Why are we ignoring Africa's floods?
Reuters AlertNet, UK - September 21, 2007
The devastating floods that are sweeping east, central and west Africa have been met with a curious silence in the British media.
Scanning the broadsheets this week, there's been plenty of coverage for Prime Minister Gordon Brown's escalating spat with Zimbabwe's Robert Mugabe. But the small matter of swathes of a continent under water has gone largely unnoticed.
A day after Reuters released the latest facts and figures on a growing African flood emergency, only The Independent covered the disaster.
A page in the world news section on September 18 with maps, flags, statistics and photos showed that people are affected in at least 15 countries. According to the paper, that's 64 dead in Sudan and more than 250,000 left homeless in Khartoum, 17 dead and 183,000 affected in Ethiopia, 21 dead and 150,000 displaced in Uganda, 12 dead in Kenya and 15 dead and 500 homes washed away in Rwanda.
It is hard to imagine how the Guardian, the Times and the Telegraph could have missed this. Instead, the one story that made the foreign pages of all these papers, (and appeared as a "News in Brief" in the Independent) was about a city crackdown ...on pigeons in Venice ...