22 September 2021 — FAIR
Janine Jackson interviewed Milton Allimadi about New York Times coverage of Africa for the September 17, 2021, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.
New York Times Magazine (4/18/93)
Janine Jackson: Benighted. Backward. Tribal. Corrupt. Inherently violent, yet somehow also docile unto imbecility.
Listeners will be familiar with the imagery that corporate media have long used to talk about Africa and Africans. Not just tabloids that blare their racism in crude cartoons–elite media have been key in promoting the narrative in which Europeans represent civilization, which they feel moved to provide, on their own terms naturally, to Africans that could never otherwise attain it.
In the US, policing can be traced back to nineteenth-century slave patrols. In Israel, security forces have roots in Haganah, a Zionist militia group involved in the ethnic cleansing of Palestine.
George Mpanga is a London-born spoken-word poet and host of the award-winning ‘