It's Getting Harder to Seriously Follow International News

North Africa as a case study of limited, problematic coverage.

I have been blogging on and off, at various websites, since 2006, and much of that time I’ve tried to follow one region or another - the Sahel above all, but also the zones that this present newsletter covers (Sahel and West Africa, North Africa, the Greater Horn of Africa, and the Middle East). My most intensive period of blogging was 2009-2013. With this newsletter (2024-present), I can’t match the level of writing I did then, at a time when I had many fewer professional and personal commitments - but this newsletter does represent my effort to get back to some kind of structure and regularity in my blogging.

A lot changed between 2013 and 2024 in terms of the raw material available for blogging about international news and events. The changes are almost all for the worse, from where I sit. Here are a four of the basic ones:

• Search results for news, on Google and Twitter especially, yield tremendous amounts of useless, low quality, or dubious results. This is true when simply searching for news about particular countries and it is even true when I am trying to find something I previously saw. Google Alerts still functions as one useful resource for bringing important headlines to my inbox, but searching Google in the moment is often a recipe for frustration.

• More and more news platforms are behind paywalls, and I’m typically reluctant to subscribe to most outlets, not just because of cost but also in some cases out of principle and, further still, because it seems like a pain to manage. I can access many sites through my university library, but this often involves cumbersome login and search processes, again even when I know precisely what I want to find. A good analyst, it seems to me, would need subscriptions to the FT, Bloomberg, Reuters, the Economist, and the New York Times, at a minimum, which - again - seems pricey and burdensome.

• Single storylines can come to dominate coverage of a country in the international press, crowding out a sense of events on the ground as numerous outlets repeat and weigh in on that one story. This is the case, for example, when searching for news about Algeria - it feels sometimes in both English and French outlets that the saga of Algerian-French relations takes up all the media space. Or to take another example, it is much easier to find discussion of Iran’s conflicts with Israel and the United States, or of Iranian foreign policy generally, than it is to find detailed coverage of politics and life at a domestic level in Iran. Sometimes, the drama and importance of an unfolding story can attract numerous talented journalists, international and local, who document the many interlocking stories that make up that broader event - for example, I have read a great deal of quality journalism about various facets of the ongoing, tragic civil war in Sudan. But more common, I find, is for a country’s presence in the international media to be thin and one-dimensional and repetitive.

• A welter of national and local news sites offer the advantage of taking one beyond the Western press, but their ownership, leanings, and reliability are often difficult to pin down. If one follows a country very closely (as I try to with, say, Mali or Nigeria), then this problem becomes part of the analysis itself and one can eventually develop some orientation within a crowded media ecosystem. But if one is trying to follow a country in a more modest way (as I do with, say, Libya), then there is a vicious cycle wherein I don’t know enough about the country to discern which outlets are reliable and then I have difficulty building a knowledge base about the country and its media ecosystem.

• Highly authoritarian governments in many countries in the four regions named above are cracking down on investigative journalism and free expression, both by expelling foreign news agencies and muzzling domestic ones; the analyst can partly follow events in such countries by turning to the human rights community and to think tanks, but those organizations have their own biases, of course, and tend to report on a somewhat narrow range of issues. Also authoritarianism and the actions of the authoritarian leader can become the single story - and certainly those leaders and their decisions are important, but the fixation on one personality can, again, crowd out other storylines.

• Speaking of think tanks (and academia), the analyst/specialist/researcher class focusing on any given country or region can become an echo chamber. Consuming each other’s reports, interviewing the same local informants, giving quotes to the same international media outlets (whose reports then feed back into the echo chamber), the analyst class can end up imposing and sustaining a framework for viewing a particular place or ongoing crisis/event.

I feel these problems when looking at all four regions I try to cover here on the site, but I feel them most when trying to follow North Africa. All of the above issues are magnified when it comes to North Africa coverage, for a few reasons:

• Geographically, for Western media sites, North Africa often falls between the cracks of Africa coverage and Middle East coverage. Africa coverage often tends to be dominated by sub-Saharan Africa, while “Middle East and North Africa” coverage tends to prioritize the Middle East over North Africa. Standalone coverage of North Africa is somewhat rare, even just in terms of how news websites are organized; for example, tellingly, the Associated Press’ standalone North Africa page appears not to have been updated since late 2022. Even Al Jazeera, both in English and Arabic, dedicates much more space to the Middle East (and Sudan) than to North Africa, as does BBC Arabic. Western think tanks, too, are more likely to have robust Middle East programs and even Africa programs than they are to have flourishing North Africa programs. I will shout out the media platforms AfriqueXXI and OrientXXI, as well as New Lines Magazine, for regularly offering deep reporting about North Africa, and Johns Hopkins’ North Africa Initiative is one rare example of a vibrant North Africa program at a Western institution.

• I find difficulty locating a diversity of serious national news sources from the North African countries. Perhaps this is my own lack of sophistication, and I would certainly welcome readers’ suggestions - but beyond Maroc360 and TelQuel for Morocco; Algérie Presse Service, El Watan, and El Moudjahid for Algeria; and Webdo, Nawaat, and Kapitalis for Tunisia, I struggle to find platforms that have quality offerings. All of those sites, meanwhile, have their own biases and limitations; some are state-run or state-friendly, others are not transparent about ownership, etc.

• The Morocco-Algeria rivalry and French-Algerian tensions dominate much coverage of North Africa and, just at a logistical level, complicate efforts to search for news about domestic events in both Morocco and Algeria. Many search results for topics on Algeria yield hostile coverage from Moroccan sites, and vice versa. Official and quasi-official Algerian news sites, meanwhile, are often full of relatively humdrum news about quotidian diplomatic developments or relatively banal policy and economic developments, making it difficult (for me) to pin down key trends and key areas of genuine political change.

• The stories of Tunisian President Kais Saied’s personal power and the grim conditions of migrants in Tunisia are vital for understanding that country, but it is difficult (for me) to get beyond those two stories in following events in Tunisia.

• Libya, as I mentioned above, is to me an intimidating and confusing media landscape. The country’s political fragmentation also creates a high bar for attempting to follow events there, meaning one must be familiar with a larger number of personalities and factions than elsewhere just to have the same level of understanding.

One additional factor here may be that I’m growing old and out of touch! Certainly I’m not as quick to explore new platforms and sources as I should be. But I also think there are genuine and growing barriers that would confront even the most creative analyst - above all, proliferating paywalls and the declining quality of search results are major problems. And while the full-time analyst at, say, a political risk firm or an investment bank or what have you might have access to all the paywalled content and be paid to spend hours on the phone talking with local informants, the beauty of blogging in my eyes has always been its accessibility to part-timers, amateurs, etc. I’m not a full-time analyst, after all, and not even close - I teach, I do academic research and writing, often on niche and historical topics, I meet with students and colleagues, etc. I have the luxury of forging ahead with a project like this newsletter because of my institutional perch, but I am concerned that newcomers to these regions and topics would find it too difficult to begin building up knowledge about countries they’re interested in; add that to the shrinking space for area studies in the U.S., and you have a situation where it’s difficult to get to the field and difficult to follow countries from afar.

And it’s not that bloggers have a huge impact on politics, but the overall growth of media black holes and/or cacophonous ecosystems of low-quality and dubious sites do all combine to boost government power. A lack of coverage by Western platforms, a fraught environment for national and local journalists, and the ability of governments to shape the narrative all mean that a lot of stories are going untold and unheard.