Diamonds are a girl's best friend. Well, a certain Ms. Naomi Campbell begs to differ. The volatile supermodel was in the dock last week, on charges of accepting 'blood diamonds' from convicted Liberian president Charles Taylor in 1997.
Predictably, the mainstream media has focused all their attention on the celebrity factors surrounding the Sierra Leon trials. The BBC, with the rest of the western media, have been in sixes and sevens to get exclusive live feeds of Campbell and actress Mia Farrow's testimonies. One wonders if the trials would have got any major coverage at all, if it didn't involve high-profile western celebrities.
Global reporting continues in its one-dimensional trajectory. News from Africa continues to be mostly about 'dead, black babies', Ian Hargreaves, ex-boss of the BBC, once said. Furthermore, these stories are almost always relegated to the tiny, cobwebbed sections that get seldom noticed in a newspaper.
Take Somalia or Sudan, for instance. They've been torn by civil strife for a better part of the last two decades. Yet, the 1.5 million internally displaced Somalis get little or no mention in the Western media.
Sure, there's the whole proximity argument--why would someone in Little Rock, Arkansas want to read about gun battles in Mogadishu? One word: Globalisation. Shell. Co. and other Western oil giants have huge vested interests in Sudan. As they strike deals with the despotic Muhammad Al-Bashr, thousands are displaced from their homes, which in the oil-rich areas. One might even argue that the whole civil war has little to do with ethnic cleansing and is more about the distribution of resources across the country. This has got to sit rather uneasily with the conscience of the average Redneck, every time he takes his gas-guzzling Hummer for a spin. But somehow, it doesn't.
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In other news, President Hugo Chavez beat me to getting on Twitter. By a whole three months.
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