By Jerry Van Marter
Harare, 11 December (ENI)--The head of CNN International, one of the world's best-known television news networks, has conceded that his organisation's coverage of events world-wide tends to be "a mile wide and a half-inch deep". But, he insisted, "at least we're out there trying".

In a lively "Padare" session - on global communications - at the World Council of Churches' eighth assembly, in Harare, Cable News Network's international president, Chris Cramer, told an audience of 150 people that he was "never content with what we're doing" and that his goal was "to increase the analysis and contextualisation of the events we cover".

Musimbe Kanyoro, a Kenyan who heads the World Young Women's Christian Association, based in Geneva, told the meeting that Africa did not get "a fair deal" from global media such as CNN and the British Broadcasting Corporation. "You have to wait for something horrible to happen for Africa to get any attention at all," she said. "If the WCC had paid attention to the media reports about Zimbabwe, it never would have come to Harare."

Kanyoro said that she had spent some years in the United States, but when she watched US television coverage of Africa, "I didn't know that the continent being discussed was my own".

However she acknowledged that "CNN does cover things immediately, and that is usually positive." Cramer responded that CNN's "job is to alert, and we agree that is a valuable service."

He "completely rejected" an assertion by a Christian man from Kenya that there was a conspiracy among the media to portray Africa negatively. "Of course some journalists have their own agenda, and sometimes they get the story wrong," Cramer said. "But our correspondents have a responsibility to get it right, and I insist over and over again that they maintain a sense of wonder and awe and try to make sense of it all."

Cees Hamelink, a professor at the University of Amsterdam and founder of the "People's Communication Charter," told the gathering that "the problem is not [Rupert] Murdoch [head of News International] or [Ted] Turner [CNN's owner], but with people, who seem very complacent". If people were dissatisfied with media coverage of events, they should speak up. Holding the media accountable was, he said, "the responsibility of the civil society".

Nor was it the responsibility of media or governments to change the world, Hamelink added. "If you want to change a difficult world, you can't delegate it ... you have to do it yourself. People are worried about the hole in the ozone layer, but they have brain-damaging television thrown at them night after night and they sit there and watch it. They don't seem to care." [466 words]

Photographs of the assembly are available from Photo Oikoumene

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