Coverage of African Conflicts in the American Media: Filtering out the Logic of Plunder

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2013 DOI: 10.1163/15692108-12341273

African and Asian Studies 12 (2013) 373-390 brill.com/aas

A F R I C A N A N DA S I A N S T U D I E S

Coverage of African Conflicts in the American Media: Filtering out the Logic of Plunder

Christopher R. Cook*University of Pittsburgh at Johnstown

email: [email protected]

AbstractThrough an analysis of the Liberian Civil War I argue that elite media and foreign policy deci-sion makers share a classical set of assumptions about conflicts in the developing world that I call Westphalian. This paradigm privileges the Eurocentric nation state and its notions of power, ideology, and violence while intentionally or not, falsely reinforcing the rigid separation of gov-ernment from the private economic sphere. In the end, this Westphalian lens of power obscures the new faces of transnational conflict networks and the importance of economic sub-state actors in creating violence based purely on economic motivations and greed

KeywordsLiberia; civil war; news coverage; Euro-centric; sub-state; violence; economic

Introduction

Americans are often uninformed about African conflicts. This may not be shocking considering African media coverage has often been non-existent or shallow (Breslau, 1998, p. 6). Africa rarely makes it to front pages of the Los Angeles Times and the New York Times (El Zein and Cooper, 1992, p. 142). The continent is too far removed from everyday American life, and without signifi-cant consumer demand the media collectively ignores the continent. (Hawk, 1992; Tuchman, 1978). When the press does report on the continent it is often stories of massacres, political unrest, starvation and AIDS. However, some argue that a logic does exist to the limited media coverage of African conflicts. Jonathan Mermin states “the spectrum of debate in Washington determines

* Dr. Christopher R. Cook is Assistant Professor of Political Science at University of Pittsburgh at Johnstown. The author wishes to thank the anonymous reviewers for their thoughtful and insightful comments.

374 C. R. Cook / African and Asian Studies 12 (2013) 373-390

the spectrum of debate in the news” (p. 143). Media coverage mirrors official American foreign policy.

Through an analysis of the Liberian Civil War I argue that elite media and foreign policy decision makers share a classical set of assumptions about con-flicts in the developing world that I call Westphalian. This paradigm privileges the Eurocentric nation state and its notions of power, ideology, and violence while intentionally or not, falsely reinforcing the rigid separation of govern-ment from the private economic sphere. When it comes to reporting conflict the press reports the political angle but the private sphere is ignored. In the end, this Westphalian lens of power obscures the new faces of transnational conflict networks and the importance of economic sub-state actors in creating violence based purely on economic motivations and greed (Nordstrom, 2004).

To understand how the media reinforces this Westphalian paradigm this article is broken up into three sections. The first is an examination of the exist-ing media literature for agenda setting, framing and indexing with an empha-sis on how this relates to coverage of African conflicts. The second section expands on the indexing literature to suggest that Americans decision makers and the press share a common zeitgeist or cultural congruence about West-phalian principles that ignore the privatization of Africa’s natural resources or what Georges Nzongola-Ntalaja (2003) calls the “logic of plunder in the new era of globalization” (p. 227). It is through this congruence of elites that we find the media’s motivations and incentives behind its coverage of African conflicts. In the third section I present a cursory analysis of the Liberian Civil War and pres-ent a possible research design based on content analysis of the New York Times and Washington Post to show how the American press obscured the economic dimensions of the struggle. Hopefully, this work will add to the established media literature of indexing, and agenda setting not only in Africa but in other parts of the developing world.

Media Theory: Agenda Setting, Framing and Indexing

It is a widely held belief that a majority of Americans do not care about the world around them. However, a scholarly consensus holds that concern about foreign policy coverage increased after 9/11. Regardless, this begs the larger question of what kind of foreign news Americans are actually interested in. While there is a lack of quality studies on this topic one might suggest that Americans care about what decision makers in Washington care about. For example, the Pew Charitable Trust argues that the most closely watched for-eign policy story of 2012 (with 43%) has been the attacks against U.S. embassies in the Middle East.

