenance of new equipment is also largely non-existent.
In extreme conflict situations, other facilities such as satellite phones, armoured vehicles and body armour, which lessen the risks of physical harm to journalists are generally not options for the resource-strapped African media.
While there has been increasing use of technology in African media, particularly the shift from the hot-metal mode of production to computer-based desktop publishing which, in theory, should give journalists more control over their copy and allow up-to-date news, further technological advances are hampered by the weak financial situation of media producers, as well as unreliable power supplies, high maintenance costs and absence of back-up systems and dependable alternatives. A depressing fact on the technology issue is that new information and communications technology has had the effect of concentrating power in the hands of increasingly few media owners -- more and more, Western-based multinationals are controlling the means of communication through satellite and computer technology.
It would be ideal if more African newspapers could publish their products on the Internet for wider international circulation, but the limited capacity of national telephone companies to provide adequate telecommunication services and the high costs of satellite transmission are restricting access. Repressive governments are also wary of allowing international outlets for what they perceive as negative news.
Having said that, there is a growing group of national newspapers on the Internet and international organisations, such as the World Bank and UNESCO, have been active in encouraging and supporting this development. Panos Institute is actively involved in assisting newspapers to publish on the Internet by setting up a Website for that purpose and providing skills training for journalists.
The liberalisation of broadcast media in many African countries has had a positive impact on acquisition and use of new technology as the state-owned radio and television stations have had to respond to competition from the innovative ‘new generation’ stations. Changing transmitters, and replacing other aging equipment became a priority for national stations.
Yet, much more needs to be done to extend the use of media technology in Africa. Veteran reporter, author, educator and journalism trainer Michael Wolfers has suggested that what is needed is to pinpoint the starting line and focus attention on what is needed, rather than proceeding willy-nilly by providing new technology on an arbitrary basis. Determining the starting line involves a careful audit of available media resources and their current uses or misuses. This could be followed by "appropriate optimisation" of the use of these resources, building on what is in place and appropriate to the tasks at hand.
Institutional Development: Exchanges
Institutional development of the media in Africa involves people, organisational structures, and processes of interaction between people and structures at different levels. It also involves putting in place or consolidating independent or interdependent capacities to provide professional support for individual media practitioners, their professional organisations, other relevant non-governmental organisations and academic institutions involved in training. Monitoring and evaluating overall development of the profession, in part, through academic research, is also part of the equation.
In general, institutional development has focused on professional associations and other non-governmental and governmental bodies that have direct or indirect impacts on the media. Institutions and networks that consider, promote and maintain quality standards in the media have made a positive difference in terms of journalistic quality. However, development of these types of institutions has been extremely uneven in Africa. At the governmental level, the grouping of three West African states -- Liberia, Guinea and Sierra Leone -- into the Mano River Union, has failed to become a focus for media collaboration in these countries, despite the interconnectedness of history, ethnicity, economics and the various severe conflicts within the region. In comparison, the Southern African Development Community has been instrumental in fostering media development through support for training and training institutions and other activities.
Specific areas of institutional development remain: the strengthening of regional and national media associations; development of independent and indigenous professional codes of practice; legal defence funds; the creation of enabling environments for equal opportunities for ethnic, religious, political, social and gender groups; regional networks for the sharing of professional information; added support for academic institutions involved in communications activities, as well as for individual students; funding and participation in media research; and national, regional and international exchanges of personnel. Intra-African media exchanges would probably be more beneficial than North-South exchanges because, in many cases, the skills learned in the North are not easily transplantable in the South and are capable of alienating participants, in part, because of the availability of seemingly unattainable resources and technology.
In this respect, it might also be worthwhile placing, for instance, a Rwandan journalist to work for a specific period, say six months, in a quality Nigerian media organisation, so they can experience how other media function in the African context. However, the language barrier created by the anglophone and francophone divide, especially in West Africa, would have a significant impact on such exchanges. This, however, could be overcome by recruiting multilingual participants or pairing them with peer hosts who speak the guest's language.
The exchange of finished media products between different producers would also be a useful way to broaden the horizons of journalists in different parts of the continent and give them a taste of how their colleagues handle similar issues with similar resources. This form of exchange has not yet proven successful. The French-supported television programme exchange, URTNA, or the more limited Afrovision scheme, operate intermittently. Regional barter of news items between various media houses, particularly between neighbouring states, would go a long way to filling the void PANA, the Pan-African News Agency, has yet to fill.
Because of the dominance of state-controlled media in Africa, particularly radio and television, institutional development should encourage improvement in the performance of publicly owned media, as well as strengthening the professional, technical and financial independence and viability of private media outlets.
Monitoring and Evaluation
Constructively critical monitoring and evaluative principles and practices -- such as internal and independent assessment of media output and dissemination of the results to media practitioners and others -- are seen as important building blocks for improved media practice.
