How African Media Covers Africa Report

2020

Africa and Africans have for centuries faced the issue of negative representation in international news media and particularly in the western news media. News reports in these foreign media connote Africa as a backward continent with barbaric people and unchanging culture. These negative representations are "historical baggage" carried from colonial rulers and have lived on to define Africa and its people. The "single story" of Africa being a crisis-stricken continent with a people in need of civilization is one that Africa and Africans have long fought to overturn. The desire to "own the African story" prompted the establishment of the Pan-African News Agency (PANA) by the Organization of African Unity (OAU). With its core mandate of correcting the distorted image of Africa and contributing to global news flow, the Pan-African News Agency was poised to offer a more positive reporting of Africa to counter persistent negative narratives. This study analyzes the successes and failures of PANA in achieving its core mandate, focusing on developments through the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s. Although PANA exists today, it is now a private enterprise and not very active or effective. Therefore, this study seeks to learn lessons from PANA's past experiences to inform future measures to revamp the Pan-African News Agency achieve its core mandate of balancing global news flow.

Westminster Papers in Communication and Culture ( …, 2005

The paper argues that over the past thirty years there has been a steady decline in the attention Western media have given to reporting Africa. And the end of the cold war has exacerbated this lack of interest. When sub-Saharan Africa is covered in the news it is uniformly as a tale of disaster and conflict. There is rarely much context or background in the reports. In part this is due to changing priorities in news coverage but also part of the wider trend of the disappearance of TV current affairs on mainstream channels in the UK. It argues that if in 2005 British politicians are seeking to reinvent our perceptions of Africa and the way that the West engages with it, then the role of the media and the stories it reports on Africa will have a pivotal role in that process.

Despite a general decline in circulation, newspapers are considered by many to have an important role to play in informing and or influencing citizens. Whether newspaper influence is discussed in relation to voting behaviour , reinforcing existing political preferences or in setting the political agenda, the content of UK newspapers is seen to matter. Why is it then, that the role of newspapers in influencing citizens' perceptions of the wider world has remained so under-researched? The last academic research into general coverage of Africa in the UK press was conducted in 1990 (see . This article seeks to fill this research gap and to draw attention to the important but largely unacknowledged role that the UK press plays in informing citizens about Africa.

This research was conducted to assess the coverage of the developed versus the developing world in six selected local English language newspapers in Ethiopia. Six editions of each of these newspapers representing six weeks in March and April, 2006 were sampled, and all the foreign news appeared on the front and/or the inner pages of each newspaper were analyzed quantitatively. A qualitative analysis of a purposely selected news items was also made to identify the roles and representations the developed and the developing world had in the foreign news coverage of the six newspapers. In-depth interviews were also conducted with representative editors and editors-in-chief of the newspapers. The results of the study indicated that the developing world in general and Africa in particular had a wider coverage than the developed world, but the developed world had far more coverage than the developing world outside Africa. However, the individual newspapers showed significant variations to the extent that the coverage of these parts of the world in some of these newspapers contradicted the generalizations drawn above. These variations appeared to have been explained partly by the objectives of the newspapers, and the influence of the individual editors and editors-in-chief who were involved in the news selection processes. The use of sources in particular was found to be an important factor in determining the newspapers’ coverage of the different parts of the world. Ownership, however, seems to have been loosely related to these variations in the extent and types of coverage given to the different parts of the world by the six newspapers analyzed in the study.

Global Media Journal African Edition, 2014

Of the many problems that face Africa, conflict is perpetual. In a continent whose land mass is one-fifth of the world, and where ethnicity is omnipresent, conflict is nearly inevitable. Africans are captive to the divisive and manipulative colonial repression that has placed hurdles toward nation building, particularly because foreign powers partitioned Africa without regard to culture or socioeconomic development. Hence, Africa has been, for decades, been the battleground for East-West political and economic interests. Despite flagrant suffering and millions dead due to conflict, media coverage (championed by western media) have either been silent or selective as evidenced by the United States (US) and British media. Even reportage filed from Africa has been edited to suit Western audiences and other pecuniary interests. To counter tribal connotations not only to forestall stereotypes, but also to assure accuracy and fairness, African countries have instituted peace journalism in association with sympathetic international media organizations with focus on conflict resolution. Furthermore, the advent of "peace journalism" is intended to undercut the "CNN factor" whereby incredulous sources are paraded before television cameras.

The media are hugely influential not because they serve as the veritable sources of information, education and entertainment. Rather, beyond these tripartite functions, the power of the media is primarily derived from how their narratives are structured and interpreted in order to (re) construct reality. This paper underscores the fact that beyond the text of media reportage, the Western media in the coverage of international news on and about Africa also consciously or inadvertently define the reality of the content. Therefore, it argues that there are other sides to Africa that have been completely ignored by the west which highlights the sincere effort of the continent at genuine socio-political changes in spite of its current challenges. And to beam the searchlight on the deliberately ignored aspects of the continents efforts at nation building would require that our " charity, " indeed " must begin at home. "

2013

For decades (perhaps, centuries) global media outlets have framed and represented Africa in a negative light. These media representations have tended to overlook the diverse political, economic, social and cultural experiences of individual African countries – a situation that has led to the uncritical lumping together of African nations under the appellation of ‘Africa’. When this happens, the specific and unique conditions of her 55 nations are squeezed into a one-size-fits-all media frame. Historical and ideological forces, both from within and outside the continent, have conspired to impose this fate on Africa. The philosophies of negritude and the Organisation of African Unity were among the complicit internal forces helping to sustain such views. To evaluate this phenomenon, this essay examines the underpinnings of the framing and representation of ‘Africa’ in global media through a review of the literature, and seeks to answer the question of whether the continent can speak for itself, using four country-specific examples. Current media practices within the African continent, enabled by local media policies and infrastructure, have tended to rhetorically position countries primarily in accordance with their national identities, while attributing the African appellation as a secondary frame of representation.

