Global media coverage of Sudan’s protests is lamentable

 In Sudan, a week of protests, demonstrations and killings (the Sudanese Doctors Union says 210 https://radiotamazuj.org/en/article/sudanese-doctors-report-210-dead-khartoum-during-demonstrations) have passed and most of us are none the wiser. In the meantime earnest calls for change have been met by brutal suppression.  School children shot in cold blood. Funeral goers attacked.  People made voiceless by nationwide internet blackouts.  Yet the response of the world’s media has barely been audible.

So while the BBC muses over the details of Prince George’s upcoming Christening and CNN speculates about the implications of President Obama and Rouhani’s exchange of niceties, human stories of unimaginable suffering have gone unheard. The idea that journalism should be a force for positive change in the world is once again put into question.

As the worlds media continues to turn a blind-eye to developments in Sudan, the momentum of the protests ebb. The longer you have to search the hidden links of an internet news website to find even vague mention of Sudan (usually written by an agency), the greater the injustice. 

There is a compelling story waiting to be told. A story of young and old, man and women ( see http://english.alarabiya.net/en/News/2013/09/30/Tear-gas-fired-at-women-s-university-protest-in-Sudan-.html), whole families for that matter bravely taking to the streets in defiance of the status quo. It is a defiance so striking precisely because of the challenge it faces.

 More often than not, voices for change are stifled by the government’s overbearing security apparatus. Media and information networks have been censored. Civil society has been purged of its most persuasive voices.  Sudan’s protest may not be as large as those witnessed in Egypt and Tunisia, yet the challenge it faces is in many ways more daunting.

 The global media does not grasp this challenge. It does not recognize the significance of the moment a journalist accuses a minister of ‘lying’ in his claims that photographs of shot protestors are ‘fakes’’  (http://www.utsandiego.com/news/2013/sep/30/sudanese-journalist-criticizes-ministers-on-camera/).

 Instead given the breakthroughs at the UN, Syria’s chemical weapons, Egypt’s ongoing protests not to mention Prince George’s upcoming Christening, events in Sudan rarely reach the newscast’s rundown (AJE and France24 being exceptions).

 Perhaps we think we already understand the protests in Sudan. That with one instinctive brushstroke we can paint the same picture of political and social oppression, economic demise and civil conflict that we subconsciously associate with any mention of this ‘hopeless’ country.

 If so, we are very mistaken.