Friday, October 8, 2010

Plurality of media in Senegal

In “Global Mediations: On the changing ecology of satellite television news”, Mugda Rai and Simon Cottle explore theories of international communications research relating to the way news is made available and accessed. They look at not only where certain satellite 24 hour news stations are available, but also at what kind of content those stations provide.

One of the interesting points they bring up is that non-Western countries may actually have more pluralized media access than the US. On page 63, they make the point that CNNI is available in almost “every Indian household with a satellite television”, but that in the US, it is very expensive and hard to get the ZEE News from India. Thus, the Western countries are actually “dominated by their own channels with few non-Western choices.”

When I lived in Senegal, we watched the local news and the BBC news on the cable television. I would agree that the news I consumed there was both more local and more international than the news on equivalent cable channel access in the US. In my experience, this definitely affected the way that people could have informed debate in the public sphere. While I watched CCTV when I had cable in the US to get more information about Asia, I don’t know any other people who do. In Senegal, the majority of conversations quickly turn to issues affecting the public in politics, both local and international, and everyone is informed. The local papers and TV local news stations give information from all angles of the political spectrum about the politicians, religious leaders, strikes, reasons for power outages, high-profile conferences, international aid projects, and the list goes on.

In the US, my experience has been different. Unless people are studying politics or it is their profession, I find that conversations don’t turn to politics as often. I also find that people here tend to be less engaged and informed about the decisions politicians are making on a daily basis, which weakens the debates in the public sphere. While Senegal is a lot smaller, and I lived in the capital city, even people who lived in the small towns were informed about issues, both local and international.

When I lived in California, I once heard a girl born there ask if New Hampshire was a town in Connecticut. In Senegal, a man from a small town who had never left Senegal, knew where New Hampshire was in relation to Boston and even knew the capital city of Concord. While this reflects also on our lack of geography education, it spoke to me about how informed and engaged people in Senegal are, and I think it is definitely related to the way media is presented and discussed.

I don’t see any contraflow of the kind of media I saw in Senegal making its way back to the US. However, it is easy to access the local newspapers from Senegal online. This is how most of the diaspora community from Senegal stays in touch with the news from home.

I also definitely noticed a preference for local content from people there. When there was news coverage or sitcoms in the local language of Wolof, everyone watched it. The local channel also showed films made by students, both fiction and documentary style, and everyone watched those as well. The equivalent media here would be only seen at film festivals and private screenings.

I think that many of the articles we have read fail to give enough credit to audiences in the “developing world” for their ability to analyze the content they watch and make informed decisions about what they are watching and how it fits into their cultures/selves. It is not as though the cultures in non-Western countries are static. I can see how some theorists lament the way that non-Western countries emulate negative aspects of our media system. In fact, some of the papers in Senegal have started to use the Western commercial style of reporting, focusing on more sensationalist topics. But, some media companies in Senegal see the economic potential and want to have a part of this lucrative industry. And, reporters adapt the style and topics to fit into the local framework. While I did see this trend, it had just started in the last few years. I do think that the plurality of access allows for a richer public debate, but it does not necessarily empower people, but that is a discussion for another time.

No comments:

Post a Comment