15 November 2010
African Journalists Look at American Politics and Media
New York — More than 30 African professionals were among the 150 journalists from around the world participating in the recent Edward R. Murrow Program for Journalists. During their almost three weeks of traveling throughout the United States, they witnessed firsthand the U.S. midterm elections and the important role a free and independent press plays in a democratic society.
Some of the African journalists spoke with America.gov on November 10 during the last stop of their tour in New York City.
Dagnachew Teklu Woldemariam, senior correspondent for the African Press Agency in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, said the Murrow program was a great opportunity to witness the U.S. midterm elections. “We have seen how the election was carried out. How it was free and how it was carried out peacefully.”
He also said he learned how the media are protected by the courts in the United States, “which is new for me. We have not seen such a democratic and free media in the majority of African countries.”
Woldemariam said, “I think it is part of the culture of a democracy to have a free and democratic media. That is crucial to improving any democracy.”
Julius Kanubah, legislative reporter/producer for Star Radio in Liberia, told America.gov, “We are returning home with a fresh look” at how journalists work, and said that what is most important is “accurate, credible reporting” with balance.
Noting that his country recently passed its own freedom of information act for journalists, he said freedom of the press is “highly important” to everyone in a free and open society.
Awazi Kharomon, a journalist from the Democratic Republic of the Congo, appreciated the opportunity to meet with other journalists from around the world.
“It has been very important to be here to see American life firsthand and the organization of the American government,” he said, noting that in each of the four cities he visited, he discovered another America.
But the importance of a free press is the most important lesson he will take home with him, Kharomon said. “To see that in this country journalists are free to write, to say what they want and there is no organization to stop them from doing their job — that is the most important thing I discovered while in this country. Freedom of the press is the most important thing for a democracy. There is no democracy without freedom of the press.”
Amadou Ndiare Diallo, political reporter for the Guineaactu.com news website in Guinea agreed that the Murrow program was a great experience.
During the midterm elections, he said, he saw in Nevada how a candidate was very scared of what the results might be. “For us in Africa, the leader already knows the results” because they are usually predetermined, he said.
For Anthony Mulowa, chief reporter of the Times of Zambia, the Murrow program was “quite useful. … We started in Washington, D.C., where we saw how the American government operates at the federal level, and then went to individual states and got an insight into the diversity of American society.”
He said it was very apparent that the laws are different in each state, but, “ultimately, at the end of the day they link up as the United States of America. It is quite a complex society but made simple.”
In the United States, he observed, “people respect the media” and freedom of the media is “important to everyone.”
Mulowa said he wants to return home to be an “advocate of free media in Zambia, where we can have good laws, better laws” with regard to the press.
Caesar Abagali, senior reporter with the Ghana News Agency, told America.gov that a free press is important because “it allows the public to be part of the governing process. Without a free press, the public would not know what their government is doing.”
Mwesigwa Catherine Kizza, feature editor of the New Vision newspaper in Uganda, said one of her favorite parts of the program was in Florida, where she saw a university journalism school actually changing a community by covering stories that had long been ignored because they occur in an area with a high crime rate.
That program, she explained, is “enriching the experience of the students and also bringing more positive news out of that neighborhood and changing it. Every day, the students go to that neighborhood and look for stories. It is a different way of learning. I thought in my own environment, there are so many forgotten places or places nobody wants to go; … if all the journalism schools had that kind of project … it would be great because most times most journalists are all fighting to get into the same overcrowded newsrooms,” while many areas go without coverage.
The Edward R. Murrow program invites journalists to travel to the United States to examine journalistic principles and practices. Named for the late pioneering broadcast journalist Edward R. Murrow, it is sponsored by the U.S. Department of State’s Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs.
Since its inception in 2006, the program has welcomed more than 600 foreign journalists. Participants meet in the nation’s capital, then travel in smaller groups for academic seminars and field activities with faculty and students at one of the prestigious partner schools of journalism.
The 150 journalists from 125 countries who participated in this year’s program also visited various American cities to observe U.S. media coverage of state politics and government, as well as American civic life and grass-roots involvement in political affairs in smaller towns.
(This is a product of the Bureau of International Information Programs, U.S. Department of State. Web site: http://www.america.gov)
