A founding member of Pan-African-European Organisation Africa Vagabonds, Lutz Mükke has urged media houses to professionalise war and crime reporting especially as it relates to Africa.
He argued that this in depth professionalisation was essential for the indepth and high quality democratic discourse on war and crisis reporting in the region.
Mükke said this in a study titled: Media Routines and Ignorance?.
A copy of the study was shared with The Nation in Abuja.
It explained: “In 2023, the Otto Brenner Foundation in Frankfurt am Main, Germany, published a survey about the coverage of the Sahel interventions of the German army in leading German mass media in collaboration with the pan-African-European association Africa Vagabonds.
“The results are a scandal: Experts from Mali, Niger and Germany criticise the media’s “oversimplified perceptions of reality” of the Sahel conflicts heavily, and the fading out of parliamentary debates on the matter in the media coverage is met with incomprehension.”
According to the author, Mükke, there was no in-depth journalistic research into the military operations in the Sahel as well as the absence of reportages or investigative research on the ground from the Sahel.
Mükke regretted that correspondents reported from Cape Town, Paris, Berlin and Rabat which were 2400 to 6000 kilometres away from Bamako/Mali, adding that high-ranking French and German government representatives dominated the information sources, lamenting that important source groups from Africa hardly ever had their say.
He further revealed that there was no in-depth information on the “terrorism” complex, maintaining that the media did not even report thoroughly on the debates of the German parliament on the Sahel military interventions.
He said: “There had been no proper contribution by these essential leading media for a democratic discourse about the military interventions of the German army.
“Details from the content analyses during the period under review, 41 online articles on the complex topic were published in the analysed media.
“The parliamentary debate plays virtually no role in these reports. tagesschau.de, for example, does not go beyond a 95-second news item and the parliament has approved an extension and reinforcement of the Bundeswehr mandate for Mali.
“The influence of news agencies on the reporting analysed is very high. Around 60 percent of all articles are one-to-one reprints of agency reports or are based on agency material.
“The French news agency AFP and the German press agency GPA are particularly influential. Around 40 per cent of all contributions came from correspondents. However, they report from Cape Town, Paris, Berlin, and Rabat, which are between 2,400 and 6,000 kilometres from Bamako/Mali.
“None of the media analysed considered it appropriate to place their reports from the ground in the Sahel region or more complex investigative contributions or storytellings. The overall reporting is strongly characterised by news reporting.
“There are no editorials, interviews, portraits or reviews on the topic, only two commentaries. Monotony also prevails in the departmentalisation, almost all articles appear under the headings “Politics” and “Abroad”. The business/economics and culture sections published nothing on the topic.
“All articles dealt with the topics of “war, crisis, coup”, with two events triggering reporting peaks – a coup in Mali and the death of the President of Chad. The activities of the German Armed Forces are never investigated in depth on the ground. The geographical focus of the reporting is on four countries: Mali, France, Germany and Chad.
“To a lesser extent, regional observations are made about regional interrelations. The mix and selections of the “information sources” of the Sahel reporting must also be questioned.
“High-ranking French and German government representatives dominated by a wide margin, followed by Malian military personnel and high-ranking EU and UN representatives.
“Representatives of the West African regional organisations ECOWAS, the African Union and the United Nations are also included to a lesser extent. It is striking that around 60 per cent of all sources are non-African.
“Entire African groups of sources are not mentioned at all or only in rare individual cases: business people, scientists, religious representatives, artists, musicians, writers, students.
“They are obviously of no particular importance to those involved in the journalistic production process, neither as characters in the narratives nor as relevant sources. Even aid organisations, traditionally strong communicators in sub-Saharan Africa, play only a marginal role.
“The same applies to so-called “Islamist extremists”, “terrorists”, and various armed groups, such as the Tuareg fractions. These, too, are hardly depicted at all but merely appear as a threatening sub-context.
“In no single case is more detailed information provided about them. However, they were and are proclaimed the main reason for the military interventions and the massive budgets the German parliament allocates to these military actions.”
An investigative data journalist from Bamako/Mali, David Dembélé pointed out that the military operations in the Sahel should be of “utmost interest” in Germany.
He finds it “paradoxical” that there was no independent journalistic research and reporting by the four media from the Sahel countries, not even during the important debates by the German parliament.
On his part, Ibrahim Manzo Diallo, editor-in-chief of the Aïr Info group and the radio station Radio Sahara FM from Agadez, Niger, explains that independent journalists and editorial offices have to do much more when it comes to highly relevant topics such as military operations or war and peace.