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If we examine American news coverage of Africa from a supply and demand perspective, we have to ask ourselves: Who would consumers of African news be? The “demand” for African news is historically quite low. In the U.S. the only city with a significant African born population is Washington D.C. with 1.6% of the overall population. Every other metropolitan area, including New York City, Los Angeles, and Chicago is under 1%. This is different than coverage of Latin and South America, or for that matter Asia where significant immigration (and stronger economic ties) has created a growing demand for information. However, Jill Carroll argues that a market of “fervent consumers” of foreign news does exist amongst Americans regardless of their racial or ethnic origin. This group of Americans tends to “be well-heeled and middle aged – an attrac-tive audience for many high-end advertisers”. (Carroll, 2007, p. 2)

This leads us to the question of “supply,” even if a market did exist for sophis-ticated foreign coverage; people are not being given that news. As Carroll’s studies note, media companies are facing financial pressures and are cutting back foreign bureaus. This is compounded by the problem that official Wash-ington often ignores Africa. As Peter J. Schrader points out, U.S. policy in Africa is marked “by indifference at worst and neglect at best” (Apple, 1998, p. A10). It is difficult for African news to break through demographic, economic, and political constraints. If you are going to find honest reporting of African con-flicts in the American media it is best to stick with small independent media and magazines dedicated to investigative journalism.

How does this limited information in the media impact the way Americans think about Africa? There has been an ongoing debate about the connection between the media and how people perceive the world around them (see Robinson, 2002). For Walter Lippmann (1922) the media provided, “compel-ling descriptions of the public world that people cannot directly experience” (quoted in Iyengar, Peters and Kinder, 1982, p. 848). Lippmann hypothesized that the press as agenda setter is a powerful and potentially dangerous agent. Bernard C. Cohen notes:

the media may not be successful much of the time in telling people what to think, but it is stunningly successful in telling its readers what to think about. And it follows from this that the world looks different to different people, depending not only on their per-sonal interests, but also on the map that is drawn for them by the writers, editors and publishers of the papers that they read. (p. 13)

We find further empirical evidence in the seminal work of Iyengar, Peters and Kinder (1982) who argued that media has power to prime people and influence what the public deems as important, and what issues they prioritize. Nelson, Clawson, and Oxley (1997) state that, “one way the media may shape political


opinion is by framing issues in distinct ways . . . Framing is the process by which a communication source, such as a news organization, defines and constructs a political issue or political controversy” (p. 567). Robert M. Entman (1991) argues that framing is the “specific properties of . . . [a] narrative that encour-age those . . . thinking about events to develop particular understandings of them” (p. 7). A troubling example of the press creating a narrative occurred during the Rwandan genocide. The press often referred to Rwanda as “ancient tribal hatreds,” while the atrocities of the Serbs in Bosnia were compared to 20th century Nazi Germany. Steven Livingstone and Todd Eachus (1999) point out in their work that the media accepted and advanced the framework of “ancient tribal hatreds.”

Indexing and the CNN-Effect

Scott L. Althaus (2003), in conjunction with the works of Cook (1996), argue that journalists are duty bound to find and report on conflict; partially as a reflection of what sells; and secondly, because it complies with the profes-sional norms of fairness and neutrality. This conflict/fairness norm is what drives journalists even when government decision makers present a unified front. But this norm deserves closer examination.

There is a widespread belief that U.S. troops went to Somalia at the end of 1992 because the public reacted towards images of starving children (see Kennan, 1993). It has been argued that television and media coverage forces governments to act. This has become known as the CNN-Effect. However, for Warren Strobel (1997) the CNN-effect is conditional and comes into play when journalists discover a policy vacuum. Strobel argues that coverage actually followed United States policy not create it. Piers Robinson (2002), like Strobel finds that cracks in elite consensus important to understanding the impact the media has on politics. In fact, research suggests that the causal arrows flow in the opposite direction than what the CNN-effect suggests. The media, more often than not follows the official viewpoint of government elites. W. Lance Bennett (1990) in his seminal article on government and press relations calls this indexing. Piers Robinson and Eric Herring (2003) in their exhaustive litera-ture review of the media argues that most scholars of media effects believe in some form of indexing even if they do not call it so. However, an implication of framing and indexing remains the fear that without disagreement within government the media becomes a tool for the manufacturing of consent. The media can only make a difference when elite decision makers are unsure of what to do.


