Downplaying Darfur

In his Sunday New York Times column, Nick Kristof rightfully chastised President Bush for devoting less attention to Sudan's Darfur region--where the government-backed Janjaweed militia has killed 300,000 native Darfurians--than MTV. In fact, most of the press coverage has been equally sparse, and inexcusably underplayed.

According to the American Journalism Review, last year the three major networks devoted five times as much coverage to Martha Stewart as to the genocide in Sudan. The world's worst humanitarian crisis prompted an abysmal 18 minutes of fame. While the BBC reports from Darfur almost daily, renowned CNN correspondent Christiane Amanpour had to beg her bosses to let her go. "If few editors could find Rwanda on a map 10 years ago," wrote Carroll Bogert of Human Rights Watch, "Fewer still have found Darfur today."

Newspapers, with a few exceptions (The New York Times, Washington Post, Knight-Ridder), have hardly been better. "Many of the stories on Sudan published in the nation's newspapers tended to be 500 words or less, giving short shrift to a complex conflict with powerful ethnic, religious and economic factors," writes AJR's Sherry Ricchiardi. "Many accounts lacked historical context or perspective, often oversimplifying the bloodshed in Darfur. And few of them appeared on the front page." Laci Peterson made the front page of the San Francisco Chronicle 36 times in 2004, wrote the newspaper's ombudsman, Dick Rogers. Darfur graced the cover thrice.

The war in Iraq, slashed international news budgets and a focus on local news contribute to the virtual blackout. And, in a headline-driven age, the Bush Administration isn't making journalists' jobs any easier. "I wouldn't say that there has been an avalanche of concern about the situation from Congress or the White House," says San Francisco Chronicle deputy managing editor John Curley. Bush has yet to take a position on the bipartisan Darfur Accountability Act. In recent meetings with Vladimir Putin, Jacques Chirac, Tony Blair and NATO, Darfur never came up.

A few correspondents and columnists are instead bearing the brunt of the reporting burden in a devastated region where a million people have been displaced and 10,000 men, women and children are dying every month. "I feel part of something bigger than drinking Starbucks and hanging around with my friends," says the Washington Post's Emily Wax, who slipped into Darfur with a French delegation in February 2004 and returned again last August. "I could be writing 24 hours a day and never feeling I'm doing enough. This is an important part of who I am."

If only the rest of the media felt the same way, the Bush Administration might have a harder time ignoring contemporary genocide.

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