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Both CBS and NBC followed up on Wednesday's coverage by NBC's Dawn Fratangelo of the Leadership Academy for Girls, the African boarding school founded in January with "great fanfare and $40m" of Oprah Winfrey's money, as CBS' Byron Pitts put it. NBC's Ron Allen recalled how the daytime TV host staked her reputation on the school's success: "This is a supreme moment of destiny for me." Allegations of abuse by seven students led to the arrest of a dormitory matron on charges of assault and sexual solicitation. The principal Winfrey hired and two colleagues were fired, Allen added, "apparently for ignoring the girls' complaints." Winfrey explained that "it is our duty as adults to listen and take immediate action" when a child alleges mistreatment. Yet the coverage was more concerned about possible trouble for Winfrey than about the abuse itself. NBC's Allen turned to Access Hollywood's Shaun Robinson. She reported that police told her that "Oprah and her staff got to the heart of the matter." CBS' Pitts consulted Jess Cagle of People magazine. "There is no damage to her brand," he assured us.
NBC anchor Brian Williams took time away from his Saturday Night Live hosting rehearsals to sit down with U2's Bono and praise him for Making a Difference. Bono announced that the first year of his Red Campaign--branding consumer products such as T-shirts, iPods and cell phones with the color to signify that a portion of revenues would go to African philanthropy--had raised $47m. That money has been used to treat 1m Africans with HIV/AIDS, 2m with tuberculosis and 20m with malaria. When Williams showed footage of a pregnant AIDS patient in Swaziland whose life had been saved by two pills a day, Bono asserted that a Third World activist shares roles with a television journalist: "Our job, partly, and your job is to turn statistics into flesh and blood, into people."
Of course the converse is also the job of a television journalist--to use "flesh and blood…people" to illustrate statistics and wider abstractions. That is why ABC's Persons of the Week was so disappointing. Anchor Charles Gibson profiled the anti-war activists Empowering Hands, a group of five former so-called "bush wives" of rebel forces in Uganda's civil war. The quintet was in New York City to be honored by Glamour and to lobby the United Nations. Gibson explained that bush wives were kidnapped as girls from local villages, raped by guerrilla soldiers and forced to bear children. Boys, when kidnapped, are turned into soldiers, forced to "torture and murder."
Yet Gibson presented these atrocities as mere anecdotes, bereft of information. What is the name of the rebel forces? What is their complaint against the Ugandan government? Is the civil war based on ethnic faultlines or religious or ideological ones or is it mere warlordism? Which forces are prevailing? Or, just the simplest information, where is Uganda on a map of Africa?
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