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CONCEPTUAL ISSUES IN MEDIA AND CONFLICT
Dapo Olorunyomi*

At least a third of the 54 countries in Africa today are currently undergoing some form of social and political convulsion. While the representations of this upheaval are complex, they are chiefly expressed in the catastrophic levels of violence and destruction we have witnessed in the past two decades, the massive and untidy migrations, the enormous humanitarian problems resulting from one war or the other, and the virtual collapse of some states.

In most countries experiencing these conflicts, the main trigger for violence has been the failure to view the management of ethno-cultural difference in society as a source of potential advantage in nation building. To be sure, mismanagement of ethnic and cultural diversity resulting in a culture of extreme intolerance is perhaps the most difficult problem confronting nation-states today. Experience has shown, however, that the creative handling of diversity can and has promoted community strength in many places, even as its mismanagement has been the basis for the great tragedies of the 20th century.

The media cannot be dispassionate about this. The sheer human implications are too acute to accept indifference. In Rwanda, for instance, the 1994 carnage cost 500,000 lives and virtually destroyed the political and economic foundations of the country. The tragedy in Burundi in 1990; the unending crisis in the Great Lakes region; the recent and still unfolding scenario in Sierra Leone today - the gross human rights violations against hundreds of thousands of people, mostly children; the Sudan; and Liberia before its recent democratic transition have produced unimaginable numbers of refugees within those states and have had extremely disruptive implications for their neighbors. In addition to provoking profound human concern, these developments also pose great challenges to journalistic practice.

Indeed, from what we now know of the genocide in Rwanda, the media can act as an accomplice to genocide not only through its indifference but also through active collaboration. During the 1994 tragedy, such newspapers as Kangura and the Radio-Television Libre des Mille Collines [RTLM] created the context for the bitter ethnic hatred that mobilized the genocide. In every communal or ethnic conflict, the positions of the media can significantly impact the outcome.

To promote instead the emergence of sound public policies, ones that will mitigate conflict and encourage tolerance and better management of diversity, journalists need a depth of understanding of the reality of difference and skills to cover "other" peoples, be they of different ethnicity, religion, region, gender, sexual orientation, or ability, accurately and with sensitivity. They need to appreciate the validity of pluralism, but they also need to value the persistence of ethnic and primordial loyalties in the face of the expanding and detached forces of globalization. To do this well and faithfully, journalists need to acquire the intellectual tools to analyze the tensions between globalization and primordial feelings, between the notions of totality and heterogeneity. They also need to understand how the tensions between these divides generate uncertainties of a political, economic, and cultural nature, uncertainties that are generally disruptive. In light of the devastation that conflicts have engendered on their continent, African journalists, as witnesses and couriers of the news in their societies, have no excuse for careless and shallow representation of ethnic and religious differences.

Sad to say, hardly any African media schools include courses on covering diversity in their curricula. In Nigeria, a country with one of the widest cultural, religious, and social diversities on the continent, not one of its 45 journalism schools has such a course. Nigeria's newsrooms also have no diversity training.

In recognition of the power of the media to promote national identity, democracy, and balanced federalism in multicultural societies, certain professional organizations and schools of journalism and their journals in countries like South Africa, Canada, and the United States are making spirited efforts to promote diversity in the reporting and editorial process and to incorporate strategies for covering diversity into the curricula of journalism schools. The Canadian Newspaper Association (CAN); the American Society of Newspaper Editors (ASNE); the Freedom Forum; the Ryerson School of Journalism in Ontario, Canada, and its Ryerson Journalism Review; the Journalism Department of the San Francisco State University and its publication, Newswatch; and the Maynard Institute for Journalism Education in Oakland, California, are institutions demonstrating leadership in this respect.

These institutions and journals, as a collective, offer the rest of us useful references in the fitful effort to bring diversity to the heart of the debate among media professionals. ASNE, for instance, has a new program dedicated to diversifying the newsroom in the United States by 2025. Towards this goal, it has set a benchmark to help increase overall newsroom minority employment by increasing the number of minority interns and supervisors and measuring whether newspapers have achieved parity with the diversity of their communities.

The forces of globalization and the increasingly multi-cultural nature of the regions news organizations serve are also driving them to recognize that those with multi-cultural knowledge and language skills will ultimately have market edge. It is significant that in its advertising, an excellent newspaper like the Seattle Times stresses its strength in diversity of sources, diversity of staff, and diversity of the issues it covers when it could just as easily point up the strength of its investigative reports and its numerous Pulitzer prizes.

There are those who might argue that a sound recognition of ethical demands in the profession would be enough to drive the problem away. The reality does not support the assumptions upon which this claim is based. Such claims oversimplify the intractable nature of identity politics and the disruption its assertion tends to elicit. It is enough to call up contemporary images from all regions of the world, including societies where ethics are considered central to the daily crisis of professional journalism - places like Northern Ireland/Britain, Spain, India, Canada, and the United States - to understand that a recognition of professional ethics alone will not enable us to respond to the challenges of diversity.

Still, there is a larger way of understanding the relationship of media ethics and the problems associated with covering diversity. Broadly speaking, diversity issues and the editorial environment affect each other in two concrete ways: through external variables like ownership patterns (competition, monopoly, community, etc) and circulation and through internal variables like professional norms, industry codes/standards, and traditions internalized by news organizations. To isolate the problems associated with covering diversity as simple matters of norms is to suggest that only endogenous factors influence the practice of the media. The fact of diversity in concrete editorial terms always assumes a pluralism that also includes the exogenous variables of ownership, employees, content, and sources.

Yet those who overemphasize the question of ethics miss one crucial point that underlies the argument over how and why the media respond poorly to the challenge of diversity. The issue here is that although accuracy in reporting on a community ultimately depends on the media's capacity to regularly portray its diversity, and that failure to do so undermines journalistic credibility, the necessity of reflecting the complex tapestry of community life in the daily practice of media work is, strictly speaking, not necessarily a normative problem.

The practice of marginalizing or inadequately reflecting visible minorities in the daily narrative of a community's unfolding story is more of an ontological problem. Thus the anecdotal references to minorities in editorial productions (news reports, opinion pieces, commentaries, and features) that reflect stereotypes and the selective depictions in broadcast programming, news casting, web casting, and advertising create a situation that can only be corrected by conscious mainstreaming.

Above all, the media's capacity to respond to its own structural weaknesses with respect to the absence of internal diversity, lack of pluralism in ownership, sourcing, contending ideas, and employment tends to strengthen their capacity to better promote tolerance and help manage diversity in the communities they serve and beyond.

In this way, the media can assure the reader that the more they know the less they need fear and help build social and cultural bridges to guide the formulation and evolution of sound ethno-national policies for society.

As the African media become more successful in addressing diversity, they will undoubtedly also become more effective in subjecting public policy to scrutiny and ensuring that balance, fairness, and equity are evident in their evaluation of the political system, state structure, citizenship, language, educational and economic policies, civil and minority right issues, and the secularity of the state. All of these issues are central to identity politics.

* Dapo Olorunyomi is director of Africa programs at the Panos Institute, Washington, DC.