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A satirical newspaper cartoon commenting on media priorities around the Murdoch scandal and the East Africa famine sparks debate
By Natasha Elkington
A satirical newspaper cartoon commenting on media priorities around the Murdoch scandal and the East Africa famine has sparked debate in our newsroom.
The image, labelled “Priorities”, depicts three naked, emaciated children holding empty bowls, with swollen bellies, ribs sticking out and flies swarming above them.
“I’ve had a bellyful of phone-hacking,” says one of the children, referencing the media frenzy over the phone-hacking scandal that has toppled News International’s top-selling News of the World paper.
“I felt it was high time the agenda changed from the phone-hacking story to Africa in terms of coverage in newspapers,” the cartoonist, Peter Brookes, told AlertNet of the cartoon in The Times, a paper owned by News International.
“It seemed to me that Somalia was being shut out.”
The image caused a bit of a storm in our newsroom, where we focus on humanitarian issues. Some of my colleagues felt that Brookes’ cartoon was a clever satirical commentary on media values that works because it plays on stereotypical caricatures and clichés of famine victims.
They argued that the joke would not work if the children were depicted in any other way and that political cartoons are by nature grotesque. They said questions of taste simply don’t come into it.
While I and a few other colleagues agreed with the message that the media has its priorities wrong, we also felt the caricatures of the children made them look like aliens, little ETs from another planet with big ears, and all three looked the same. The resounding response from our corner of the debate: “It’s tasteless!”
As someone from Africa, I felt the images of the starving children represented the stereotypical way the West views Africa and Africans – as helpless victims running around naked and covered in flies.
And now, more than ever, many the pictures coming from Somalia and the rest of East Africa are these same images. It makes me uncomfortable. Could it be that the way Westerners look at Africa hasn’t changed since the last famine, in 1985, in which 900,000 people died?
Brookes told me he drew the cartoon using mostly aid agency photographs as a reference and was just drawing what he saw.
“The way I draw is just the way I draw. I am purely working from a lot of photographs that have been available to use on the crisis on Somalia, and I was using those as reference,” Brookes said.
“It’s a children’s famine, that’s what it’s depicted as, so children were the focus of the drawing,” he said, adding that extended stomachs show the process of starvation and famine.
“I am trying to point out that there is a disaster out there that needs immediate attention.”
Earlier this week, an article from AlertNet’s East Africa correspondent Katy Migiro – “Starvation pornography: How many skinny babies can you show me?” – addressed the media’s voyeuristic and whimsical approach to the drought, as journalists chase pictures of hungry children.
Nonetheless, after speaking to the cartoonist I understood that his intentions were genuine.
“I am totally and absolutely sympathetic to the plight of the starving victims in Somalia, I hope the cartoon doesn’t pretend to be other than that,” Brookes said.
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