Media: on-the-spot reporting

By Richard North - May 1, 2023

War journalism is difficult and dangerous, so there is absolutely no shame in BBC diplomatic correspondent Paul Adams monitoring current events in Sudan from Nairobi in Kenya, as the BBC website tells us.

But I don’t think it is unfair to point out that Nairobi is 1,197 miles from Khartoum, as the crow flies – if any crow was mad enough to want to make the journey. It is necessarily the case, therefore, that the BBC’s coverage of the war zone will be limited and derivative, all the more unreliable when it is filtered through the broadcaster’s institutional bias.

For the moment, the only direct coverage we’re getting from the BBC is from war-porn specialist Lyse Doucet, positioned a safe 400 miles from the nearest fighting at Port Sudan, where she has been emoting endlessly about the “traumatised” evacuees, even though these are the lucky ones who have escaped the violence.

Still, that’s a slight improvement, from the proximity perspective, on earlier reports filed by the BBC’s Africa Correspondent, Andrew Harding, based in Johannesburg. That city is actually further from Khartoum than London.

Apparently, the only time Harding has ventured into Sudan in recent times was to report on the war in Tigray, some 500 miles distant, leaving the on-the-spot reporting to an Aljazeera team.

When the absence of any local representation becomes too obvious, though, the BBC is not averse to publishing pieces on local conditions in Sudan, without revealing that the copy has been filed by a London-based reporter – omitting, therefore, to point out that it is retailing unverified reports.

Even then it is presenting an explainer written by Beverly Ochieng, a “senior digital journalist” working from the relative safety of the BBC office in Nairobi.

With the BBC shutting down or limiting its local broadcasting in the UK, readers will be delighted to learn that this office is the largest BBC bureau outside the UK, employing close to 300 of the 600 BBC journalists working across Africa, in a new, state-of-the-art facility, funded by £289 million contribution from the UK government.

As to the print media, we can always turn to the Financial Times, which likes to give the impression of being ahead of the game. However, its reportage is hardly any better. Currently, it is offering a detailed piece headed: “Sudan crisis has potential to be ‘worse than Ukraine’ for civilians, says UN official”, citing the UN deputy secretary-general who says that fighting between the army and the paramilitary force threatens to cause mass civilian casualties.

It turns out, though, that Amina Mohammed – the UN official in question – was speaking at a business forum in Nairobi, with the FT piece submitted by David Pilling and Andres Schipani, also in Nairobi.

Without providing any direct evidence, Mohammed says that Sudan’s army and its rival paramilitary group “were waging an indiscriminate battle for Khartoum”, while the air force’s bombardment of paramilitary “threatened to cause mass casualties” – claims uncritically recorded in the FT piece.

For an example of on-the-spot reporting (not), another part of the piece would be hard to beat as the pair cite Malaz Elgemiabby, a Sudanese architect living in Dubai.

She is cited as claiming her family members in Khartoum have been recounting horror stories of RSF fighters forcing their way into people’s homes, raping and looting. “They’re forcing slave women as young as 16 to cook for them”, says Dubai-based Elgemiabby.

Turning to The Times, formerly lauded as the “paper of record”, this paper relies for its on-the-spot reporting on Fred Harter in Jeddah, some 600 miles from Khartoum, augmented by writing from David Woode, its London-based crime correspondent.

This pair are able to tell us that “dozens of people are trapped in Khartoum because their passports are at a Khartoum-based centre for processing UK visas that closed after the outbreak of fighting”.

This is something the journalists cannot know from direct observation but they cite Elmuiz Mustafa, 45, a Sudanese engineer, who claims he gave his passport to the centre last May. He says he was applying for a spouse visa so he could continue visiting his British wife and their three children in Exeter.

With the centre closed, Mustafa claims he is now unable to retrieve his passport (which apparently has been with the centre for nearly a year) and flee Sudan, even as airstrikes and shelling pummel his neighbourhood. “If I had my passport, I would have a chance to escape”, he tells The Times, saying he would have at least been able to cross another border out of the country.

At least the Guardian does not pretend to have a local presence, employing London-based “special correspondent” Heather Stewart to cobble together a boilerplate piece, which relies heavily on PA Media.

Perhaps the claim for the most honest reporting can go to the Telegraph, if for no other reason that, at the time of writing, it has no current news item on Sudan posted on its website. Its opportunities for false representation are thus limited.

Nevertheless, there is nothing to suggest that any of the media reports are inaccurate, but it certainly seems to be the case that media organs are heavily reliant on unverified (or unacknowledged) sources, while the collective is recycling much the same information, with very little in the way of direct news gathering.

This is by no means a new phenomenon – we saw especially egregious examples during the military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. In many instances, journalists based in Baghdad and Kabul were filing “on-the-spot” reports of events that were taking place many hundreds of miles away, sight unseen.

With special kudos claimed for “being there”, we thus experienced many inaccurate or incomplete reports, which took precedence over more thorough reporting from a greater distance.

This applied especially to reporters embedded with the military, although their appreciation of events was sometimes limited to what they may have glimpsed from the grimy armoured window of a Snatch Land Rover, and partisan official briefings.

But there is no doubt that reporting in African war zones is more than usually difficult and dangerous, especially as there are rarely any trustworthy military forces on whom journalists can rely for facilities and protection.

This website (repeat link) sets out some of the difficulties and dangers of reporting the war in the northern Ethiopian region of Tigray.

Not a single report, we are told, has come from Eritrea, which is one of the main troop contributors to the war, but this is hardly surprising. Eritrea features at the very bottom of the Reporters Without Borders World Press Freedom Index for 2021 – even below North Korea.

The country is, quite literally, the worst place in the world for journalists. It is hermetically sealed from outside scrutiny, with even accredited ambassadors requiring written permission to travel outside of the capital, Asmara.

Since the Tigray war erupted in 2020, the Ethiopian Prime Minister, Abiy Ahmed, has adopted many of the practices of his Eritrean allies. He has restricted access to the war zone, rarely providing foreign journalists with visas, and keeping those who are resident in Addis Ababa on the shortest of leashes. All fear deportation if they cross the line and invoke the government’s wrath.

As we see with Ukraine, therefore, media coverage is not so much a reflection on the importance of events as of accessibility and the degree of danger. Thus, the BBC will happily devote maximum airtime to the low drone of Lyse Doucet, whether emoting in Ukraine or the safer edges of Sudan but will expend less time and effort on news gathering in conflict zones.

This goes, to a greater or lesser extent, to most of the Western media, rendering coverage derivative, often incomplete and mostly unreliable.

One can quite see why the media opt for the easy meat of domestic stories and celebrity trivia, but – despite claims of producing “trusted, award-winning journalism” – most of the media are ill-equipped for reporting “difficult” wars. They are largely overselling their capabilities and the quality of their reportage.