China spent big on African media empire, but no one’s watching

Bloomberg: Bureaucratic dysfunction, leadership churn and tightening political controls have left China’s African media experiment struggling to find relevance in a region that will be home to more than a quarter of the world’s population by 2050. Africans watch the BBC, Al Jazeera and CNN, but even China’s marquee media brands barely figure in public debate in most countries on the continent. “Audiences are more attuned to news from the West than from China, which generates distrust,” says Confidence MacHarry, an analyst at SBM Intelligence, a political risk consulting firm in Lagos…