SOCHI (Pakistan Point News / Sputnik - 27th October, 2019) Media often choose to focus the attention on the negative aspects and omit the positive ones when it comes to covering Russia and the African countries, Rwandan Minister of Trade and Industry Soraya Hakuziyaremye told Sputnik on the sidelines of the Russia-Africa economic forum in Sochi.
"As you know, Russia and Africa may suffer from the same biased narrative from the main media, where people choose to show only one side of what is happening, and it is always the negative side. ... The African continent is not about war, famine, conflicts and poverty. There is dynamism, there is growth, economic growth, development," Hakuziyaremye said, adding that "these are the positive stories that people should also showcase."
To illustrate her point, the minister pointed to the fact that six African countries are among the top ten fastest-growing economies worldwide.
"I think it has been an eye-opener as well for the African continent to find out what is really happening in Russia," she added.
The prejudice of Western media covering the African countries has been gaining a growing momentum in the public discourse. Twitter was stormed by hashtags such as #someonetellcnn and #someonetellNewYorkTimes as more and more people in Africa and abroad took to social media to express their outrage about certain media covering events in Africa in a way they would normally not do if covering events in the West: from publishing sensitive data, such as dead bodies covered in blood, to spelling out only the countries of origin of victims from the West, as happened in case of the deadly Ethiopian Airlines plane crash earlier this year.
It is all doom and gloom when it comes to the coverage of Russia too in media of the United States, Canada and Europe, research by the Rossiya Segodnya news agency revealed earlier this month. Analysts studied 81,500 articles and news reports and found that 49.8 percent of them were critical of Russia and 48.1 percent neutral, with only 2 percent of stories being positive. Of US outlets, CNN published the most negative stories about Russia (982), followed by The Washington Post with 555 and The New York Times with 346. The UK's Daily Express and The Times were close behind with 339 and 311 stories respectively.
The inaugural Russia-Africa Summit and Economic Forum ran through Wednesday-Thursday in the Russian resort city of Sochi. It brought together the heads of state or government of over 40 African nations, while 11 others sent their vice presidents, foreign ministers or ambassadors.
