Terrorists, Radio Waves & Africa's War Against 'Biased Reports'

According to this article, until recently UK broadcasting laws only allowed European companies to run a radio station in Britain, and all the licences for the London FM spectrum are taken until 2010. Although the law now allows non-EU residents to apply, the limited FM spectrum remains a problem. This means that the requests of media personnel such as Raphael Tuju, once a newsreader on the Voice of Kenya's evening news and now Kenya's minister for information and tourism, have been turned down. The concern, according to some analysts, is that the reporting provided by Western media such as the BBC, which has beamed British news to Kenya since the 1950s, is "biased" - especially in light of al-Qaeda attacks of late.

That is, as this author states, "Kenya's tourist industry, its third largest foreign exchange earner, has lost $125 million since the US embassy in Nairobi was bombed in 1998, because of a Western perception that it was an unsafe destination. Immediately after the attack, European and US authorities advised their citizens not to travel to Kenya...Western governments reacted very differently to Spain's terrorist attacks in March 2004, which killed 200 people and injured another 1,400. The British and US governments advised tourists to be vigilant, but not to avoid Spain altogether."

The article continues: "The Kenyan Broadcasting Corporation was formed in 1961 and, although officially independent of the government, it has been used by successive governments to broadcast propaganda. The BBC and Voice of America gained popularity in Kenya as a result...Eighty-three million people a week tune into Voice of America, most of them outside the US. But the sound of radio in Africa is changing, with a new boom in private FM stations which are winning audiences both from foreign broadcasters and national public radio stations....The European Union and US are trying to force 109 countries to open up their borders to foreign news agencies. They say that as members of the World Trade Organization, which promotes the free trade of goods and services, these countries should liberalise their radio and television industries. Kenya is on the list but has not yet responded to the 2002 bid....No-one from Africa has. They now face the renewed prospect of losing their domestic audiences to foreign media companies."

Click here for the full paper online on the Panos website.