To see whether this was true I set up a small research project to systematically monitor the world’s news media to find out how Swaziland was reported abroad. To do this it would be impractical to read every newspaper, listen to all radio stations and watch all television stations in the world. Instead, I used Google News as the source material. Google News is a computer-generated news site that collects together headlines from more than 4,500 English-language news sources worldwide.
I have been downloading items on Swaziland from Google News every day since February 2005. I do this by requesting from the computer site all items that contain the word ‘Swaziland’ in them. To make the number of downloads manageable Google News only sends you one copy of an item even if it appears in more than one publication. That means, for example, if a news agency such as the Associated Press sends out a story and it is used by a dozen newspapers in the United States only one version will be picked up and sent out to you by Google News.
For this research I took the period for one year starting March 2005 and counted the items for every other month (March, May, July and so on).
In that time there were 166 items counted. The first thing to notice about this is how few there were. The 166 items averaged just over one a day and many of the items were small reports of less than 100 words. It would seem that there is not much interest in the rest of the world about what is going on in Swaziland.
The research threw up a lot of interesting questions and there are too many to tackle in only one post, so here I’ll look only at the items that appeared in media published outside of sub-Saharan Africa. I’ll try to deal with sub-Saharan Africa at another time.
Of the 166 items published in total only 40 were published outside sub-Saharan Africa. Nearly half the 40 items (17) came from the United States and Canada, with the majority of the rest spread more or less evenly between UK, Asia and the Middle East.
These bare statistics don’t tell the full story of the way that overseas’ media see Swaziland.
The Swazi press is always very defensive when King Mswati III’s activities are reported in the foreign media. The Swazi’s tend to exaggerate the importance of the king to overseas’ media and imagine a concerted campaign against him. This is particularly so when it comes to the expensive lifestyle the king leads. (In August 2007, Forbes.com estimated that King Mswati III had a net worth of 200 million US dollars, or one billion, four hundred million emalangeni).
Only eight of the items counted in the survey referred to the lavish lifestyle of the king and five of these were from the UK media. The UK media pays little attention to Swaziland, but when it does it does seem to hone in on the king’s lifestyle. Fully five of the six items on Swaziland in the UK media were about the king.
A classic example of the type is this report from the Times of London headed, ‘Where the money went: self-interest and stupidity’. It ran for only 49 words but in this small space it managed to touch on many concerns about the king. The report expertly links the extravagant spending of the king to the fact that the newspaper’s readers indirectly contributed to this ‘self-interest and stupidity’ by giving 550,000 British pounds (more than seven million emalangeni or one million US dollars) in foreign aid to Swaziland.
SWAZILAND King Mswati III has spent £500,000 on eight Mercedes cars with gold-plated number plates, £8 million on palaces for his 13 wives and £330,000 on his 36th birthday party. Swaziland, where 700,000 people live in poverty, received £15 million of foreign aid in 2003, including £550,000 from Britain.
Times 2 July 2005
Not all reporting on the king was negative. There were five ‘positive’ stories about the king (mostly about him being involved in talks to bring trade to Swaziland). Four of these positive stories came from Middle East countries and the fifth was from China.
The US and Canada concentrated on health and development issues. All but one of the seven items on AIDS and HIV were from these countries. But the US and Canada is also concerned about human rights issues in Swaziland with five items on human rights issues originating from these countries. There was some cross over between stories about human rights and King Mswati III. For example the Washington Times, carried a United Press International agency report stating that the king had refused to sign Swaziland’s new constitution because he disagreed with sections on religion and taxing the Royal family.
Four of the items from the US and Canada were not really about Swaziland at all. Rather, they were items in small town newspapers about local people who were doing charitable work in Swaziland. The stories were about people within the newspapers’ circulation area and the news angle of the reports was the charitable work they were doing. Had they been doing the same work in a country other than Swaziland they would still make news.
I have written before that these kinds of stories aren’t about what’s going on in Swaziland, instead they’re about what local people in the area the newspapers serve are doing to help Swaziland. The kingdom is being portrayed as helpless and unable to take care of itself. The impression given from these types of newspaper reports is that the ‘heroes’ of the story are whites of European descent lifting up the helpless Swazis - an image that is false.
Possibly the harshest lesson for the Swazi journalists to learn is that hardly anyone outside of Swaziland is interested in the kingdom. Swaziland has no significance on the international stage because it is not strategically placed (there are no ports on world trade routes, for instance). Nor does Swaziland have much economic importance, such as a wealth of raw materials that are important in world manufacturing.
This lack of interest is reflected in the world’s media. International news agencies such as Reuters and the Associated Press do not have offices in the kingdom and when there is a potentially interesting story, such as the annual Reed Dance, foreign journalists travel into Swaziland for a day or so and then move on to their next job.
If Swazi journalists want the world to know more about Swaziland they should take advantage of the shortage of international reporters by writing their own news reports and articles and supplying them to foreign media.
If they really don’t like what’s being written about Swaziland, they have an ideal opportunity to change the situation.
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