For most of the Cold War the media and political zeitgeist was dominated by an anti-communism paradigm. This included coverage of African conflicts like Angola and Ethiopia. Fairness is nothing more than the acceptance of what bipartisan American foreign policy makers already believe – the basic premise of the international communist threat from Moscow. Media reporting came to be dominated by a narrative of “official enemies.” In turn the media became a compliant partner in the dissemination of the government’s anti-communist policies at home and abroad. Elite opinion in the United States during the Cold War was by no means monolithic but if communists, tribal violence, or famine were not involved, Africa would disappear from the media lens (Ebo, 1992). In a 1992 Washington Post article the new Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs Herman J. Cohen stated that he was no longer constricted by the secu-rity “template of Soviet-American relations.” Entman argues that the end of the Cold War should have weakened the “journalists’ habit of deference.” (p. 107). Scott Althaus argues that official indexing of government positions should be the exception not the rule in the post-Cold War world.

But even during the Cold War the media missed an important story: con-flicts in Africa were not always about ideology and realpolitik. William Reno (1998) argues that some African leaders successfully leveraged their status as leaders of a sovereign nation to gain foreign investment. But this economic and political participation was not a desire to advance the larger ideological or material goals of the hegemonic powers but to generate the necessary revenue streams and to pursue internal regime consolidation and security (Le Billion, 2005). This carrot and stick approach ranged from outright brutality to the co-optation of political rivals for a share of the state spoils became known as neo-patrimonialism (Clapham, 1985).

The end of the Cold War was a rude awakening for some African leaders, who traditionally used external security aid in complex internal patronage systems. They were now forced to scramble and innovate. Trade not only flourished in resource extraction, but in illicit drugs, money laundering, and diamonds. Thus the roots of modern African conflict are not ideologies, and the balance of power, but what Tim Raeymaekers (2002) calls ‘network wars.’ Formal insti-tutions of power have been have been replaced by a criminal global shadow network of “extra state” activities that exist between local elites, transna-tional corporations, and governments that have transcended national borders (Nordstrom, 2005). This is also known as the warlord economy (also see Berdal and Malone, 2000). Georges Nzongola-Ntalaja (2003) calls it the “logic of plun-der in the new era of globalization.” A process where states, “Mafia Groups, off-shore banks, transnational mining companies enrich themselves from conflict” (p. 227). Laurence Juma (2006) sums it up concisely, “conflict becomes business


and business becomes conflict” (p. 103). The Eurocentric concept of national interest “fails patently” in Africa (Clark, 2001).

Developing Media Lenses and Filters and the Cultural Congruence of African Conflicts

So why does the media miss this story of private plunder? Lance Bennett (1990) reveals an avenue on how to examine coverage of African conflicts, the fears of manufacturing consent and the filtering of economic motivations. He argues that the media does not explicitly index its coverage, but instead a more sub-tle process takes place: journalists often “just know” what is news and what is considered outside the mainstream (p. 111). He expands this concept in When the Press Fails (2007) with his discussion of the Washington zeitgeist. Robert Entman presents a similar theory of “cultural congruence” (pp. 147-148). Simi-larly, Bosah Ebo states that when it comes to Africa, Americans have a pecu-liar “socio-cultural mindset” (p. 20). Journalists, he argues “deculturalize news from Africa by stripping” it of historical context, and social relevance. Ameri-can journalists “just know” that conflicts in the developing world are about security and ideology but never private profit. This is what officials in Washing-ton believe and this is what the media does not question.

This discussion leads us to the literature of worldviews and belief systems. Robert Keohane (1986) states that, “No one can cope with the complexities of world politics without . . . implicit assumptions and propositions . . .” about how the world works. The media and political elite share an “underlying normative order” because they work together, travel in the same social circles, live in the same neighborhoods and have often attended the same schools. We can an even add to the list religious organizations, like Reverend Pat Robertson, who not only has close ties to the American elites but heavily invested in Mobutu’s Zaire, and received mining concessions from Charles Taylor in Liberia. The zeitgeist of how Americans understand conflict in the developing world is thus learned through “a combination of formal study and socialization” and it influ-ences the way individuals and institutions interact with reality (see Mowle, p. 563; Voss & Dorsey, p. 11). This paradigm shapes not only the kinds of ques-tions that are supposed to be asked about African conflicts but the answers we expect to receive (Mowle, 2003; Barber, 1993; Kuhn, 1970; and Cottam & McCoy, 1998). For the media these shared beliefs, and interlocking personal connections are reinforced through the constant need for government access which creates a set of rules or expectations about what is acceptable news to cover. To challenge these unwritten rules is to find yourself “out of step with 95% of your colleagues” (p. 149, but also see Lichter, Rothman and Lichter, 1986;


Roberts, 1992). To paraphrase George Orwell in his preface to Animal Farm, the Westphalian filter of security becomes orthodoxy, “a body of ideas which it is assumed that all right-thinking people will accept without question . . . Anyone who challenges the prevailing orthodoxy finds himself silenced with surprising effectiveness” (Orwell, 1948).

