One might almost think that there is no Rain in Africa, judging from the extremely sparse Ghanaian journalistic reporting about the flooding that has misplaced 600 000 people in Northern Ghana and other West African countries. According to some reports 25 Ghanaians have already died in the floods. While BBC had this flooding among its top news yesterday, see for instance here, the issue was glaringly absent from the Daily Graphic front page, the most read newspaperin Ghana on the same day.
On popular news site Ghanaweb, I find only this article on the floods, source CNN (!)
Also reliable radio channel Joy FM, do not place any significance on the flooding in the country. The same CNN article (!!) is what they have listed under Africa/International on their webpage here.
One would think since Ghanaians are dying and we live relatively close to the scene, Ghanaian journalists would be the first to report on this horrible situation to the surrounding world. But sadly, the situation has not improved at all since I blogged about the flooding in 2007 here . What I said then was
people write me about the floods in Ghana - note the irony of that I write a comment on it on my blog “Rain in Africa”. Anyways apparently these floods make it to the news in Sweden, Spain and the US.
Is this news not relevant to Ghana? Do we not care?
Map borrowed from BBC.co.uk/Africa
1 comments:
It is precisely this kind of lack of creativity and apathy that while on the committee of the 14th GJA MEdia Awards, I resolved to set up a blog, which I have not been very active on recently. It's Ghana Media Watch Unlimited.
Back to ur point, I have been asking myself the same question that why are Ghanaians not writing about it--and does the lack of writing of it suggest that the Northern region is not considered as important by journalists as by the rest of us?
Even TV3 reports the floods in the foreign segment! WTF!!?!?!
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