Charlayne Hunter-Gault, former NPR correspondent and author, delivered a public lecture as a Halle Distinguished Fellow, in February on her new book, New News Out of Africa. After the lecture, Hunter-Gault signed copies of her book.

Charlayne Hunter-Gault has been a journalist for more than 40 years, in various forms of media, including National Public Radio, The News Hour with Jim Lehrer and various newspapers. Hunter-Gault has lived in Africa since 1997, working as chief Africa correspondent for National Public Radio, based in Johannesburg, and later as Johannesburg bureau chief for CNN, a position she held until 2005, when she left to pursue independent journalistic projects, including reporting on the continent for NPR as a special correspondent.

It is that coverage of Africa which Hunter-Gault discusses in her new book, New News Out of Africa. Originally three lectures given at Harvard, Hunter-Gault was approached by Oxford University press about expanding the lectures into a short book. The majority of news coverage on Africa, according to Hunter-Gault, concerns what she calls, “four Ds of the African apocalypse.” She explained, “Most news coverage of Africa continues to be seen through the prism of Death, Disease, Disaster and Despair.” Hunter-Gault theorizes that this preoccupation with the four Ds leads to ”tragedy fatigue” in most Westerners, even those that care deeply about the African continent. “Even the people with the largest of hearts eventually say ‘What is the point if our support and our caring and whatever else we are contributing isn’t doing any good?’ And so they just shut down.”

The book’s three chapters “South Africa: Then and Now,” “Baby Steps to Democracy,” and “Reporting Renaissance,” attempt to portray some of the good news that is coming out of Africa, rather than the constant stream of negativity that populates American news coverage.

New News Out of Africa, part memoir, part analysis, shows how Hunter-Gault worked with individuals during the end of apartheid, in an attempt to paint a nuanced picture of the struggle and those involved in it, rather then what she says are “clichés of struggle: the white repressive government being mean and brutal and awful to the black victims and you never saw anything beyond the broad brush strokes of coverage.”

Because of the similarities to the Civil Rights movement in America, Hunter-Gault knew that Americans were engaged and wanted to assist in the struggle of the South Africans, but she also wanted to delve deeper then the average report seemed to be reaching. She arrived in South Africa in 1985, determined to find new angles to the story. “I wanted to find out about the black protesters because I was sure that they weren’t as monolithic as they were being portrayed,” she said.

Hunter-Gault has received numerous awards for her reporting in general, and specifically for her coverage of Africa. In 1985, she received broadcast journalism’s highest award – a George Foster Peabody for her 1985 five-part MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour series, “Apartheid’s People.” Hunter-Gault earned another Peabody in 1998 for her overall coverage of Africa for National Public Radio.

Hunter-Gault is also the author of In My Place, a personal memoir of the Civil Rights Movement and her own role in it as the first black woman to attend the University of Georgia.