However, this discussion of zeitgeist begs the question if the filter is sim-ply capturing the cozy marriage of corporate owned media and Washington’s neo-liberal policies. Lawrence R. Jacobs and Benjamin I. Page (2005) argue that “internationally oriented business leaders [including the media] exer-cise strong, consistent, and perhaps lopsided influence on the makers of U.S. foreign policy” (p. 120). Corporate influence of media coverage exists. General Electric’s ownership of NBC has had an impact on news coverage. Clearly the media has motivations and incentives not to report the true cause of conflict in Africa. Herman and Chomsky’s propaganda model of Manufacturing Consent (1988) preface their discussion of the media by noting their fundamental belief that they “serve to mobilize support for the special interests that dominate the state . . .” (p. xi).

The zeitgeist even has a name, the “Washington Consensus,” as Stanley Hoffman (1968) argues the “conceited belief that their political and economic development is a universal application for everyone” (p. 108). As Hoffman states, “Americans oscillated between the view that the country’s business was business and the view that its business was universal emancipation.” The over-all effect is that American business, media, and political elite, have effectively divorced the “process of economic growth from the pattern of foreign affairs” (p. 122). Americans do not think of private corporations as extensions of raw power, or for that matter even political. The idea that businesses might appear to Africans as a symbol of political imperialism make little sense to Wash-ington or for that matter to the media. Thus political instability and political elites fighting for the control of a sovereign nation-state are acceptable stories because it advances the Eurocentric conflict narrative (van der Gaag & Nash, 1987). But the idea that the opening up of the African economy to the free mar-kets, which has in some places privatized profits but socialized the violence is a non-story.

Thus economic turmoil disappears from coverage. Brian Beil and William Hachten (1985) discovered that the New York Times and the Times of London coverage of Ghana and Tanzania between 1965 and 1982 did not provide readers adequate information regarding the “severe economic crises . . .” both nations faced (p. 626). Fundamental economic problems in developing nations are not considered relevant “news” until it threatens the interests of the west.


A Brief Look of American Media Coverage of the Liberian Conflict

In December of 1989 Charles Taylor (with the help of Libya) launched a rebel-lion to overthrow the Samuel Doe regime. Even after Doe’s murder the rebel-lion fragmented into a brutal stalemate between competing factions in which hundreds of thousands died and millions displaced. The nations of the Eco-nomic Community of West Africa sent in a Nigerian led monitoring group (ECOMOG) to end the conflict and eventually oversee an election that gave Taylor the presidency. But the underlying economic dynamic of the Liberian war was summed up concisely (and probably inadvertently) by a refugee in an article in the New York Times: “No one is in a hurry to win this war, because the money they are making from it is so good . . . The one thing that is sure is that we, the people, are being defeated” (French, 1996, p. 8).

Using Liberia as a case study this section maps out a possible research design to measure and gauge whether the Westphalian zeitgeist operates in the media. Liberia is an example of the new face of African conflicts in the post Cold War. It is impossible to disentangle Taylor’s economic motives with his political ones. The United States did not consider this conflict a strategic interest and did not intervene. Assistant Secretary of State for Africa Herman Cohen did not even speak to President Bush about it (Huband, 2001, p. 60). With the familiar communist villains missing and a lack of American national interest we might expect the media to develop whatever Liberian narrative they wished. How-ever, I argue they continued to privilege the Westphalian worldview of elite actors at the expense of the growing importance of economic exploitation.

