February 21, 2005
By Lesley Crosson

After a Dec. 26 earthquake generated a tsunami in the Indian Ocean, extensive news coverage spurred some $6 billion in donations to governments and relief agencies in less than a month.

But lack of coverage can mean little money. Although millions of people in Africa continue to suffer from the scourges of war, disease and poverty, people elsewhere who might be inspired to open their wallets don't hear of the need for humanitarian aid.

Relief organizations, including the United Nations, have noted the disparity. In a January Security Council briefing, Under Secretary-General Jan Egeland chastised member nations for their slow response to humanitarian appeals for the African continent.

"I remember sitting in this very room last summer asking for five helicopters to save thousands of lives in Darfur (Sudan). In the end we had to hire helicopters commercially as no member states were willing to provide them," Egeland told the meeting on humanitarian challenges in Africa.

A similar appeal after the tsunami resulted in the deployment of several helicopters "within days," Egeland said.

Nearly 2 million people in Eritrea, in its fourth consecutive year of drought, continue to suffer from a severe food shortage. In addition, the 3.8 million people in the Democratic Republic of Congo who have died in fighting since 1998 represent "the toll of more than a dozen tsunamis," said Egeland, who heads the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs.

The sheer number of international crises requires agencies to "multi-task," said the Rev. John McCullough, Church World Service executive director.

"We can't turn away from the Indian Ocean," he said. "When natural disaster strikes quickly, it is very compelling, but ongoing disasters require ongoing attention."

Those disasters include the genocide in Darfur, which has claimed 70,000 lives; the AIDS pandemic, which has killed some 2.3 million people in sub-Saharan Africa alone; wars that have killed or displaced millions of people in different African countries; and the malnutrition, poverty and diseases that plague millions more.

All these compete for the media attention that prompts people elsewhere to provide donations for relief. Experts cite several reasons for the lack of continuing coverage.

Kearsley Stewart, visiting professor of anthropology at Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill., said unbalanced coverage affects people's ability to identify with and feel compassion for the people of Africa.

"We don't ever have good news from Africa, so we really have a lopsided exposure. It's all famine or war or corruption, so you get no sense of the diversity of culture and the way people really live," Stewart said.

Many American editors want to see those stories in their newspapers because they think-incorrectly-that is what readers want, said John Yearwood, world editor for the Miami Herald and treasurer for the National Association of Black Journalists. The 3,200-member association regularly sends journalists to Africa and encourages them to report on the continent, he added.

Tight budgets, the complexity of the stories, and the short attention span of the public are also problems. Donatella Lorch, director of the Knight International Press Fellowships in Washington, said world news increasingly is being reported from news bureaus in London, Jerusalem and Moscow because news organizations have closed bureaus in other parts of the world. It is not simply that journalists don't want to report stories out of Africa, Lorch adds, "but they can only do so many."

When Africa does get media attention, the results can be astonishing.

Just before Christmas, the Rev. Michael Slaughter read about the carnage caused by the fighting in Darfur. He said he felt that his congregation at Ginghamsburg United Methodist Church in Tipp City, Ohio, was being called to intervene. Slaughter challenged church members to raise a Sudan Miracle Offering with a level of giving that matched what they spent on gifts.

"If they spent $800 on themselves, then I asked them to bring $800 to the church for the Sudanese," Slaughter said.

The result was an offering of nearly $312,000. The church sent the money to the United Methodist Committee on Relief for relief efforts in Sudan.

The Ginghamsburg donation helped the agency respond quickly in Sudan, said Marc Maxi, UMCOR's regional director for Africa and the Caribbean. UMCOR is using the Ginghamsburg offering as seed money for an emergency mission to bring food, water and supplies to the Darfur region. Maxi said he hopes for increased positive coverage about the success of Africa relief efforts because such stories "would encourage more people to give."

When news of the Asian tsunami hit the airwaves, the Ginghamsburg members didn't redirect their money. Instead, they collected yet another offering and sent UMCOR an additional $30,000 to help tsunami victims.

"Our personal relationship with Jesus calls us to radical social action," Slaughter said. "I'm thankful that so many people are involved with tsunami relief, but the potential in Sudan is for the death of many more people."

United Methodist News Service
Lesley Crosson is a freelance journalist working in New York City.