Sixty-seven minutes into last week's presidential debate in Coral Gables, Florida, moderator Jim Lehrer took a time-out from the discussion on Iraq and terrorism to ask about an often-overlooked foreign-policy issue: genocide in the Sudan. Lehrer noted he could not find evidence of either campaign addressing the possibility of sending troops to Sudan. “Why not?” he asked.
Both candidates offered defensible plausible explanations. John Kerry blamed inaction on an overstretched military and hinted at the eventual use of American forces. George W. Bush ruled out committing any troops and pegged the hopes of the Sudanese people on the African Union. But the honest explanation you'd never hear is that it is unwise for a presidential candidate to discuss pledging military action for a conflict that is off the radar screen for most Americans and most of the media, particularly television news. In a world dominated by Iraq, a presidential election, and the hurricane of the week, the U.S. TV media has largely ignored and failed to grasp the ongoing genocide against the black Sudanese in Darfur.
In September 1988, outraged by the press' refusal to publicize Saddam Hussein's murderous campaign against Iraqi Kurds, William Safire wrote, “The world's film crews are too comfortable in Israel's West Bank, covering a made-for-TV uprising of a new ‘people,' to bother with the genocidal campaign against a well-defined ethnic group that has been friendless throughout modern history and does not yet understand the publicity business.” Sixteen years later, while the actors have changed, the story remains the same.
As John Heffernan, a senior communications associate for Physicians for Human Rights, detailed for the Prospect in June, since early 2003 Sudanese government forces and a government-supported Arab militia, the Janjaweed, have conducted a slash-and-burn campaign against the African Darfurians, destroying their villages, murdering their families, raping women, and displacing millions. In Heffernan's dispatch, a 35-year-old woman told how the Sudanese military circled her village, set her house on fire, and brutally murdered her sister and niece.
It's precisely these heart-wrenching stories that the TV cameras ought to be capturing in an effort to stir the American consciousness. But while the images and voices are powerful when reported, Americans do not see them enough.
Consider the number of reports on the subject from the three major TV network news programs, which are watched collectively by nearly 26 million Americans each week. Over the past year there have been an abysmal 15 stories total, many of them aired in the past several weeks. ABC leads the pack with eleven, NBC is second with four, and CBS trails with a single report. From a sheer numbers standpoint the cable networks, with the exception of MSNBC, are demolishing their network counterparts. But even the cable giants fail when compared with their European counterparts, CNN Europe and BBC World, which have mentioned the Sudanese conflict twice as often, according to TV Eyes, a television search engine.
Quantity aside, the quality of the reports has left much to desire.
One of the most frustrating deficiencies of the TV news reporting has been the refusal to indict the Sudanese government for its role in the genocide. Embracing one of the worst habits of campaign journalism, TV news has reported the humanitarian disaster in a “he-said, she-said” account, as if the testimony of human-rights activists working in the Darfurian refugee camps and the Sudanese government stood on equal ground. In a June 17 CNN report, correspondent Zain Verjee first mentioned that “international rights groups accused the Sudanese government of supporting the Janjaweed Arab militia groups that commit atrocities,” before playing a sound byte from Dr. Mustafa Osman Ismail, the Sudanese foreign minister, denying the charges.
At no point did CNN point out that an overwhelming amount of refugee testimony supports the international rights groups' side of the story. This question plagued initial coverage, says Heffernan, robbing the viewers of the well-established fact that the government and the Janjaweed were “working in concert.”
The most glaring problem with the coverage has been the treatment of statistics. With limited access to the region, and a government complicit in the atrocities, news organizations have depended on the conservative estimates of aid groups. But often months would pass without updated numbers; TV reports would relay the numbers without noting they were dated. On June 2, FOX News first reported that “at least 30,000” people had been killed in Darfur. More than three months later on September 9, FOX News reporter Teri Schultz relied on the same number, as if the Janjaweed had taken a summer vacation.
Since then the go-to number in the media has risen to 50,000, but even that increased count has its problems. Eric Reeves, a Sudan activist and English professor at Smith College, traces the statistic back to a World Health Organization (WHO) report from September 15 that sought to estimate mortality for “Internally Displaced Persons living within accessible Internally Displaced Person settlements.” In other words, the WHO report only counted the deaths of refugees that managed to reach specific WHO-accessible camps, leaving out tens of thousands of Darfurians. Nonetheless, in the past three weeks, FOX News, CNN, ABC, and NBC have all reported the number as an accurate tally of all the genocide victims. (Reeves estimates the number killed at over 250,000.)
In addition to its factual shortcomings, the TV press exudes a curious sense of self-awareness that it is not doing its job in publicizing the humanitarian disaster. Rather than boost the quantity or quality of coverage, however, it's satisfied writing off the problem of genocide as one that's too distant for concern. On June 20, Sudan wiggled its way into the lineup on ABC's World News Tonight Sunday as the debut topic of the new segment, “Sunday Spotlight,” which anchor Bob Woodruff described as a feature to “focus on stories that don't often get reported.” The following month, on July 21, ABC's Peter Jennings signed off a brief report on Darfurian refugees saying, “[That was] a closer look, much of the world probably needs to watch even more closely” -- an odd statement coming from Jennings, whose network had uttered no more than a few sentences on the genocide since Woodruff's June 20 report.
Reeves and Heffernan pointed to one exception: PBS. While the quantitative numbers don't jump out as exceptional, the quality certainly does. The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer even bumped a segment on detective stories to continue a long, difficult discussion about Sudan.
On July 10, a FOX News viewer wrote into the network on the subject of substance in TV news, complaining, “I'm sure we will find out what kind of cologne that John Edwards wears, et cetera, but do we know anything about the situation in Sudan?” The answer is that we know very little. Of course, it's inappropriate to suggest that TV news dedicate more time to Sudan than the U.S. election. But it's not out of line to demand that the media begin to ask tough questions, among them, “Would oil sanctions being threatened by the UN deter the Sudanese?” -- and more poignantly, “Why is the world standing by as another genocide unfolds in Africa?”
Thomas Lang is a reporter for the Columbia Journalism Review's Campaign Desk.
