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CHINESE TV EXTENDS ITS REACH INTO AFRICA
DEC 19, 2005 - 8:47AM PDT
by Adam Clayton Powell III

NAIROBI – December 10 Is Africa becoming part of the Middle Kingdom? That is a popular question in the news recently: The week began with a Council on Foreign Relations report describing Africa's strategic importance to the United States. The report was comprehensive, but most American media accounts focused on one chapter, about energy, and how the Chinese were cultivating African oil, gas and other resources. The week ended with the publication of Andrew Neil's remarks at the Institute of Economic Affairs, in which he detailed China's economic growth and worldwide expansion. But here in Africa, you did not to read either report to see how China has expanded its influence. All you had to do was turn on a television set. In the 1980's and 1990's, in addition to CNN, the U.S. WorldNet television channel brought a 24-hour service to Africa that included the PBS NewsHour, C-SPAN excerpts and public affairs programming from Washington. But the Cold War ended, and WorldNet was dismantled, along with much of the rest of the U.S. public diplomacy effort. Al Snyder, a senior fellow at the USC Center on Public Diplomacy, said that the United States believed that CNN was sufficient to show the flag. This was the first indication that American dominance in broadcasting in Africa was weakening, which allowed networks from other countries to establish themselves. CNN is still on throughout the continent, joined by Bloomberg News, but now they are just two of several 24-hour English-language television news channels. There is the BBC and Sky from London, SABC Africa from Johannesburg, and, live from Beijing, China's English-language Channel 9, which has particularly benefitted from the United States' scaled back influence. There are also news channels in French and Arabic, and NHK News from Tokyo is a factor. ESPN might be the worldwide leader in sports in the United States, but in Africa, it is just one of at least half a dozen 24-hour English-language sports channels from London and Johannesburg. Al Jazeera has also added a similar sports channel to its repoertoire of news and children's networks. MTV is here, but then again, so are other music video channels, including East Africa TV from Dar es Salaam and Kampala, which features a high-tech Web site. The American Discovery and Hallmark channels are widely available, but there are dozens of entertainment channels, including several from South Africa, London, India and a Middle East channel that features old American movies subtitled in Arabic (this week's highlight: Grease). Those are just the English-language channels; there are also 24-hour channels beamed here in other languages from Germany, France, Italy, Spain, Portugal and the Middle East. However, all of these are only available on multi-channel satellite platforms. The services are expensive and therefore have very little market penetration in Kenya. The name of the game here is free, terrestrial, over-the-air channels, which can be watched by anyone who has a television set. Here is where the Chinese expansion becomes clear. There are only a few…... FULL TEXT
 
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ervin dyer on December 20, 2005 @ 11:08 am:
instead of offering the africans stadiums or office complexes, are any africans asking for help to create their own images and programs? or as you put it, more terrestial programming?

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