Even before Taylor had become President, he had turned his rebel occu-pied areas into a pseudo-sovereign entity called “Taylorland” or Greater Libe-ria with its capital in Gbarnga. This mock nation (complete with rudimentary bureaucracy) was designed to maintain control over the extraction and profits of Liberian natural resources (timber, diamonds, iron ore and rubber) while denying them to the weak central government in Monrovia. To some extent the global community accepted the state of affairs and American and Euro-pean businesses flooded in to trade commodities (Duyvesteyn, 2005, p. 31). In 1990 a Firestone executive called Taylor a freedom fighter (Noble, 1990, p. A7). In reality Liberian sovereignty in the Eurocentric sense was de jure rather than de facto (see McLean, 2001).

Methodology: Measuring American Media

How did the American media frame the Liberian crisis? One NGO official, who was trying to raise awareness in the west, felt that Liberia: “was reported as a weird, lower order war” (Minear, Scott & Weiss, 1996, p. 48). The first step


in this study is to define what media we are going to use analyze the crisis. There are many different kinds of media outlets: print, radio, television and now we can add to this internet. But when it comes to the Liberian War, which started at the end of 1989 I have chosen to analyze the New York Times and the Washington Post for two reasons. First, the difference in depth and intensity of coverage between the press and television. For example, according to the Vanderbilt Archives for the 12 months of 1990, ABC News had 37 minutes of coverage on Liberia, CBS had 15, and NBC had six whole minutes. If an average American was watching all three national networks that would only amount to 58 minutes for the entire year. By contrast the New York Times had 153 articles on various aspects of the war in Liberia in 1990 alone. If there is a serious con-sumer of African news in the United States they will turn to newspapers to get the coverage they need.

Secondly, I have selected these two papers because they are considered the official ‘newspapers of record’ for American foreign policy and international events. Hillel Nossek (2004) argues that foreign news in the United States is mediated by a few gatekeepers. These two papers have the power, resources, and an elite audience to drive the national media agenda in the way they choose to frame stories (Handley, 2008, p. 145).

With the sources chosen I next ran a Lexis-Nexis search using the keyword “Liberia” for the years 1990-1997 in the pages of the New York Times and Wash-ington Post. However, such a wide search will inevitably create false positives or stories with no actual relevance to the conflict. So in the first phase of the research I went through and manually filtered the stories that were not actually about the political events in Liberia. Stories that appeared in the food, home and garden; sports, metro and entertainment sections were discarded. This is necessary because a general search of “Liberia” in The Washington Post will uncover stories about Liberia Avenue in Manassas, Virginia alongside African cuisine and pop culture. The Times also counted Liberia in a “News Section” which acts as a table of contents for what is inside the issue. These “hits” were also discarded. However, I did include articles where the main emphasis was American foreign policy and Liberia is mentioned as a case study of African failed states and the broader question of when to intervene. This was quite common in editorials and opinion pieces. Overall, this process revealed a pop-ulation of 859 stories (476 in the New York Times and 383 in Washington Post).

Secondly, with the relevant stories flagged I needed to develop a method of content analysis that can adequately test the hypotheses whether a West-phalian zeitgeist exists. The idea that we can spot embedded concepts as “Westphalian” from the press might seem daunting. We must define this zeit-geist in observable behavior and language. We are not seeking to measure the


private worldview of any particular reporter but the collective voice of the New York Times and the Washington Post (Mowle, Cottam & McCoy, 1998, pp. 129-139). To code this press coverage I operationalize Westphalian loosely based on the methodology of van der Gaag and Nash who searched for emotive terms like murder, atrocities, and rape in relation to coverage of Zimbabwe in the 1980’s. They also found what they call African descriptors words: corrupt, crazy, gruesome, evil and brutal (van der Gaag and Nash, 1987, pp. 28-30). How-ever, in this case we are looking for descriptor words that convey Westphalian and economic exploitation. While this is ultimately a subjective process the words chosen should be simple, common, and easily recognizable terms that newspapers frequently use to convey a story and that other researchers can readily agree too. Secondly, similar words and concepts are also searched to make sure I am capturing the underlying concepts within the articles and not missing them because of unique word choices. Since we are coding the full text of every story we should alleviate some of the fears of selection bias that come from choosing stories that only support the hypotheses.

