34/YOUR MONEY OR YOUR LIFE!majority of these television images are produced, chosen and
marketed by three image banks that control 80 per cent of the market
(see Table 2.2). In an era in which an event is not judged to have
occurred unless it has appeared on television, these image banks have
tremendous power.
What is not shown on television simply does not exist. The way an
event is shown also plays a big role, as does the spoken commentary.
We have an increasingly one-dimensional and monolithic 'world
view', of which CNN provides a very good example.
The effects are staggering. African television audiences see the
situation on their continent through the eyes of local networks that
are fed their material by international news agencies and image
banks. In other cases - and this is hardly much better - the former
colonial powers' television networks provide material to African
stations. France's former colonies in Africa are submerged in footage
from France's public networks, free of charge. Africa's public
networks do not have the means to provide their own footage. A
reporter from Cote d'lvoire once quipped that it was easier to get
footage on the condition of farmers in the northeast of France than
on farmers in his own country.
In this sense, the 'global village' fosters exclusion. The 'globalisa
tion of news' means excluding a part of the planet. In a village,
everyone knows their neighbours. In the 'global village' of the media,
they do not.
Entire regions of the planet only make the news when there is a
catastrophe of one sort or another. Dozens of television teams all
converge on one location at the same time to give viewers live
coverage of the catastrophe. The genocide of Tutsis and mass murder
of Hutu dissidents by the Rwandan army and the paramilitary militias
of the Habyarimana regime, in which about 1 million people died,
were not shown at the time they were carried out (April-May 1994).
Rwanda only really hit the screens in July-August 1994, when a
section of the Rwandan population fled the country en masse towards
former Zaire as part of the French army's Operation Turquoise.
Television coverage by French networks, broadcast through much of
French-speaking Africa, did not mention the support given by French
officials to those responsible for the genocide before, while and after it
happened. Indeed, French soldiers backed by African contingents,
especially from Senegal, were portrayed as saviours.