The reporting last week by the Swazi Observer of two destitute seven-year-old boys has awoken concerns about how the media in Swaziland report on poverty.
I wrote yesterday that the media tend to cover ‘poverty’ as if it were an event, when, in fact, it is a process.
The reports about the two boys showed that they were without parents, often went days without meals, had to walk 10 kilometres a day to school and only had rags to wear.
The coverage sparked concern among readers of the newspaper and donations of food, clothes and cash flooded in. I was critical of the Observer because 70 per cent of the population of Swaziland or about 700,000 people live on less than one US dollar a day. That pittance of an income means most people in Swaziland go hungry most of the time. About 66 per cent of the population is unable to meet basic food needs, while 43 per cent live in chronic poverty. Or put another way, the two boys featured in the Observer last week are not really much different from anyone else.
I do not intend to single out the Observer for particular criticism. Research by Sibusiso Ngubane into how the Times of Swaziland covers poverty shows that the Observer is far from being alone.
In his research Ngubane wanted to know whether the Times played an important role in fighting poverty in Swaziland.
He defined poverty as ‘a state of being deprived of the essentials of well-being such as adequate housing, food, sufficient income, employment, access to required social services and social status.’
He looked at 20 copies of the Times spread over the entire year, 2006, and found that only 24 stories about poverty were published in his sample. This led him to conclude that the Times ‘hardly reports about poverty in the country.’ He said the Times only reported about poverty as an event.
He said, ‘… the Times mostly reports about poverty when a Member of Parliament or International Donor donates food and clothes to the poor as compared to reporting about the state of poverty in rural areas of Swaziland.’
He added that the Times hardly wrote about the background of the poor while reporting about them. ‘The voice of the poor is not included when reporting about poverty’ he said. ‘The Times does not dig deep in the stories of poverty, they only report what they are told, not what they know.’
‘They also don’t go to the communities to get the stories first hand and interview the poor.’
Ngubane, a Journalism and Mass Communication student at the University of Swaziland, found that the Times did not focus on individuals but instead focused on communities in the rural areas that live in severe poverty. However, there were occasions when the Times gave some background to the causes of poverty (for example, orphans created by the HIV AIDS pandemic).
Ngubane concluded that the Times did not ‘attach any importance to the issue of poverty in the country.’ One piece of evidence for this was the fact that the newspaper did not give prominence to poverty stories. ‘.. there was not even a single story on poverty in the first five pages, including the front page.’ Most of the stories appeared on the ‘community news’ page.
None of the stories that the Times did publish on poverty were followed up at a later date, leading Ngubane to conclude that the Times did not dig deeply into poverty to find out ‘what led the poor to find themselves in such an unfortunate situation.’
There is some hope in the reporting of poverty, however. Comparing the Times to the electronic media in Swaziland, Ngubane suggests that television and radio do a better job when covering poverty. He writes that from his own observation a television or radio bulletin ‘always has one or more stories about poverty every day’.
See also
POVERTY OF SWAZI JOURNALISM 1
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