As my friend, Boyah Farrah, explained to me, “Somalia has it rough.”
Boyah is the author of the new and quite popular book, America Made Me A Black Man (Simon & Schuster 2022).
The reason I know Boyah is because we share the same literary agent, Alicia Brooks.
Boyah’s personal story, as told in his book, is an amazing tale of fortitude, courage and survival – a refugee from the civil wars in Somalia, he came to the United States as a teenager, but remade himself and his life and has now returned to Somalia with the intent of setting up a school.
Somalia has it rough because the only thing Americans or Europeans know about Somlia is that it is a very dangerous place, riven by war lords, violence, pirates and famine. The reason that people conjure that image up for Somalia is because that is the only Somlia that they know, and their knowledge of Somalia comes entirely from the coverage that Somalia gets from the news media.
Sending a reporter and a film crew to Somalia (or Bangladesh or Lesotho for that matter) is expensive. Very expensive – airfares, hotels, meals, rented cars, drivers, translators, fixers. It costs a fortune. So places like The BBC or NBC or CNN have to think long and hard before they commit to do a story about Somalia or places like it. And more often than not, the answer is, no.
The only time that a major news organization will send a crew to Somalia is if there is an exciting enough story that will get ratings. And what kind of stories are those? Well, pirates is a good one. There was even a Tom Hanks movie about Somali pirates (“I am the captain now”), so it’s a story that American audiences can relate to.
Other than that, Somalia doesn’t exist.
Except for Pirates, or war lords or violence, but it’s gotta be pretty good violence.
So Somalia has what we might call a negative media footprint. Pirates, war, violence, starvation. Not the kind of place you are going to go on your holiday. Not the kind of place you are likely to invest if you have a business.
Much of the world, and most of Africa suffer from this negative media footprint.
And it’s a self-perpetuating problem. Bad stories lead to a bad reputation which leads to a lack of investment which leads to more poverty and problems. Good for CNN, not so good for anyone living there.
There is an answer, however.
It is for Somalia, (and many other countries) to take control of their own media footprint. There was a time when they had to depend on the good graces of CNN or The BBC to deign to send a crew to their country, but the results were generally disastrous. Bad press. Bad stories. Scary stories. In those days, Somalia (and Haiti and Malawi and Bangladesh) and no choice. CNN and NBC had a lock on TV news.
That is no longer the case.
Train a few Somali journalists to do positive stories, and create a Somali news feed that goes right to the web. Bypass the broadcast networks. Tell your own story. All you need is an iPhone, really. That’s it.
Can you do it?
We are going to try.
UnPress, a new start up I am a part of is going to work with Boyah to train young Somali journalists to tell a very different story of their country and their lives.
As the Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis once famously said, ‘the best solution for bad free speech is more free speech’, so too, the best solution for bad news is more good news.
Carpe Medium
You can also read about how this works in my new book, THE RISE OF THE MEDIAVERSE.
