Journalist and author Howard W. French and more than 150
other writers and professors sent a letter to "60 Minutes" faulting
the prestigious CBS News program for its "frequent and recurring
misrepresentation of the African continent."
"In a series of recent segments from the continent, 60
Minutes has managed, quite extraordinarily, to render people of black African
ancestry voiceless and all but invisible," French, a former New York Times
foreign correspondent, wrote in the letter, which was signed by college
professors and writers from across America.
French's primary example was Lara Logan's reporting on the
Ebola crisis. "In that broadcast, Africans were reduced to the role of
silent victims," he wrote. "They constituted what might be called a
scenery of misery: people whose thoughts, experiences and actions were treated
as if totally without interest.
Liberians were shown within easy speaking range of Logan, including some
Liberians whom she spoke about, and yet not a single Liberian was quoted in any
capacity." He said he centered on 60 Minutes, specifically, because he found
Logan's segment on Ebola "deeply shocking in the way that it eliminated
Liberians themselves from the story about the Ebola crisis sweeping that
country…"This story came after a fairly extensive debate in the US about
the disproportionate attention given to the relatively tiny exposure to Ebola
faced in this country, compared to the toll that the disease had generated in a
swath of West Africa," he wrote. "Logan proceed nonetheless to outdo
the very worst of that kind of unbalanced coverage by going to Liberia and
avoiding, or at least failing to broadcast the voices of Liberians -- not even
as simple victims, which would have been the easy and stereotypical thing to
do."
French also cited two segments "featuring white people
who have made it their mission to rescue African wildlife." People of
black African descent "make no substantial appearance in either of these
reports, and no sense whatsoever is given of the countries visited, South
Africa and Gabon," he wrote. French characterized 60 Minutes' coverage of
Africa as "narrow, blinkered and anachronistic, like that, unfortunately,
of a lot of coverage elsewhere in the press on TV, and indeed in Hollywood, for
that matter. Very little interest is accorded to the actual lives of
Africans."
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