Nigeria Missing in News Action

Sometime on Jan. 27, a huge explosion ripped through the Ikeja Military Cantonment in Lagos, Nigeria, sending flames and debris over a vast area, killing between 600 people (the official count) and 2,000 (the unofficial one). Many of the dead were children.

This was the worst human disaster since Sept. 11. But viewers who rely solely on the evening news broadcasts of ABC, CBS and NBC may be learning about it right now for the first time.

The catastrophe barely rated a mention on the “CBS Evening News” and ABC’s “World News Tonight.” NBC’s “Nightly News” gave the story exactly ... nothing. (The story did receive a total of 11 mentions across all the daily broadcasts of the three networks, according to a LexisNexis search.)

Compare this to the BBC, whose TV and radio newscasts together produced 75 stories on the tragedy since Jan. 27, as well as the resulting political turmoil and tribal warfare in Africa’s most populous nation and one of the world’s leading oil suppliers.

So, why did the networks screw up? Too busy covering Enron and the war on terrorism to squeeze this story in? Hard to believe--stories on weather got prominent play in late January.

What about that old charge that the networks don’t care about Africa (a charge leveled most recently on “Nightline,” just before airing a weeklong series on genocide in the Congo)? How then to explain the “Nightline” series and Mark Phillips 12-part series on Africa that CBS aired last summer?

Maybe the networks have run out of money covering Afghanistan, a multimillion-dollar budget-buster. That’s impossible to believe. Lack of will--not lack of money--has long hindered the networks’ coverage of foreign news.

So what gives? Maybe the hard truth is the most obvious. After a decade of cutbacks, layoffs and bureau closings, the three major networks are so ill-prepared to cover the globe they can’t possibly cover two major stories outside of the Mideast at once.

Back in the glory days, that used to be like walking and chewing gum at the same time. Now, it’s more like brain surgery, and the success rate is 50%, if that.

The failure to cover the Nigerian tragedy “is a fair question and I’d have to go back and look at that day’s” budget, said Bill Wheatley, NBC News vice president. “But it’s a story that doubtlessly required more than we all had. We don’t have a bureau in Nigeria, but we never have.”

He adds, “I don’t ascribe any shortfall in that area to financial issues.”

Nigeria isn’t the only foreign oversight at the networks these days. The wrenching recession in Japan barely gets a mention. China is as much as forgotten. Local elections in Cambodia (the first since the Vietnam War) don’t merit even a nod.

There are significant terrorist cells (and activities) in Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore and India. Again, nada (although the Philippines is getting some attention). The networks also are pulling reporters and producers out of Afghanistan to plug holes in Somalia, Iran and elsewhere.

Meanwhile, figures from the Tyndall Report, which tabulates nightly news coverage, show that foreign coverage on the three flagship broadcasts fell nearly 50 minutes from December to January. Much of that decline can be attributed to Enron coverage.

“It used to be that even if [a] story might never appear on U.S. TV, crews had to gather footage just in case someone might suddenly want it,” says John Simpson, world affairs editor for BBC News and an Afghanistan specialist who has traveled to that country dozens of times over the years. “Now, it’s a rarity and a curiosity to find an American TV crew anywhere.”

There’s also some evidence that cable’s appetite for foreign news has cooled, too, particularly at CNN, where current flavors-of-the-month are “personalities.” MSNBC and FNC aired syndicated footage of the Nigerian disaster, while CNN aired four short reports by correspondent Jeff Koinange.

But what’s key here is that only about 21/2 million viewers (on average) watch the prime-time telecasts of the three major cable networks. About 30 million viewers watch the Big Three evening newscasts, which continue to be the country’s dominant news venue.

Over the past decade, much of network TV’s interest in foreign news seemed predicated almost entirely on its relevance to you and me.

But Sept. 11 exposed this as fallacy. Reason: The TV networks, which gorged themselves on domestic stories such as Monica and O.J. over the past decade, apparently forgot to ask which foreign hot spots were in fact relevant. Afghanistan and Pakistan? As remote as

“I don’t agree with the premise that we weren’t covering news” about terrorists pre-Sept. 11, says Marcy McGinnis, senior vice president of news coverage for CBS News. But “how do you explain the mind-set of people who hate us [when] you have 22 minutes?” She adds, CBS News is holding “conversations” about covering turmoil in Nigeria.

Paul Slavin, executive producer of ABC’s “World News Tonight,” says, “While we knew a lot of people had died [in Lagos], we had no sense of the scope of it for several days.” By then, “it was almost as if the story had gotten beyond us [and] we had all these other stories, foreign and domestic, going on.”

But after a decade of corporate malfeasance, in which network news divisions were sliced and diced, are they now capable of adequately covering the world in all its growing complexity? Says Slavin, “I’ll give you an answer that I wouldn’t allow any of my reporters to take, which is, only time will tell.”

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Verne Gay writes about television for Newsday, a Tribune company.