There are three subject areas we want to examine in American coverage of the Liberian conflict. First, Westphalian descriptor words should capture the political process that is comfortably known in the west: power (the men with guns), negotiating cease fires, peace agreements, foreign interventions and geo-graphical places. So the specific words searched for are: cease fire, ECOMOG, Economic Community, intervention, interests, peace, rebel, refugees. It was important to find the right set of words to capture articles about the Economic Community of West Africa intervention. I then ran searches for the Liberian elite actors: John Hezekiah Bowen, President Samuel Doe, Prince Johnson, the ULIMO leaders Alhaji Kromah, and Roosevelt Johnson, respected civilians like Amos Sawyer, and of course Charles Taylor. I followed this with searches for the following nations and places: Bosnia, Ivory Coast, Libya, Monrovia, Nigeria, Rwanda, Sierra Leone, Somalia, Zaire and West Africa in general. Bosnia might not seem like an obvious choice but in context of the debate about humanitar-ian intervention I thought it might be an interesting to see how often it was mentioned in the same article as Liberia (11.75% of stories covered). Though there might be words I have missed these keywords can paint a quick picture about what these articles are about.

However this Westphalian hypothesis will be challenged if we find more stories supplemented by a discussion of the roles of corruption, the looting of natural resources, the inflow of private capital, global economics, and the importance of sub state actors. But we need to be specific about the terms of corruption. The idea that sovereign rulers are corrupt is not, in of itself evi-dence for Carolyn Nordstrom’s shadow networks. The western press is ripe


with stories of personal corruption in Africa. We need to differentiate fram-ing of stories that show corruption as isolated, or individualistic with systemic transnational corruption. In essence we are looking for the enablers to the exploitation of Liberia. So the keywords chosen are not only “corruption” but: diamonds, Firestone, forest, logging, minerals, mines, ore, rubber, and timber. These terms represent the major Liberian commodities. Manual filtration is also needed to see what kind of corruption is being discussed and to make sure that mines means mining and not land mines etc.

Finally, in line with the work of van der Gaag and Nash we can examine how much emphasis the American press puts on the role of ethnicity in Africa. So we can examine descriptor words like: ethnic, Gio, Krahn, Mano, tribal, and tribe. Former President Samuel Doe was a member of the Krahn tribe and Tay-lor’s NPFL was mostly (but not exclusively) comprised of Gio and Mano. How important were the concepts of tribe and ethnicity to reporting this conflict? We should be able to tell based on word content.

The Findings

In my analysis of the Liberian conflict coverage in the pages of the New York Times and the Washington Post I found a systematic under reporting of the economic dimensions of the conflict. Coverage conforms to the narrative of the Westphalian lens and is dominated by elites jockeying for power, the inter-national intervention of West African states, the removal of American citizens from the country, and the negotiations and cease fires which led to the end of the conflict in 1997. Below are the findings by category.

The leading descriptor words over the eight year time span (besides the cap-ital “Monrovia”) was “peace” (as in peace keepers, peace treaties, peace in Libe-ria) which appeared in 56.92% of stories; also “rebel” in 51.68%. Rounding out the top ten key words are “Charles Taylor” who appeared in 44.35%, President “Samuel Doe” 38.06% (executed in September of 1990); and “refugees” which was in 33.64%. The top two other nations mentioned (besides the United States) were “Nigeria” with 34.34% and the Ivory Coast (where Taylor launched his rebellion) with 28.28%. “West Africa” was mentioned 51.57%, but ironically the term “ECOMOG” only appears 4.88% and “Economic Community” 15.13%. The press to some extent fixated on Taylor after the death of Doe. For example they seem to have discounted the rival ULIMO movement overall – it only gar-nered 2.79%, and its highest total in any one year was 8.95% in 1995.

Did the press obscure the role of economic exploitation? On one hand the New York Times states: “Mr. Taylor has granted lucrative concessions to a num-ber of foreign diamond and gold exporters, particularly from Germany and


France. Now, the taxes and export duties from timber, rubber and mining operations – which once flowed to the central government – are controlled by him” (Noble, 1992, p. A3). We could also find, courtesy of Howard French that the ECOMOG mission turned into: “into a contraband-running, shake-down operation” (1996, p. A4). But considering the importance of economic exploitation in fueling the war these articles were few and far apart. The role of economics received scant coverage and confirms our hypothesis. Corrup-tion might be considered the closet proxy to the level of exploitation and it was mentioned in 11.52% of the articles. But these articles on closer inspec-tion actually refer to the corruption of Doe, Nigerian domestic politics, Mobutu Sese Seko and Africa in general. By contrast the “State Department” appears in 23.16% of Liberian stories. I then ran a search for “Charles Taylor and Corrup-tion” and found they only represent 4.07% of the population.

