AMIN STEALS SPOTLIGHT AT USC AWARDS

For four mesmerizing minutes Tuesday, a well-heeled crowd of about 600 celebrants attending USC’s 26th annual Distinguished Achievement in Journalism Awards in Universal City watched a reprise of the Ethiopian famine horror story that aired a year ago over NBC.

Suddenly, the white wine spritzers, baked chicken and even the ice cream served up at the Sheraton Premiere Hotel banquet did not seem so appetizing.

It was that same dramatic four minutes of film, produced by Nairobi-based photojournalist Mohamed Amin, that has been generally credited with bringing the sub-Saharan hunger catastrophe to the attention of the West.

“Compared to the rest of the world, Americans are a much more compassionate and giving people,” Amin said. “But at the same time, they are only interested in what is going on immediately around them. They aren’t interested in what’s going on thousands of miles away. I’ve come across Americans who don’t even care what’s happening in the next state.”

Amin returns to his home in Kenya Wednesday, but he was in Los Angeles this week to show the famous footage one more time and to accept one of four prestigious USC awards for his efforts. Other Journalism Alumni Assn. awards went to National Public Radio, KCBS commentator Bill Stout and USA Today.

USA Today editor John Quinn and KCBS’ Stout elicited some laughs when they accepted their awards. Quinn read excerpts from readers’ letters-to-the-editor mocking the “junk-food format” of the 3-year-old national daily newspaper whose formula has been mimicked by other newspapers. UCLA graduate Stout took the opportunity to lambaste his Trojan hosts and station management in general, KCBS in particular. NPR Capitol Hill correspondent Cokie (nee Mary Martha Corinne Claiborne Boggs) Roberts, accepting on behalf of NPR’s newsmagazines “All Things Considered” and “Morning Edition,” addressed her remarks to USC journalism students whom she urged to pursue a news career.

But the evening clearly belonged to Amin, who warned the well-dressed and far-from-hungry crowd about the dangers of Western media complacency in its collective attitude toward the Third World.

Despite the visual impact of his stunning images of skeletal babies and human feeding frenzies, Amin was cautious in his optimism about Africa’s recovery. Since the footage was first broadcast, Western relief efforts that include Band Aid, USA for Africa and Live Aid have traced their roots to Amin’s photojournalism.

But U.S. interest in Africa and the Third World in general seems to be on the point of ebbing, now that the Ethiopian emergency has peaked, Amin said.

“Recently, the broadcast media have been giving more attention to the background problems in Africa than ever before,” Amin said. “People want to know why it’s happening, not just that it is happening. If that attitude had been there a number of years ago, we would have been able to attend to the problems a lot earlier and saved a lot more lives.”

The USC award will go up on his office mantle at his Cinepix headquarters in central Nairobi, along with such prestigious public-service awards as the George Polk Award, the National Headliners Award, the Overseas Press Club Award and the British equivalent of the Emmy.

But the 43-year-old producer/entreprenuer said that all those Western awards have only scant effect on the men and women who ultimately decide what does and does not get on the nightly news broadcasts.

“The plea I was making (during the awards ceremony) was for the West to cover Africa in ways other than just in terms of the horrors and the disasters,” he said.

“Most African countries are suspicious of the media--especially the Western media--because that’s the only media that matter in creating world opinion. The good things that happen in Africa don’t get any coverage whatsoever. Bad news is the news that gets into the paper rather than a development project or whatever.”

Amin, who pursues the dramatic and the disastrous for a living, admits that trying to sell two minutes to American television on a new dam or airport project in one of the 51 countries of Africa is usually quixotic.

But the surge of interest in all things African this past year has made such efforts somewhat more rewarding than in past years, he said.

“Fortunately in the last year there has been more interest than before in something other than the big disaster story,” he said.

On Oct. 23, the first anniversary of the NBC airing of his original four minutes, Amin was able to sell network executives on twice as much videotape, for example, and almost all eight minutes was dedicated to depicting the growing crops, water-well digging projects and other positive outgrowths of the West’s compassion.

Next stop for Amin and his camera crews is El Geneina in the center of Africa’s largest country, the Sudan. There, he will do a Sudanese version of the Ethiopian first anniversary story, showing food that has arrived, reclaimed desert lands and smiling faces rather than death, mayhem and hopelessness.

“Maybe NBC will run that too,” he said.