Crisis Sells: On Cooperation between Foreign Correspondents and Aid Organisations in Sub-Saharan Africa

News reports on sub-Saharan Africa are dominated by reporting which focuses on crises. It is in large part responsible for reinforcing the picture of ‘Africa, the lost continent’. Therefore, the question of why reporting assumes this form is important and is closely interconnected with the formation of public opinion on political issues. Persons from the Western cultural sphere are almost invariably consulted when it comes to assessing conflict situations. It is striking that two thirds of all of the sources used in news reports are non-African, with representatives of aid organisations playing a prominent and mostly positive role. Whereas the aid sector has experienced a rapid boom since the first decade of the twenty-first century, there has been a marked decrease in the number of foreign correspondents. The interests of the media and the aid sector seem to intersect in the field of ‘crisis themes’: the media perform a key role for the aid sector when it comes to the normative representation of aid, acquiring donations and its employment as an instrument for realising political and economic objectives. In return, aid organisations, with their dense information and contact networks, are valuable partners for journalists when the latter need figures, estimations or logistical help. In extreme cases, they propose offers of travel to aid projects to correspondents who are working on tight budgets, where the travel costs are partially covered or are financed through quid pro quos, so that the editorial departments are more likely to give their approval. Both, the media and the aid sector, are doing agency in international affairs. What kinds of motives and cost benefit analyses underlie their acting and their cooperation? As part of the current discussion on the coverage of foreign affairs and the repeated criticism of the aid sector, the goal of this contribution is to connect the two themes by pointing out their interrelations. The contribution focuses on the question how the actor relationships between foreign correspondents and relief organisations interrelate with the media coverage and, furthermore, shows up the political dimension of reporting on foreign affairs as well as its effect on Western involvement on the African continent.