Read it in the news

Sky news has been running a story from the UK about a broken TV that was taken to a recycling center and ends up in a dump in Nigeria. Toxic waste is a serious problem, but this isn't reporting, it's entertainment. It seems that the organization Greenpeace took a TV and disabled it, then fitted it with a GPS/cell phone tracking device and dropped it off at a local recycling place. They claim to have tracked that exact TV all the way to the Alaba market near Lagos where it was destined to be broken up and the toxics released.

There's a couple obvious problems with the reporting on this story. First of all, Greenpeace is not an unbiased media outlet, they are out to push their point of view and Sky news neglected to mention that Greenpeace had fed the story to them. Secondly, can GPS or cellphone work inside a metal shipping container? No. There seems to be something more they are not telling us here, how did they really locate that TV?

But there's something more here. If you watch that video, it's shot to express the feeling that "you are in Africa now, everything is bad". The traffic, the piles of monitors, the jostling, it's focusing on all things that are unsettling to westerners. They show a tiny fire, is that the source of clouds of toxics or just something the producer needed? Then they add the closing shot of an LAWMA (LAgos Waste Management Authority) truck and pan across a seemingly endless waste dump, one that has nothing to do with electronics.

This is not reporting. It's producing a mini-movie for emotional effect. And it drives me crazy.

It's easy to take pictures or film to make a place look bad. Like these examples from the National Geographic. Or this from CNN, that was later shown to contain a pastiche of years old footage.

See above picture for happiness and hope for the future.