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African events are often not reported because Western news coverage is strongly connected to a nation's wealth.
The first week of April 2003, several hundred people were killed in ethnic violence in the Ituri region of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). Given the magnitude of the event-up to a thousand civilians killed in a single incident-and the history of violence in the region, it made sense to expect media coverage. Shortly before the killings, the International Rescue Committee published a study suggesting that 3.3 million people had died as a result of conflicts in the DRC, making the ongoing violence in the region the deadliest war in the world since World War II.
But the events in Ituri went almost unreported. On April 7th, the first day American newspapers reported the killings, The New York Times ran a brief Associated Press story on the conflict, buried on page A6. Google News, a Web site that monitors 4,500 news sources, listed only 1,200 stories in the preceding month that mentioned Congo. By contrast, on the same day Google News showed 550,000 stories for Iraq, and The New York Times ran five Iraq stories on the front page, as well as a separate section, "A Nation at War."
While it's predictable that the U.S. invasion of Iraq would squeeze most other news off the front page of American newspapers, it's only one of several reasons the conflict in Ituri received so little attention. In their seminal 1965 paper, "The Structure of Foreign News," Johan Galtung and Mari Holmboe Ruge proposed 12 factors that influence the publication of international news. While Galtung and Ruge's statistical analysis has been questioned, their proposed factors are still widely used by media theorists to explain the inclusion and exclusion of international news stories.
Galtung and Ruge, writing almost 40 years before the Congo event, could have predicted the events in Ituri would have been ignored in the United States:
* The Democratic Republic of the Congo is a "non-elite" nation.
* No "elite people" were killed in Ituri.
* There's little cultural proximity between the United States and the DRC.
* The conflict had little meaning for American readers.
* And the decade-long war in the region meant...