Whose Story Is It, Anyway? Al Jazeera, Ethiopia, and the Politics of Selective Outrage
Perhaps the most intellectually dishonest feature of Al Jazeera’s recent Ethiopia coverage is what it refuses to remember. Ethiopia is home to one of Africa’s largest refugee populations not as a transit country, but as a host. Hundreds of thousands of displaced people from Somalia, Eritrea, Sudan, South Sudan, Syria, and Yemen have found sanctuary on Ethiopian soil. Syrians who fled the catastrophic civil war that Al Jazeera covered with such sustained passion built lives in Addis Ababa, opened businesses, integrated into communities, welcomed, for the most part, without the violent xenophobia that has disfigured the response of certain wealthier nations considerably better placed to absorb displacement. This is an extraordinary humanitarian record. Al Jazeera, so reliably attentive to refugee suffering when it serves a particular narrative, has shown remarkably little interest in it here.