Originally published in Stellenbosch Media Forum 2019.
Is environmentalism a Western ideal?
When looking at how the African media cover environmental issues, one could almost say that, though there are indications that this trend could be shifting.
“African media do not cover environmental issues the way it should be,” says Wole Adegbule, a Nigerian environmental activist and founder of the International Student Environmental Coalition.
“Eco-journalists in Africa are also rare,” Adegbule adds.
“Sustainability-related media coverage and socio-economic development: A regional and North-South perspective”, a study conducted in 2013, looked at 115 media outlets in 41 countries and found that climate coverage coincides with the socio-economic development of the country where the publications are based.
According to the study’s findings, abstract subjects like climate change, are more typically covered by news agencies in the Global North (countries that are economically more developed and are generally situated in the Northern hemisphere), whereas “issues such as corruption and poverty show significantly higher levels of coverage across newspapers from the Global South”, the authors of the study write.
“One way of trying to capture national-level differences in sustainability-related perceptions and priorities, was to look at country-level media agendas,” says one of the paper’s authors, Prof. Ralf Barkemeyer, Associate Professor of Corporate Social Responsibility at KEDGE Business School in France.
“Developing and emerging economies have tended to prioritise economic growth, which in turn may leave less space for some environmental issues on the media agenda,” says Barkemeyer. “Or it might crowd in on coverage of other issues that are, for example, closely linked to industrial production, such as air pollution.”
Adegbule also points to socioeconomic factors as the reason for Africa’s perceived low environmental reportage. “High rate of illiteracy and poverty is responsible, therefore people in Africa feel that protecting environmental resources is just a drive to be caged.”
Prof. Byron Santangelo from the University of Kansas writes extensively on African literature, environmental humanities and postcolonialism literature. He says, “I would say that environmentalism has been positioned as an elite or northern issue as a result of the way that in its more mainstream manifestation it has corresponded with bourgeois, often white interests frequently at the expense of poor, politically disenfranchised peoples.”
Barkemeyer does point out that the findings don’t apply to all sustainability issues.
“Climate change has [since the study was conducted] become a more global issue, instead.”
It should also be noted that environmental coverage in the Global North is not homogenous.
“There is a lot of variation within the Global North as well. Thus, coverage on climate change is not really linked only to socio-economic status, but a multitude of other factors.”
Dr Diane Holt, one of Barkemeyer’s co-authors on the study and the Chair of Entrepreneurship at the University of Leeds, says that the media reflects what society is talking about. “The key is the narrative in the public sphere reflects those issues most talked about by that society.”
“So if it is gang violence in the townships, that may drown out other conversations. It is not so much they aren't covered well more that the conversation reflects local priorities,” Holt adds.
Santangelo also points to historic reasons for African media’s relationship with environmentalism. “It also has had an unfortunate historical relationship with colonialism. The result has all too often been the suppression of other voices and interests."
Because environmental reporting does not live up to the “if it bleeds then it leads” phenomenon, it doesn’t capture the same attention as other stories in the media. When the media does not cover a topic adequately, it tends to go unnoticed by the public.
Evelyn Tagbo, a Nigerian journalist who has written extensively on environmental coverage in Africa, points to the power of the media. “For good or ill, the media, through its various channels, ‘imposes’ its decisions, views, and opinions on the rest of society. It dictates public taste. It decides what the public should know and how and when it should know it.”
Barkemeyer also says that the media plays an important role in how the public perceives an issue, such as climate change. “There is a positive relationship between the media agenda, the public agenda and the policy agenda.
“In reality, these relationships can be very complex, with a range of other variables that influence policy responses to a given challenge.
“But, ultimately, if an issue such as climate change is underrepresented on the media agenda, it is quite likely that there is less public pressure and a lower likelihood of effective policy responses as a result.”
Tagbo conducted her own study, “Media Coverage of Climate Change in Africa: A Case Study of Nigeria and South Africa”, by looking at how often news media publications in South Africa, Nigeria, and Ghana wrote about climate change from 2008 - 2010.
In the study Tagbo writes, “Generally, the findings of this study have shown that, Nigerian and South African media coverage of climate change, though not particularly outstanding, compares favourably with the negligible coverage in Ghanaian’s media in the last quarter of 2008 and first quarter of 2009.
“This was also a time when seasoned media professionals in the West found climate change an extremely sensitive topic to comment on with predictable attacks from climate change deniers.”
Barkemeyer says, “Assuming that an issue is covered more frequently in a given country, it is also likely to be perceived as more pressing when compared to countries with lower coverage levels.”
But, there are reasons to be hopeful for the coverage of environmental issues in Africa. There are several associations for African environmental journalists and the UN has introduced an award for the best environmental writing in the continent.
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