Abstract
james Wahutu’s upcoming book, In the Shadow of the Global North, joins an increasingly vibrant conversation about how mass communication scholars should study journalism as practiced beyond Western Europe and the United States. The book engages the question of how and why African journalists cover their own continent for their audiences, telling the “story of how African journalists contend with being journalists that are African, covering an international event unfolding next door” (p. 5). It finds that, despite social and geographic proximity to newsworthy events in neighboring countries, African journalists often rely on reports and quotes from Western voices rather than local experts to tell these stories. To build its case, the book unpacks the complicated contexts in which journalists on the African continent must make sense of their professional roles, norms, and power. With this book, Wahutu, an assistant professor of media, culture, and communication at New York University, contributes several valuable interventions to scholarly understanding of global journalism practice. First, In the Shadow of the Global North offers empirical data that help us better understand journalism in a Global South context—specifically, African journalistic coverage of violence on the African continent. Second, the book invokes theories that are popular but often superficially applied in journalism studies and shows how their application to overlooked contexts helps enrich theory and our understanding of those contexts. Finally, and I would argue most importantly, it does these things by centering the experiences and voices of African journalists.
There are several reasons a potential reader might pick up this book. One is to gain a better understanding of how news production unfolded across the continent and especially the sub-Saharan region. Chapter 2 (“What is African Journalism?”) provides an excellent, succinct overview of newspaper history that incorporates both historic data and scholarly discussions about the various influences—often colonial—guiding the early African press. Chapter 3 shows how journalism education unfolds at Daystar University, a Nairobi university where many young Kenyan journalists receive training before entering the field. Wahutu finds that colonial and postcolonial influences persist in this context, with much of the curriculum drawn from U.S. programs, textbooks, and theorists. As a result, young journalists enter their first jobs familiar with U.S. journalism ideals but often unsure how to process the differences on the ground between, for instance, coverage by CNN and coverage by Kenya’s Daily Nation. Chapters 2 and 3 together offer an important introduction to a complex field of news production and should be required reading for anyone interested in understanding journalism in a postcolonial context.
The rest of the book shows how the layers of colonial influence described in chapters 2 and 3 shape journalistic practices; to do this, Wahutu focuses on media coverage of specific crisis events on the African continent. Part II, “Narrating an Atrocity,” examines the way African journalists and news outlets covered violence in Darfur in the late 2000s. Wahutu draws on interviews with journalists from South Africa and Kenya along with news coverage from South Africa, Kenya, and Rwanda to show that even African outlets and journalists tended to rely on Western voices, in many cases using stories produced by wire services instead of relying on staff reporters and in other cases introducing Western voices as “experts” into locally bylined stories. The evidence is rich and engaging, providing a valuable look at how journalists in these spaces encounter and explicate knowledge hierarchies and colonialism at work.
The book offers several theoretical insights for journalism scholars. First, Wahutu enriches field theory by applying it to a Global South journalism context and showing how fields gain complexity in postcolonial contexts. He argues that African journalists practice in a space with two rarely overlapping journalistic subfields. The cosmopolitan subfield, defined by Global North journalism rules and norms and reinforced by the colonial logics described in the first part of the book, carries the most weight in defining international news coverage across the continent. The national subfield, which varies across geopolitical boundaries, defines who has local access and incorporates journalists with locally rooted professional identities (i.e., journalists working for Kenya’s Daily Nation or Rwanda’s New Times). In this way, an African journalist—someone born in Kenya, trained at Daystar University, and working on the African continent, for instance—can still occupy a position that prioritizes Global North knowledge. In fact, many news organizations on the continent prioritize this knowledge hierarchy. The arguments and data Wahutu introduce pave the way for a great deal of future research—for instance, the glimpse into journalism classrooms is fascinating and could easily become a book of its own, as could a postcolonial analysis of the spread of journalism across the continent (the subject of Wahutu’s second chapter). However, this book as it stands makes an important contribution to scholarship. In suggesting that African journalism consists of layered fields of practice, it sets the stage for future research to explore the complexities of this region’s news production in more depth and shows how journalism studies can thoroughly engage field theory in future studies. It joins a growing body of research on the realities of journalism practice in African countries that is valuable and long overdue.
In the Shadow of the Global North is an important book for journalism scholars and students. Graduate students will find it useful especially for its overview of African journalism and description of how journalists covered an important event and scholars will benefit from the rich insights into the complexity of postcolonial journalism fields in the contemporary world.