African Journalism Studies 36(1): 57-64, 2015

This study investigates authorship and geographical focus of three notable media and communication research journals: Ecquid Novi – African Journalism Studies (ENAJS); African Communication Research (ACR); and Journal of African Media Studies (JAMS). The focus of the three journals depends to a large extent on their academic history and geographical origin. ENAJS (South Africa) has by far the highest proportion of writers and case studies from South Africa; ACR (Tanzania/Kenya) has the highest proportion of contributions from East Africa, particularly Tanzania and Kenya; and JAMS (London) has the highest proportion of contributors from the UK. Overall, South Africa is the major hub for media and communication research in Africa with 26% of all case studies published in the period 2010–14, followed by Nigeria (15%) and Kenya (12%). In longitudinal perspective, the case of Ecquid Novi – African Journalism Studies illustrates how a journal which was previously confined to one region (South Africa) has expanded greatly and today has a mixture of contributors from both south and north. More surprising perhaps is the absence of south–south collaboration in the published research articles. Also, collaboration between Sub-Saharan and North Africa is nearly non-existent in African communication research.

2017

Free and independent information media are fundamental for both the economic and democratic development of countries (Sanjukta, 2014). In Africa, and particularly in conflict zones, international donors and non-profit organisations mainly support media development. They provide initial investments to help stabilise countries and support their transition towards democracy or out of war. After a certain level of success is perceived, donors and organisations either lower their support or withdraw completely. The sustainability of media in the long run is therefore one of the biggest problems for developing democracies to solve (Cook, 2016). Furthermore, donor interventions have emphasised training, but much less so the development of strategies and the creation of institutionalised structures for educating journalists, media business managers, and audience researchers over the long term (Fojo, 2012; Kariithi, 2002; Susman-Pena, 2012). Among the five objectives that according to the In...

Digital technologies have transformed the relationship between news outlets, journalists and their audiences. Notably, editors can now monitor their websites and discern the exact news preferences of their readers. Research suggests that some editors are using this data to help them produce more popular, ‘click friendly’ content. To date, research on this phenomenon has focused on journalists working within newsrooms. This article adds to the literature by exploring the relationship of foreign correspondents in Africa with their audiences, and asks whether readership metrics are influencing the journalists’ selection and development of news stories. Drawing on 67 interviews with foreign correspondents in East and West Africa, the article identifies three different approaches to audience metrics: correspondents who are 1) data-driven; 2) data informed; and 3) data denialists. The article discusses the implications of these approaches for the media image of Africa that is distributed around the globe.

It has become a pattern to find academics, professionals and students of journalism bragging with the scope, techniques and dilemmas of investigative journalism. But there is one gaping hole: nowhere was information collated about the heroic contributions, and often the sacrifices, that were made for the profession by African investigative journalists across Africa. Writing a history or complete account of African investigative journalism is outside the scope of this issue and the journal. This issue comes in parallel with the aims of the UNESCO to encourage new academic research in this important area that until present has been covered only by a scarce amount of scientifically oriented studies. As the editor, my multiple roots as an African, Arab, Middle Eastern and a true global citizen, I am trying to offer here a series of contributions – some current, some historical – on the topic of safety of journalists, that will, hopefully, lay the foundations for further research, and also lay to rest decisively the myth that journalism which exposes social problems and criticizes the powerful is ‘un-African’

International Communication Gazzette, 2022

With the Joe Biden-Kamala Harris administration working toward the resetting of policies and strategies toward Africa and China, the question of whether African journalists will be accorded a chance to tell an African narrative amid the trilateral relationship has become more apparent. The influence exerted by China in African poses questions of whether China is "constructively" reporting Africa and whether journalists do see themselves as telling an African story. This study interrogates the role of African journalistic paradigms within a broader framework of what it means to constructively report Africa. It argues that despite the overwhelming challenges, the African media can tell its narrative if, (a). it seriously interrogates its journalism education system, (b). focus on in-depth reporting as opposed to efficiency and convenience, and (c). value its epistemologies and localize its content.

This study examined the image of Africa as portrayed in the international news columns of Nigerian newspapers in order to determine how African media represent the continent. Content analysis was adopted and five newspapers: The Guardian, Vanguard, Nigerian Tribune, This Day and the Punch were purposively selected. A total of 3,064 editions of the newspapers, between 2001 and 2005 were content-analysed. Two hypotheses were formulated and data were analysed using chi-square and t-test. Findings revealed that the image of Africa in the selected Nigerian newspapers is that of a politically unstable, conflict-ridden and economically backward continent. There was a significant association between the newspapers' sources of international news and the direction of African news (x 2 = 405.77, df 12, p<.05). Africa is under-reported in Nigerian newspapers as the newspapers significantly reported more news about other continents than African news (t=-22.413, df = 3062, p<.05). Such image of Africa in the newspapers which depicts it as a politically unstable, conflict-ridden and economically backward continent challenges popular assumptions about its portrayal in African newspapers. This has pedagogical and curricular implications for journalism education in Africa. This study therefore reinforces the arguments for an overhaul of the curriculum of African communication schools.