If we look more specifically for the keywords of major natural resources we find even less coverage. For example the major export is rubber and it was only mentioned in 6.75% of the articles; Firestone specifically in 3.25%. We find this same story repeated for every commodity that makes money in a glo-balized economy: “forests” were mentioned 3.95% of the time; “timber” 2.32% and “logging” 1.16%. But even then some of these articles on the logging indus-try were referring to exploitation in Zaire and logging in relation to the Ebola virus (which appears in .81%). We also have “diamonds” mentioned in 6.05%, “minerals” 3.6%, “mines” 4.07%, and “ore” 1.97%. The discussion of economic exploitation is not absent but it is de-emphasized. Reporters like Howard French and Kenneth Noble described the level of Taylor’s corruption in “Tay-lorland” (which was specifically mentioned once in the Washington Post) but it pales in comparison to the straightforward narrative of rebels, and govern-ments fighting over a war torn capital and the political and military process to make them stop fighting and resolve their differences (Richburg, 1992, p. A1).

It may be also informative to disaggregate the data about Liberia coverage into the different phases of the conflict. During the year 1990 (which repre-sents 27.47% of all the stories) both papers covered the Liberian crisis as an advanced game of “capture the flag.” As the rebels advanced on the capital coverage fixated on the political elites and rebel leaders and where they were located. President Samuel Doe appeared in 91% of the articles while Charles Taylor appeared in 65%; and rival rebel leader Prince Johnson (who eventually killed Doe that September) was in 43.35%. The word “rebels” were mentioned in 88% of the stories. Since the focus of the initial conflict was the capture of Monrovia (signaling the fall of the Doe regime) it appeared in 90% of the articles. But to be certain the American slant of the coverage is apparent in the New York Times where Washington’s reactions to the conflict are mentioned in


74.82% of the stories and in both papers the State Department is mentioned in 37.64%.

However, with the introduction of the ECOMOG forces and the uneasy and fragile stalemate coverage in both papers actually drops. Simple word counts of Liberia become misleading because the nation is now being mentioned in the press in conjunction with the goals of American foreign policy, the general plight of Africa and the concept of humanitarian intervention. So for example, in 1993 as the American press joins in on the debate about the post Cold War, President Clinton is mentioned in 36.11% of stories, Bosnia is in 30.55% and in the most telling statistic Somalia was mentioned in 50%. By contrast Charles Taylor is only mentioned in 34.72% – less that Clinton. The following year Somalia is mentioned in 51.21%, Rwanda is mentioned in 57.31%, and Bosnia is 21.95%. Taylor, who we must remember controls most of Liberia, is only men-tioned in 28.04%. Instead of in depth coverage of Liberia it becomes alongside Somalia and Rwanda another case study of a failed state.

As we have seen in our literature review, Africa coverage is often seen as the “dark continent” and much has been made of tribes. While tribes are a normal fact of life in Africa to the average American they usually connote primitive-ness. Based on this analysis the use of tribe was not overdone by the press: tribe only appeared in 13.62% of the articles (tribal was 14.08%). The word “ethnic” appeared in 28.05% of all stories covered and some of that was in relation to Bosnia, Rwanda and Somalia. For the specific groupings inside Liberia we find Doe’s Krahn tribe at 12.57%, and Gio and Mano (usually reported together) at 7.21%.

The first phase of the conflict ended when Taylor legally assumed the Libe-rian Presidency in 1997. But the election has to be placed in the context of his military superiority in relation to other factions and his well financed intimida-tion campaign. For example, his unofficial campaign slogan, “He killed my ma, he killed my pa, I’ll vote for him.” The New York Times wondered which Charles Taylor won: “the bullying ex warlord or the modernizer” (French, 1998, p. A3)? It was obvious to Liberians that the warlord won. Taylor needed the title of President to truly leverage the full money making potential within the country. As President he willingly outsourced control of the ports and airports to foreign firms to please the west’s zeal for privatization. But this action also shrewdly cut off a powerful source of independent revenue from potential rivals who were accustomed to skimming off the top. Furthermore, with foreigners collecting revenue it doubly served the purpose of starving the bureaucracy (a rival power base) and reinforcing Taylor’s autocratic power (Reno, p. 225). Tay-lor would not let the spoils of the state help develop independent power struc-tures even if it meant punishing fellow Liberians. But by 1997 the American


press moved on. Even during the Liberian election year the New York Times had 29 stories and Washington Post had 45. In 1998 the New York Times had 23 stories for the year and 15 were actually about Sierra Leone.

