Comments on: Darfur and the media attention deficit

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Wed, 09 Jul 2008 22:01:54 +0000

Agreed on pretty much all points there Ethan, I would add that the Google Trends graph above is interesting when looking at a multi-year measure. It takes in the last four years,

http://tinyurl.com/6e59ma

Also, re: Silobreaker. I intend to contact them to find out more about the â€œapproximately 10,000 news, blog, research and multimedia sourcesâ€ what they are and how they are chosen. That could greatly impact any results.

One rather telling Darfur stat that supports your argument is one Rob Crilly and I have discussed here previously relating to the number of videos uploaded to YouTube tagged or a with a Darfur descriptor which do not originate from Darfur, rather a classroom or bedroom in the US,

http://tinyurl.com/6g3sul

EJM, you're absolutely right on the differing names for the DRC. I did run the different names through Google News and I did, as you might expect, get differing results. However, all were lower than the countries in the comparison charts above.

By: EJM

EJM — Wed, 09 Jul 2008 16:12:21 +0000

Raw comparisons involving DRC-related news stories can be a bit tricky, because of how various media outlets refer to the country itself. Style-wise, many major outlets (including the AP, the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Economist) refer to it as, simply, “Congo”–while a few others (like the BBC and AFP) will sometimes use “DR Congo”.

Also, something that I noticed some time ago is that Google News does include results for “Democratic Republic of Congo” in searches for “DR Congo”.

By: Ethan Zuckerman

Ethan Zuckerman — Wed, 09 Jul 2008 14:56:56 +0000

Really interesting graphs - thank you. There's a lot to be said about the complexity of measuring media attention by counting mentions of nations or cities. I wrote a long paper on this about five years ago and have been running different comparisons using this method. One of my challenges is figuring out what the baseline attention for a country "should" be - it seems like China deserves more attention that Iceland as it's got vastly more people and a bigger economy. But what's the amount we should expect, and how does the actual amount received compare to what was expected? Lots of attempts to answer that question at http://gapdev.law.harvard.edu/

One question I'd ask regarding the graphs you offer here is how the timeframe covered affects the attention we're discussing. My sense is that the attention paid to Darfur is a multi-year phenomenon. It's unsurprising that Zimbabwe is currently outpacing Darfur attention, but my sense is that over a longer period, the attention to Darfur is more pronounced.

The comparison to Iraq is an interesting one. Another possible comparison is to other global catastrophe stories. Mark Jones with Reuters has an excellent post from a few years back about attention paid to global crises versus attention paid to the Boxing Day Tsunami: http://www.alertnet.org/thefacts/reliefresources/111044767025.htm

To a certain extent, we're talking about such small amounts of attention compared to mainstream media stories, it seems like there's little to say but recognize that most of these events are undercovered...

All that said, as someone who (like you) follows African issues closely, I've been surprised to see how many people have taken on Darfur as an issue they care about, and I continue to wonder whether the info they're getting is sufficiently complex and grey.

Thanks for digging into this topic.