An Advisor to the Al Jezeera Network, an international TV network, headquartered in Qatar, has expressed concern about the distorted image and biased stories of Africa in foreign media reportage.
Ahmad Sheikh, was delivering a lecture, on "Writing for the Picture - the Al Jezeera case", at the World Media Summit, at the weekend, in Beijing, China's capital. The summit was attended by African and Asian journalists.
Sheikh, a former Editor in Chief of Al Jezeera, stressed that foreign media organisations, including the Reuters and the BBC, often project Africa in their reports in a manner which suggest that there is no good news to
write about.
He emphasized that it was high time the negative trend stopped for the positive stories on the continent be told.
He stated that the Al Jezeera Network was more focused on reporting on issues that bothered on human sufferings, corruption and dictatorship on the African continent.
Sheikh cited China as an example for African countries to follow in the area of utilising national potentials for concrete development.
He advised journalists, especially those in television, to use more pictures in telling their stories, explaining that, the audience would
understand the messages better than with mainly narrations.
Participants in the summit were taken through Conflict Reporting; Online Reporting; Video Reporting; Multi-Media Reporting; Running Digital
Newsrooms, with others topics by resource persons from Reuters, BBC, Al Jezeera, Associated Press and others.
The summit was organized by the World Media Summit Secretariat and hosted by the Xinhua, China's national news agency.
It was to sharpen participants' skills to better handle current technologies in Journalism.
As part of the Summit, participants were taken to tourist sites, including the Great Wall, Olympic Venue, the Forbidden City, San Shenghua and the Socialist countryside of China.