One approach is to build into any training programme the capacity for detailed narrative and analytical reporting on training processes and experiences, as well as evaluations of the training experience by participants, trainers and independent evaluators. A useful tool in such processes are baseline profiles, which indicate participants’ issue preferences and professional context, areas of expertise and interest, difficulties and deficiencies. The establishment of a focus group called Media Against Conflict in Liberia, following the consultation with journalists in Monrovia, is a positive example of journalists taking the initiative to monitor media output and encourage responsible reporting of conflict issues in that country.
Media training could also stand to benefit from greater contact and practical co-operation with academia -- particularly existing regional journalism institutions and departments of mass communication -- which can provide independent research on professional and policy issues, resource persons for workshops and seminars, sustained academic training for media practitioners and a meeting point for working journalists and would-be media practitioners.
Specialised publications or ‘trade journals’ should also be encouraged because of the important contributions they can make in developing the professionalism of practitioners by making media transparent and promoting quality control by focusing on standards and media behaviour.
Research Options
Thorough and systematic examination of the role of the media in Africa, its strengths and constraints, and its relationship to trends within different societies has been sadly lacking. Western scholars, and even Africans, have tended to look most closely at foreign technological, political and cultural influences on communication in Africa, rather than the immediate environment and output of African communicators and the impact of their activities on social, political and economic trends.
An African agenda for research could start with an inventory of structural capacities and weaknesses, including human resources, levels of education and training, financial viability, existing technological capacities and weaknesses and possible applications of new technologies. Such research should fully take into account the severe economic, political and social constraints that have an impact on much of the media in Africa, while drawing out examples of high-levels of professionalism, commercial success and degrees of public credibility and influence. An important aspect of this in relation to human resources would be the availability and quality of media training and media educational opportunities.
Another priority area of research could involve appraisals of public perceptions of the media and the messages it communicates. This could include data-gathering and comparative analysis of perceptions of independent, government-controlled and foreign media in dealing with issues such as governance, modernisation, development agendas, conflict, the role of women in society, religious diversity, and ethnicity. In a similar vein, it could be revealing for Africans and foreign commentators on African affairs to systematically examine the latter's approaches to communicating African realities.
Regarding, African conflicts and attempts to manage or resolve them, there is an apparent need for empirical and analytical examination of the changing nature of warfare in Africa, the consequences of civil conflicts, grassroots coping mechanisms, the effectiveness and short- to long-term implications of outside humanitarian intervention, the effectiveness of national, regional and continental mechanisms for mitigating and resolving conflicts, indigenous methods of resolving conflicts and the cultural appropriateness and practicality of externally originated conflict resolution initiatives. Another area for investigation is the uses and abuses of the media in African conflicts.
The ongoing clash between modernisation and traditional values and practices on a number of levels is another area of potentially illuminating research for media practitioners and consumers.
It is worth bearing in mind the proactive role of the media as in the recent groundbreaking work of Star Radio in Liberia, Search for Common Ground in Burundi and Macedonia and Radio Agatashya, run from Tanzania, but focused on the humanitarian crisis in Rwanda from 1994 to 1996. However, these experiments have not been studied in-depth and their impact not fully assessed. There is a need for critical analysis of these and other interventions to assess their impact and possible replication in other conflict areas.
Looking Forward
In Africa, where millions of people are engaged in a day-to-day struggle for personal and collective survival in the face of a wide range of social, political and economic conflicts, the media plays an important role in reflecting and explaining those human events. While clashes of personalities and ideas have helped to forge insights and encourage and enable human development, it is also true that societal conflicts that erupt in violence have inflicted an untold amount of suffering and physical destruction wherever they have occurred.
Media practitioners who have been caught up in extremely disruptive and destructive conflicts know full well that journalists suffer as much as, if not more than, other members of society when peace gives way to widespread violence.
The power of the media to effect change is not in doubt. Most recently, in Rwanda, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and the former Yugoslavia, it has been used to fan hatred and encourage massive abuses of human rights and material destruction. Used creatively and constructively, the media is a potent instrument for describing and analysing the events affecting peoples' lives and reporting or generating constructive alternatives to violence and despair.
Despite high rates of illiteracy in many African societies, broadcast and print media remain key means for millions of ordinary people to make sense of the events they are living through and to express their opinions on how to deal with those events. It can be argued that the media's right to freedom of expression is now being supplemented by a growing consciousness on the part of African publics of their information needs and their right to know. In effect, African media is becoming more aware of broader political, social and economic needs and interests than those of a narrow elite, which has traditionally included owners, publishers, editors and individual journalists.
But given the weakness of the African media in general and the multiplicity of constraints -- political, economic, technological and social -- which impede the flow of timely, accurate and responsible information, there is a tremendous need for a consistent and sustained effort to improve the mass media's ability to understand and communicate the underlying causes of conflict and the contributing factors for its escalation by providing fora for public dialogue on strategies for social, political and economic change. That need is even more urgent, and the obstacles that much greater, in African societies wracked by widespread social violence or civil war.
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