There has been significant academic criticism of the international news coverage of Africa, but little or no first-hand research on the forces that create this news. This thesis draws on 51 semi-structured interviews and ethnographic work with practicing foreign correspondents in Sudan, Kenya and Uganda to explore the question: how can we explain and theorise the production of international news on East Africa? The thesis argues that Pierre Bourdieu’s Field Theory, and its analytical toolbox of ‘field’, ‘capital’ and ‘habitus’, can be meaningfully used to examine international journalistic practice. Field theory has been widely and productively used to understand domestic news production, but it has not yet been employed to empirically investigate journalistic production in the global sphere. The analysis is presented in three sections, each of which focuses on a different ‘layer’ of the international news system: the global field, where newswires compete for clients and capital; the national field ‘back home’ where traditional, nation based news outlets are based; and, finally, the local and immediate site where foreign correspondents work. Each of these layers is explored through an in depth case study of a major news producer/group of producers working in East Africa. The first and most substantial section examines the global journalistic field, and the position and practices of the Reuters newswire within this field. The second examines the foreign correspondents who report on Africa for print outlets in the UK. The final section presents two case studies of correspondents at work, negotiating a local news ecology: the election violence in Kenyan (2007-8), and the international coverage of the Darfur crisis. The discussion explores the fluidity between these three layers. Each analysis section stands alone as an investigations of major news producers in Africa today, and the forces that influence their work. Together, they build the argument that field theory is a useful approach to conceptualising the contemporary global news system, and examining journalistic practices within this. The main strengths of the theory lie in its notion of habitus; the extent to which it can incorporate and explain change; and its ability to link macro level phenomenon with micro level practice. The theory is ideally suited to capture and study the way in which foreign correspondents negotiate a complex and fluid global news system.

Investigación hemerográfica avalada por la reconstrucción y la deconstrucción de documentos portadores del eco social de un personaje, Francisco Rabal, que ni pasó desapercibido por la sociedad, los escenarios y los platós, ni puede ser ignorado por la historia y los anales del cine, el teatro y la interpretación en general. Han sido utilizados métodos concretos de investigación social de carácter cualitativo, descriptivo e interpretativo; análisis de contenidos de prensa en una investigación rigurosa sobre el tratamiento periodístico visto aquel en el escenario del universo del mensaje y contemplado éste tanto por sí solo como desde la perspectiva hemerográfica, en la que adquiere una importancia extrema la comunicación no verbal, el valor de lo icónico. Los interesados en estas investigaciones encontrarán una herramienta muy válida: la conjunción de periodismo y sociología para que el resultado ofrezca esa visión transversal solamente presente en el ámbito contextualizado de las Ciencias Humanas. / Newspaper investigation guaranteed by the construction and the desconstruction of documents , bearers of the social echo of a character, Francisco Rabal, who neither went unnoticed by the society, the stages and the sets, nor can be ignored by the cinema history and annals, the theatre and the performance in general. Specific methods of social investigation of qualitative, descriptive and interpretative nature have been used: press contents analysis in a rigorous research about the journalistic processing, seen the former in the scene of the universe of the message and considered the latter so much by itself as from the newspaper prospect, in which the non verbal communication, the value of the icon acquires an extreme importance.People interested in these investigations will find a very valid tool: the conjunction of journalism and sociology for the result to offer that cross view only set in the context of Human Sciences.