Abstract
In Who’s reporting Africa now? Kate Wright enquires into the conditions under which news about sub-Saharan Africa have been produced in the United Kingdom in recent years. Her book represents a remarkable study of various forms of interaction between journalists in mainstream news outlets, non-governmental organization (NGO) staff, and the freelancers who work to service both. Based on rich empirical detail, Wright demonstrates how, as they intersect, the differential but interrelated practices of these actors lead to specific forms of textual, visual and audio-visual reporting about Africa – a type of reporting that, in spite of good intentions and eloquent ideals, tends to leave its protagonists out of the definition of preferred narratives.
A former award-winning journalist with a background in news production for public broadcasters, Wright garnered her professional experience to gain access to practitioners and produce interviews of a depth rarely seen in research about Western representations of Africa. But she has also produced an exemplary account of how to deal with positionality and subjectivity by ‘doing reflexivity’ about her insider knowledge in the process of analysing her data (cf. Dean, 2017).
Who’s reporting Africa now? is organized in nine chapters. Following a compelling first-person preface, chapter 1 introduces the reader to the overall project and its rationale. Chapter 2 builds on existing studies about the links, similarities and differences between the media strategies of NGOs active in Africa and about Western journalistic coverage of the region, calling attention to the crucial role of freelancers as intermediaries between NGOs and news outlets. In chapter 3, Wright clarifies her positioning as a critical scholar concerned with making a contribution to ongoing debates about ‘how news organizations, and indeed the news industry should be structured, funded and regulated’ (p. 66) and about how these organizations are representing, and should represent, Africa (pp. 8–12). She discusses the strengths and weaknesses of democratic theory as a framework to evaluate these issues and, by way of assessing three bodies of research that engage moral economy theory in differential ways, she argues that adopting this theory facilitates the interconnected analysis of structural issues, media production practices, and the ensuing media texts.
Chapters 4–8 focus on five distinct case studies. Each case involves a British news outlet, an NGO (either British, international or Kenyan), and freelancers working for one and the other. To give an example, chapter 4 retraces how, in 2012, The Independent on Sunday came to publish a double-page spread on a hunger crisis in Mali. The spread included text written by the head of media of Christian Aid, and used photos commissioned by the NGO that had been taken by a freelance photojournalist who had also worked for the newspaper at an earlier time. In the face of severe financial constraints, and a preoccupation with branding and marketing in both organizations, The Independent and Christian Aid piggybacked on their shared trust in the photojournalist to work around their mutual needs.
Subsequent chapters consider cases that involve Channel 4 News and Human Rights Watch, BBC News Online and Save the Children UK, The Guardian and Internews, and The Observer and the Kenyan Paraplegic Organization. The choice of cases may seem eclectic. But Wright explains that, because journalistic practices are increasingly defined by hybridity and makeshift solutions in the context of digitalization and troubled funding models, she chose heterogeneous cases precisely to explore variation as a defining characteristic of the problem that she is concerned with. This is, namely, the impact that NGOs’ financial and operational capacity to commission freelance multimedia has on the production of mainstream news about sub-Saharan Africa.
Who’s reporting Africa now? provides a trove of empirical and analytical openings for future research within journalism studies and beyond. Chapter 7, which analyses a case of interaction between The Guardian Online and Internews with an eye to the indirect-but-crucial role played by the Gates Foundation, makes a significant contribution towards advancing a political economy approach to communication in development (Enghel, 2015). My only point of criticism of an otherwise impressive book is this: given Wright’s argument that moral economy theory is the most productive avenue for framing future research about the problems that she legitimately raises, I missed a more thorough discussion of how to operationalize her theoretical approach to this effect in chapter 9.
Overall, Wright provides much-needed knowledge about the inner workings of precarity and budget cuts in journalistic work, and about their influence on news-making about Africa. She calls attention to the ways in which both journalists and NGO staff externalize ethical issues to freelancers as they prioritize self-interest in order to survive. Moreover – and this is perhaps Wright’s most productive contribution to an academe enamoured with the analysis of media texts – she evidences beyond doubt that, in order to grasp the complexity of present NGO influence on narratives about Africa, we must investigate how practitioners interact across fields of professional activity, and the rationales that underpin their moves.