Reporting From Mauritania, Where the System Is Built to Break Journalism
Dear Reader,
Greetings from Mauritania. What should have been a 20-day assignment in this Sahelian nation has been cut short; yet, in some ways, the trip feels far longer than the nine days it actually has been.
A slew of political and bureaucratic reasons obstructed me from speaking to my sources and taking visuals from the field.
Mauritania, an oft-forgotten nation of five million people, lies on the western portion of the Sahel that connects the Atlantic Ocean with the other jihadi-ridden Sahelian nations. Here, the military exists not to defend civilians, but to uphold the government’s clandestine doings regardless of the cost.
There is no accountability factor; in fact, the system here — comparable to others in the region — was created to be dysfunctional. Some may argue that colonial and neo-colonial powers destabilized and then neglected this part of the world to the point where it is embroiled in constant chaos. Relentless bureaucracy — for which I blame the legacy colonial French government — reigns as an effective repressor. It’s impossible to work in a place where those in power lie to your face, and there is absolutely no recourse.
This is a mindset that can be witnessed in most sectors of society I’ve come in contact with. Even ornithologists, those supposedly working with an interest (if not passion) in ecological ecosystems and therefore may want to advocate for the subject’s visibility in international media, have baffled me. One might think they care about the unusual behaviour of that migratory bird and that they would feel global media attention could aid them. But in reality, they are just not interested in facilitating a reporting trip.
They don’t try to hide that they don’t give a damn. Without their facilitation, access is impossible.
To a certain extent, I get it. They are living in a broken system and do not want to stick their necks out, which could invite bureaucratic questioning. But without passionate individuals willing to help reporters, stories may never see the light of day. How fair is that to journalism? I wish these sources were courageous enough to help me, even with the promise of anonymity.
I am cosmically depressed about the state of affairs.
Driving through the Sahel under the pressures of the job —at the end of the day, I’m a freelancer, with no real fallback aside from my own problem-solving skills — I feel intensely existential.
Why am I trying so hard —trying to report from a place where freedom of the press is quashed, lacking basic infrastructure, yet still extremely costly to operate in (each day I’m there costs a minimum of $400 for the fixer, car, and driver, but you can help cover some of the reporting expenses here!) — to do something that has such a waning place in the world? Putting myself through physical and emotional turmoil, often in places so intensely biased against women… to do what? Tell some stories?
These are the same issues that have weakened institutions like The Washington Post, once held up as a model of journalistic integrity. Reporters there now work amid layoffs, leadership churn, and an ownership structure that has hollowed out editorial independence, where decisions are increasingly shaped by reputation management and risk aversion rather than public interest.
A dear friend of mine — formerly a Nairobi-based colleague I traveled with on several reporting trips — left journalism a few years ago and now works as a policy research analyst. After a decade reporting across Africa and producing award-winning work, he eventually hit the same mental wall I find myself facing now. He texted me this morning: “It’s an industry in free-fall filled with lots of idealistic folks and also narcissistic folks, largely only kept alive for influence projects and reputation laundering of oligarchs.”
“The WashPo thing is very depressing but not unexpected if you let oligarchs take over your media,” he says.
Researchers have long pointed out the enduring role of oligarchic networks in Mauritania’s economy, controlling vital sectors in mining and fishing, while maintaining intimate ties to political players and the military.
To me, the oppressiveness of the Mauritanian system and the intentional dismantling of media institutions in America have similar threads — they force us to look inwardly. Does this world only reward those who propagate the devaluation of life and care for profit? Is the future going to be filled with people with completely smoothed-over brains, an adopted, brutal inability to empathize, sapped of curiosity beyond our egos?
What we managed to accomplish in Mauritania was good – it’s one of the most viscerally beautiful places I’ve been to in a long time.
The ‘flooding the zone’ (a political strategy where someone disorients and distracts the public on what is actually real by contaminating the information ecosystem) by the Trump administration has obviously been overwhelming. But it’s also probing me to take a deeper look at what we really care about: imagine what kind of person you want to be, the future you want to have. How do we get there?
With gratitude,
Kang-Chun Cheng
Editor-at-Large
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