Karen Rothmyer has a “terrific and necessary” piece in the Columbia Journalism Review headlined “Hiding the Real Africa; why NGOs prefer bad news” about stereotyped images of Africans in poverty in the U.S. media and the influence of NGOs working on aid projects on this coverage (with comments from Jina Moore and I so far). Linked is the full research paper for Harvard’s Shorenstein Center.
Also at CJR is a review of Rebecca Hamilton’s Fighting for Darfur: Public Action and the Struggle to Stop Genocide.
In The Star Andrea Bohnstedt explains that “Kibera Slum is Now the face of Kenya Abroad.”
In “Good News is No News, and that’s Bad News”, Terrance Wood writes at the Development Policy Blog that the media cover aid failures and problems, rather than success stories, and that this gives a misleadingly negative impression about the effectiveness of aid.