‘This Place Used to be a White British Boys' Club’: Reporting Dynamics and Cultural Clash at an International News Bureau in Nairobi

Abstract

Africa has long been portrayed by Western media as a dark and conflict-ridden continent. Such reports have traditionally been produced by white journalists in the field, writing for a distant audience ‘back home’. In recent years, significant structural changes in the foreign news industry have seen the near-demise of foreign correspondents and the increasing use of locally hired journalists. This research explores the important role of local correspondents in the production of international news reports, and asks whether their presence may start to change how Africa is depicted in the West. This investigation is framed by a cultural analysis of the Reuters newsroom in Nairobi during the post-election crisis of 2007–08. This newsroom provides a microcosm of the media industry, in which Western and local journalists disagreed and debated the role of the media in a crisis. This clash of values offers a springboard for exploring the potential ability of local national journalists to shape the news: do they have the power to challenge Western reporting modes, or are they simply reproducing the values of this system? This article concludes that the current situation is somewhere between the two: Westerners continue to dominate international reporting, but there are indications that a slow and sometimes uncomfortable synthesis is beginning to emerge.

Key Words:

• media
• Kenya
• international newsgathering
• conflict
• post-election violence
• tribalism
• Reuters
• colonialism
• Al Jazeera

Acknowledgement

The research for this article was funded by The Round Table Commonwealth Award for Young Scholars, instituted as part of this journal's centenary celebrations.

Notes

1. In April 2008, Reuters was acquired by the consortium Thomson and became Thomson Reuters. However, this paper follows near-universal custom and refers to the newswire as ‘Reuters’ throughout.

2. These are The Daily Telegraph, The Times, The Guardian, The Independent and The Financial Times.

3. In the Guardian website archive, for example, a search of ‘Kenya’ in October and November 2007, prior to the election violence, returns a result of approximately 50–60 articles per month. In January 2008, there was four times that number—with 202 articles. In February 2008, the coverage remained high, with 113. By March, it had dropped again to 61.

4. The vernacular press and radio in Kenya, by contrast, have been accused of taking sides during the post-election crisis. Space constraints do not allow for a discussion of this issue in a paper focusing on the English language international coverage. For analysis of the local-language media see Ismail and Deane (2008).

5. The size and composition of the news team fluctuates from day to day as stringers from the field come and go and journalists follow stories in and out of the field. In the text and television sides of the newsroom combined, there were on average eight full-time journalists and an additional eight stringers in the office at the time of this research.

6. These are not listed as some journalists chose to speak off the record and the identity of their outlet would make them easily recognisable.

7. Kenya, Uganda. Rwanda, Burundi, Eritrea, Djibouti, Ethiopia, Somalia, Somaliland, Tanzania, Comoros, Madagascar, Mauritius and Seychelles. The bureau also provides supplementary reporting on South Sudan and East Congo on an ad hoc basis, owing to their geographic proximity.

8. Each of the 14 countries covered has at least one stringer in the field; with more in the countries perceived to be of greater financial or hard news significance. In total, Cawthorne noted an estimated 24 stringers in the text network, and a comparable number working for the TV side. These stringers range from working nearly full time for the wire, through to those who file very occasionally.