'60 Minutes Blasted for 'Anachronistic Style' of Africa Coverage
A group of academics and journalists is accusing 60 Minutes of turning black Africans into background extras in its recent segments from the continent. “60 Minutes has managed, quite extraordinarily, to render people of black African ancestry voiceless and all but invisible” in a series of recent segments, says a letter penned by Howard W. French and signed by more than 150 people that was emailed to 60 Minutes exec producer Jeff Fager and posted on the blog A Glimpse of the World. French, who spent most of his 23-year career at The New York Times as a foreign correspondent, now is an associate professor at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, where he has taught journalism and photography since 2008. In the letter, the signers most notably dinged the CBS news magazine for a segment in which Lara Logan went to Liberia last year to cover the Ebola epidemic in that country. “In that broadcast, Africans were reduced to the role of silent victims. They constitu