World

Comparing Figures 1, 2 and 3 shows the structure ofattention devoted to the countries of the developingworld. A majority of countries in the Middle East and inAsia did receive some attention on the news. The biggercountries of the Pacific rim were also covered. It isnoticeable, that with the exception of Singapore all therapidly developing south-east Asian ‘tiger economies’were featured whereas poorer and less developedcountries such as Bangladesh, Vietnam, Laos, Mongolia,Bhutan and Nepal were not. A roughly even number ofcountries in South/Central America and the Caribbeanreceived some coverage as received none, with a furtherfive featuring only in relation to sport, western visitors oranimals. By contrast the African continent receivedproportionately much less coverage than the other areas.Less than half the 52 African states/territories receivedany coverage at all on the news in our sample. Many ofthe poorest and least developed countries in Africa,particularly in the Sahel and across central sub-SaharanAfrica were simply not mentioned on the news (includingBurkina Faso, the Central African Republic, Chad,Congo, Côte d’Ivoire, Ethiopia, Gabon, Ghana, Mali,Niger, Senegal).The countries which received the most coverage in theperiod were either those in which long runningcrises/stories occurred during the period of our sampleor in those which British television companies have asignificant journalistic presence. Thus in the first casethere was extensive coverage of the civil war in SierraLeone, the kidnapping and killing of tourists in Uganda,earthquake in Colombia, hostages and the arrest ofBritons in Yemen and the bombing of Iraq. Secondly,there were a small number of countries which werefeatured on five or more occasions in relation to differentstories. These can be seen in Figure 4. It can be noted thatthose countries featured most often are South Africa,India and Israel, where British television networks havemajor offices. Overall, the structure of attention ofBritish TV news is skewed towards the richer and moreeconomically powerful countries, but with someimportant exceptions which relate most noticeably topolitical conflict and natural disasters as we shall see inmore detail in the next section.Figure 4: Countries featured onfive or more occassionsSouth Africa 16India 9Israel 7Democratic Rep of the Congo 5Indonesia 5Kenya 5South Korea 5Turkey 5Pakistan 5No. ofstoriesC.1.3. Types of CoverageOf the 72 countries which were mentioned or shown onthe news there were a variety of types of coverage. Formost of the 72 there were fleeting appearances on one ortwo topics. But some countries did receive extendedcoverage. The types of events or occasions which resultedin extended coverage tended to be confined to a fairlylimited repertoire. The main types of news were sport,conflict/war/terrorism, natural disasters/accidents,politics and the visits of westerners to developingcountries. These accounted for more than eighty percentof coverage on both BBC and ITN (ITV, C4 and C5)news programmes. The number of items on eachtopic/category are given in Figure 5 for ITN and Figure 6for the BBC.DFID – July 2000 19