News Audiences Beware! Insights from Darfur

Abstract

"In capitalist business systems, buyers of products and services are told to check out claims made by profit-making advertising and marketing companies. Some know this warning as the Latin phrase caveat emptor (buyer beware!).Journalist turned journalism professor Dan Gillmor (2010) urges that consumers of news also need to think critically and evaluate news reports for comprehensiveness and fairness: skepticism, judgment, free thinking, questioning, and understanding are crucial. “Many US citizens think the world backed the war in Iraq. Maybe it’s the papers they are reading,” UK’s Weekly Guardian, 2004. The following article uses excerpts from my 2010 book, The Geopolitics of Representation in Foreign News: Explaining Darfur1 that my students and I wrote to answer the questions: Whose version of foreign events does the news “represent” in this internet age of information abundance? What does it emphasize? What is it silent on? Foreign news is a major source of our knowledge about foreign Others and plays a significant role in continuing out-of-school lifelong education. Journalism’s “curriculum” consists of hard news, features, background articles, and opinion columns. My focus was on how different news organizations from Qatar, China, Egypt, South Africa, France, and the UK represented the struggle of Darfur in western Sudan for equitable treatment by its own national government in Khartoum. In 2003, western Sudan’s unmet regional demands for economic development and political representation burst into the open again, for the third time in two decades. The military dictatorship of Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir responded with disproportionate violence, as it did in response to similar demands for attention from now independent South Sudan and the Nuba mountains. The result: 300,000 civilians have been killed. Nearly onethird of the western region’s population, that is, more than two million Darfuris, live in refugee camps."(pg 1)