“Americans like their wars movie length and with a happy ending,” [said Mike Boettcher, a Baghdad correspondent for NBC News from 2005 to 2007.] “If the war drags on and there is no happy ending, Americans start to squirm in their seats. In the case of television news, they began changing the channel when a story from Iraq appeared… Like it or not, the country is at war and there is not a correspondent to cover it,” he said. “Sad.” link

By now the whole newspaper reading world has heard of the Canadian journalist Amanda Lindhout who was kidnapped in Somalia earlier this week. Some of the world is also aware that Australian snapper Nigel Brennan was also kidnapped at the same time. Google search on ""Amanda Lindhout" Somalia" and you get 4,070 results, there are also two Amanda Lindhout Facebook groups boasting nearly 2,000 members (as of this blog post).

A search on ""Nigel Brennan" Somalia" pulls up 2,950 results and he has a Facebook group with 7 members (as of this blog post). Yet scant few western media readers, African media readers or wherever readers, have heard the names of the other kidnap victims in this saga.

Search on Somalian photojournalist/guard/transaltor Abdifatah Mohammed Elmi and you’ll currently find 449 Google search results, the driver from the Shamo Hotel, by the name of Marwali brings in just 10 search results and the group’s driver Mahad Clise garners a grand total of 0 search results. Yet all three were kidnapped at the same time in the same place.

Statistically speaking it is the lives of the Somalians that are most at risk here. The parachuted in freelances have a decent price on their heads, they’re worth holding on to. With lack of press support and/or interest, it is the local fixers, hacks, drivers and guards who are not only under-reported, but often expendable in these situations.

Arguably it is this lack of media attention that endangers them most of all. The awful irony is of course, foreign journalists cannot even begin to think of doing their jobs without the help of local fixers, drivers and guards in a place like Somalia.

I said this earlier today, but this is the key reason why The Frontline Club established the Fixer’s Fund just over one year ago – to help the often undervalued and most at risk in journalism. I am not trying to belittle the danger Amanda Lindhout and Nigel Brennan are in, but you only have to look at the whole, awful story that is the death of Ajmal Naqshbandi and the life of Daniele Mastrogiacomo to figure out who has the greatest chance of survival here. As The Reporters Without Borders Press Freedom Barometer said in 2007,

According to the analysis carried out by CPJ, journalists working in war zones (especially local reporters) are usually not killed by an errant bullet. In fact, they are usually murdered. link

The photo above, by Philip Poupin, is of Abdifatah Mohammed Elmi taken on a trip to Somalia with Frontline blogger Alex Strich from when they were in country earlier this year. Here’s hoping to a swift conclusion to this kidnap for all involved and not just those names on the front pages of western media outlets.

One of the least favourite (yet most common) topics of this blog since we started has been the decline in foreign news coverage and the various attempts to try and rescue it. The New York Times, quoting the latest Pew Research report today, suggests the grim tidings are only set to get grimmer,

“Itâ€s really concerning when we have two wars overseas, our economy is more global, weâ€re competing with economies that are growing faster than ours, and our dependence on foreign oil is one of the biggest stories,” said Tom Rosenstiel, director of Pewâ€s Project for Excellence in Journalism… “One thing that surprised me was how optimistic the editors are… “Theyâ€re convinced that they can still make their newspapers better, because otherwise Iâ€m not sure they could go to work in the morning.” link via Sambrook

UPDATE: Ethan goes over the main points of this report,

What worries me is that, with less international news in newspapers and newscasts, most citizens are going to end up feeling like these are issues they have no information about, no opinions on, and no ability to influence. In a world where the hard local problems demand global solutions, thatâ€s an ugly development indeed. link

No doubt others will join in the discussion. I’ll update this post as and when they do.

Sudan does have the most coverage according to the comparison above – based purely on country over one year – but not by any massive margin. However, if you compare specific cities/locations within those countries Darfur appears to come out on top for the most part. NB: comparing Kinshasa, Kampala and Mogadishu – not all of which you could term conflict zones – is admittedly not quite eggs with eggs,

Of course, if you compare media attention of Somalia, Sudan, DRC and Uganda with Iraq there the difference is far more obvious and here perhaps we get the real picture of how off piste Darfur really is,

Sudan/Darfur is clearly the bigger African story, but it’s still small beer when we look at media attention to conflict zones as a whole. If we take out Iraq and add Zimbabwe to the African media attention mix, Mugabe’s mess has clearly taken over the agenda in recent months leaving Darfur a distant second,

Therefore, in answer to the central question Ethan poses,

If Darfur is one of the best examples of people in the developed world paying attention to events in a developing nation, and if drawing attention to Darfur has involved an oversimplification of the conflict which may be damaging and misleading, should be be looking at the Darfur movement as an exemplar for how to draw attention to developing world issues, or should we be avoiding it like the plague? link

Perhaps Darfur has not received as much attention as one might assume, and certainly not in the depth of detail Ethan suggests is needed. I for one know a number of hacks who have reported from Darfur and do an excellent job of explaining the complicated situation. However, I still don’t feel I’m fully in the picture. A picture which could of course be blurred by the abundance of oversimplifications Ethan refers to in his post.
Just to add a final bit of stats madness… Google News search results comparisons seem to mirror the more thorough results shown above from Silobreaker,

Results 1 – 10 of about 67,931 for Zimbabwe
Results 1 – 10 of about 17,624 for sudan
Results 1 – 10 of about 10,887 for uganda
Results 1 – 10 of about 8,408 for Somalia
Results 1 – 10 of about 3,480 for Democratic Republic of Congo

I’ll leave Google Trends out of this, before all of our heads start hurting… Here is the Google Trends comparison,

I will refer you to the Media Attention Screening the World 2007/2008 report from DfiD published last month which looks at this whole issue very closely. When it comes to Africa, the report concludes,

“International factual output of the four main [UK] terrestrial channels in 2007 was the lowest recorded since reports began in 1996… Africa receives relatively little coverage and is dominated by wildlife programming.”