The glitch in journalism from the global north which requires fixing.
There’s been an almighty glitch in factual storytelling, particularly the form called Journalism. But to see the glitch, it pays to consider a model of thinking given the name “systems thinking”. It’s a way of making sense of the world by considering the influence of a myriad factors and elements.
So, for instance were you to consider solutions for climate change, you’d look beyond geographies and politics, but economic development, and food sustainability, particularly if you’re also coastal based.
First this quote from one of the most eminent authorities in journalism theory, Professor Michael Schudson who cites in the Power of News
“news is a form of culture, complete with its own literary and social conventions”.
If you deconstruct this, it becomes obvious, but with some caveat. You might be able to distinguish say news and journalism as cultural forms with differences between the US and UK, but what constitutes journalism as a cultural model form for say Africa?
Language, customs, values, behaviour that crystallise as conventions is at the heart of the conduit to journalism. Journalism and news are cultural constructs and yet a cultural form of journalism from the global north dominates the world. It does so in its world view and structure.
Second, I come at this as the friendly critic having worked in mainstream media as reporter, producer, newsreader and correspondent around the world for some time. I’m now an Associate Professor in Journalism Innovation and Tech at JOMEC (Cardiff University).
Briefly, some context of me to give perhaps weight to the consideration given in this piece.
A friend, Riz Khan, who once presented CNN, recalled a conversation with his editors when they opened a story with US President Clinton to meet ( African leader). But we’re international Riz said so why can’t we also say African leader to meet President Clinton.
In her incisive book The Culture Map by Erin Meyer the author posits example after example how communication is framed by culture. People from different cultures can easily misunderstand each other because of their differences.
The West is framed as low context; patterns of communicating are literal and explicit e.g. US and UK, whilst countries which are high context frame implicit behaviour and possess customs within communities that persist.
Germans and Norwegians are said to be blunt and Americans don’t get English humour. In Ghana language is tonal, strewn with metaphors.
Distinctions here will impact the way and reception of communicating and writing. It once surprised me many years back when I was training journalists in Ghana and they insisted that in their voice-over of a gathering of MPS that everyone should be mentioned. In the UK, that would be met with short shrift — given the time alone.
This is not to say then that a journalism should entertain a whole roll call, but to indicate a model of how one group sees fit, before they were removed from the idea.
Global north journalism is a super model exported around the world that insisted everyone adopt. In News broadcasts everyone sits/ stands behind a desk with a news box in the window. The approach is 1–2 minutes, and the structural form is attenuated.
In Cairo’s broadcast network where I spent 5 years on and off teaching journalism, they have a state of the art broadcast system that requires consultants ever so often to pop by to inform its use.
Yet we find distinctly different story forms from within African cultures in Art, cloth-storytelling e.g. Kente, music, dance and cinema. Afro beat, Kwaito and High life have achieved global status offering different compositional and arrangement styles to Western pop music.
Art too! In the Sculptor Park in Surrey, just outside London, are an array of sculptures. One caught my eye. Carvings from the Shona people with a sign adding that there is no evidence the Shonas happened across Picasso’s work and what in the West is called Cubism.
One of the fundamental tenants for storytelling is truth at its centre which elides into journalism in the 1700s in the West. Daniel Defoe (Robinson Crusoe) is oft cited as someone who understood this more than others.
Yet people around the world told stories and the truth. In Akan “ɛyɛ Nokare” (it’s is true) and “Wo di Konkonsa” ( you’re bring mischievous) help indicate people told truths. After King Mbanza Kongo in 1491 comes into contact with the Portuguese, he is compelled to write to King Joao III later (Proto journalism).
‘Each day the traders are kidnapping our children… The corruption and depravity are wide spread.
The 17th century yields other interesting ideas. Philosophy shapes a hierarchy between the global north and south, and indeed a white supremacy. Read the immersive “Race and racism in the founding of the modern world order by Amitav Acharya”.
Many of the West’s canons of great thinking provide a patterned discourse for language and communications that is with us today. In this, very few, if any people of colour contribute to today’s framings.
But something else also reifies storytelling — perspective, and individualism in for instance the Descartian meme: “I think therefore I am”. Both would usurp ways of accountability and seeing the world.
At British Columbia University as a visiting professor, I get the chance to view rare 17th century Japanese Ukiyo-e paintings. Perspective does not exist. In South Africa, African paintings too.
Perspective is a way at drawing patterns together with a sole focus point. Leonard Shlain in Physics and Art locates when it became a feature of the West drawing a singular viewpoint on the world. It’s claimed that it was the Jesuits who brought perspective to Japan in the 1600s and started to change their ways of seeing.
African philosophers like Antonius Amo Afer I write about here challenged the “I” and self which elides with the heroes story. For Africans it was the collective, the community. As a hypothetical gesture if African journalism was a used form in the UK, it wouldn’t just be former PM Boris Johnson who would be removed, but those connected with him.
The Adinkra symbols, Ghana’s alphabet, is another consideration of communications. Here at the former President of Ghana’s residence John Kufuor I’m invited to view a beautiful framed collection. Looking on is one of Ghana’s most foremost scholars in African studies Emeritus Professor Kofi Asare Opoku who makes the point to me, why other forms of word symbols are all pervasive today, not the Adinkra.
Amongst the symbols is the more popular Sankofa symbol ( go back and fetch) epitomising how the past is important, and supposedly impact the structural aspects of storytelling.
In 2006 as a senior lecturer at University I recorded this from students. Listen to the Ghanaian Kofi when its his turn to speak and his criticisms, which at the time I didn’t give as much currency as I do now.
All these different systems collide to shape a mode of journalism to come. But it’s in cinema that offers an interesting insight.
The birth of cinema yields a systems of tools and cameras, and a burgeoning now dominant creative space called Hollywood. Hollywood in the 1920s will attract the best of new filmmakers from around the world.
Yet in areas like Japan, China, India, Russia and France new models of storytelling will emerge. Russian Formalism, French New Wave, Neorealism — all these form tied into the intrinsic forms of folklore storytelling within a country.
The Laval Decree, a law to prevent French colonies in Africa making films in 1934 halted the growth of cinema and African expression, political, cultural, and artistic. That said The cinemas of Tunisia and Egypt come alive in the 1900s.
Cinema provided a storytelling form of differentiation, notwithstanding that during WWI & II with film making being banned in Italy, German and France, Hollywood films filled the void. Cahiers du Cinema, the influential film text by André Bazin, Jacques Doniol-Valcroze, and Joseph-Marie Lo Duca spoke about Hollywood’s influence on them.
This viewpoint becomes mirrored in Journalism in the 1940s. In Professor David Hendy’s erudite history of the BBC, we learn that the architects of BBC Broadcasting who had little to know knowledge of the electronic medium, saw its usefulness to export their Presbyterian world view to the world.
Broadcasting makes limited use of cinema’s langue, but something else, it deigns, unlike cinema with its cultural variations. For journalism and its tenants for efficacy its unitary approach is immutable. Whatever has been discovered in the global north that is it!
From thereon the model is expanded across the world. Today that’s where we are, but the internet, and digital have exposed the differences in culture, once hidden from day to day view. Like democracy and global policy making mired in global north colonial thinking, there are moves to delineate its core.
And I suggest there is a way to do this in journalism by using cinema and language as jump off points. So the question is what if the global south framed journalism. That’s what I’ll be talking about at a forthcoming international conference.
