Culture Trek

Posts Tagged ‘Tribal violence’

I just read two compelling articles over at Spiked in which Western media is being taken to task for failing to report honestly and without stereotypical bias.?

In “Kenya is not the new Rwanda: Why Western observers see every political conflict in Africa as an inexplicable outburst of violence and a harbinger of ‘holocaust’” (Tuesday, 8 January 2008), Frank Furedi. Professor of Sociology at University of Kent, critiques the Western disinformation that plagues Kenyan news coverage. Tracing the underlying historical tensions of the region, Furedi challanges Western cowboy journalism that shoots from the hip:

Through today?’s promiscuous use of the term “genocide”, conflicts become transformed into morality plays about human destruction, and tend to be seen as being both incomprehensible and inevitable. Western reporters see only a sudden, inexplicable outburst of violence – a kind of murderous descent into hell – and overlook the structural causes of crises in the Third World…

…it is precisely because the stakes are so high that the last thing Kenya needs is for its problems to be transformed into a Western fantasy about “another Rwanda”. Kenya was not a beacon of democracy or a model of economic stability before the December elections. And nor is it the dramatic setting for a Rwanda-to-be after the elections. All that has happened is that one group of corrupt politicians overplayed its hand, got a little bit too greedy, and forced its opponents to react on the streets.

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