Conclusion

I argue these findings support my hypothesis that the media obscures the role of economic exploitation in African conflicts. Of course the idea that some Afri-can leaders are corrupt and use the apparatus of the state to enrich themselves is neither shocking nor new. What is new is how the process of globalization has changed the game. Long gone are the unlimited financial and military aid given to American or Soviet backed despots. The 1990s saw the expansion of neo-liberal economic reforms and privatization. Western interlopers, includ-ing the media confer legitimacy to actors who control land and access to natu-ral resources. Instead of focusing on the deeper economic roots of conflicts the press favored the Eurocentric narrative of power – and while factual it is super-ficial. Why? Possibly, as Chomsky and Hermann argue that media serves to, “to inculcate individuals with the values, beliefs, and codes of behavior that will integrate them into the institutional structures of the larger society (Chomsky and Hermann).” Taken with the research of Bennett’s zeitgeist, and Entman’s cultural congruence, the American press helps limit the terms of debate.

However, it would be incorrect to state that reporting on economic exploi-tation did not exist at all. Carolyn Nordstrom quotes an Angolan youth about this new kind of interrelated globalized violence, “Peace? Forget it, there’s too much money being made here” (p. 191). Eerily it sounds familiar to the man in Liberia quoted in The Times: “No one is in a hurry to win this war . . . because the money they are making from it is so good . . .” Kenneth Noble of the New York Times points out: “If many Liberians find doing business in Mr. Taylor’s territory [Taylorland] hard, the experience of foreigners has been quite differ-ent. Liberian-American Mining Company, one of the region’s biggest iron-ore producers, has resumed exports to Europe” (Noble, 1992, p. A3). But there is not enough of this reporting. This information is not followed up or given context. In fact, besides Firestone (3.25%) there was almost zero coverage of specific western firms operating within Liberia, within the time frame examined 1990-1997. The Westphalian filter limits the questions we ask. The American press felt no need to question the economic motives of the Firestone executive who called Taylor a “freedom fighter.” The same Firestone, in which labor standards on their rubber plantations bordered on indentured servitude; in which 75% of its profits were directly exported back to the U.S. and the 25% that remained within Liberia were expropriated by corrupt officials (Gifford, 1993, pp. 12-13).


The media must broaden its conceptual framework of how it reports con-flicts in the developing world. They must go beyond the economic and political elite and the barriers created by the nation-state start to include voices from civil society and the people. Harold H. Saunders (2001), “state borders no longer exclude a large range of interactions among citizens, and human beings have many identities – ethnic, racial, linguistic, regional, global . . . religious, ideo-logical, economic – many of them are not defined or bounded by the western definition of the nation state” (p. 485). Only when the press can report this wide range of sub state interactions can it reach a richer and deeper understanding of conflicts in the developing world. As Scott Althaus points out “editors and producers could seek out critical views by shifting the story beyond the scope of governmental institutions . . . When journalists have reason to believe the scope of conflict has extended to include non-official groups or ordinary citi-zens, they feel less obliged to follow the index set by U.S. officials” (p. 385).

Further research will have to explore whether this is obfuscation is inten-tional because of the media’s connections to the existing structures of eco-nomic power; or simply a story that sub-state economic exploitation (in the words of Bennett) is not in the underlying normative assumptions of what is a compelling story to reporters and editors. When it comes to coverage of African conflicts the press might rely on older more familiar tropes, so in Rwanda we see tribal hatreds, and during the Cold War it could be framed as Communism aggression. But many Americans in Washington, in the news room, or reading a newspaper cannot see the “bear in the woods” of economic exploitation as the underlying cause of conflicts because the western ideal of state behavior reinforces a perceived wall between the public and private sector regardless of how flimsy that wall is.

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Coverage of African Conflicts in the American Media: Filtering out the Logic of Plunder

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