Note: The following is in stream of consciousness form because I am working from A German language keyboard and cannot find the punctuation marks I need to producer paragraphs…. I am writing on Friday at 6PM, Bonn Time…..

I would not exactly call this trip to Germany a pause from the cause, since I have been locked away meetings with media monitors from all over the world. It has offered a respite of sorts from the TV war, but, instead, I have been plunged back into discussions of the coverage of other issues. While the world is following the war in Afghanistan, other issues are unfolding, driven by many different agendas.

The Media Tenor organization which is sponsoring this event gave its international TV prize this year for media diversity to the South African Broadcasting Corporation, a clear sign that media makers who in other countries are not just looking to CNN or western broadcast models as their paragons of excellence. Media monitors from this group, based in Bonn, but also New York, Pretoria and three other cities compared and contrasted the range of coverage. They rated different broadcasts by a variety of specialized criteria. In their view the SABC outclassed and out reported two prime time BBC news programs and all the US networks. These ratings are based on a detailed viewing and coding of content. When Matatha Tsetu, a veteran and respected editor turned TV journalist accepted the award, he spoke of his network’s efforts to give voice to the poor and voiceless in his country.

He later told me about the war he was most worried about, and that it is not in Central Asia. He explained how his country’s soldiers and former President Nelson Mandela were engaged, at that moment, in helping to promote peace in the Central African nation of Burundi. Burundi had also had a serious genocidal type ethnic conflict, and it was his hope that if its new transitional government, supported by soldiers from his homeland, works, it may provide a model for neighboring Rwanda. Let us not forget the million who were massacred there while most of the world fiddled and looked away. I tried to remember the last story I had seen about Burundi, or if I had seen ANY stories about Burundi at all. CNN INTERNATIONAL (the global news service broadcast from Atlanta to the world but not the US) did devote one of those world news minutes to an image of Mandela on the scene there, while BBC World gave it slightly more time.

But the point he made to me is that African news barely makes it on to our radar screen, especially when most Americans believe that the only pain worth paying attention to is their own. I was happy that the Media Tenor conference had made Africa a part of its agenda. Albina du Boisrouvray, the campaigner for AIDS orphans through her FXB foundation (www.orphans.fxb.org) was here too, discussing how hard it is to get the plight of 40 million children on to the news agenda. This is an issue that I have been involved with too, but it was hard to see how in this period the US news media would pay it any mind. She explained why so many oppressed and forgotten children are already becoming child soldiers and terrorists in training.

But you know and I know how hard it is to get journalists to look ahead, over the horizon at the next social disaster-building stream. Also, when you think about has the media approach really changed all that much since September ll, as we are told the world has. Recall that for the last few years, big media has lurched from one big story to another, from OJ to Monica to Condit, all projected as evil, perhaps not on the scale as the dreaded OSAMA, but the formula seems the same. We seem to only be capable of one big one at a time. (I know that today we are hearing about more than one threat at a time, with Anthrax, and the Taliban, and now the bridges of San Francisco are something new to worry about, but all of these stories belong to the disaster movie genre.) Believe me I am scared as everyone else because I have to fly home tomorrow, but in this country, other alarming threats seem right around the corner. The German government has just announced that so-called EXTREMIST CRIMES are down this year compared to last year. With the efficiency folks here are known for, we are told in this morning’s Frankfurter Allgemeine that there have been a mere lO,657 such crimes this year, 657 of them violent. Somehow, It am not very reassured by this news, or the picture of the German Chancellor Schröder smiling in a photograph taken in China alongside Prime Minister Zhu Rongji, who has a roster of his own crimes to account for.

It’s time to go. I expect to be in Boston tomorrow afternoon at 3PM for the Alliance for Democracy conference at the Boston Public Library. I will be talking about a news event that seems to be distant history — the 2000 election that resulted in the elevation of a Texas Governor into a seat of greater power. Once I am back, I hope to be able to resume these reports without having to toss a Deutsche Mark into a slot every five minutes.

In the meantime, comments are still welcome. Write Dissector@mediachannel.org