Mainstream news coverage of Africa relies increasingly on material provided by NGOs, who stand to gain in political influence as a result of becoming ever-more media savvy in a digital age. But at a time of widespread cost-cutting in mainstream journalism, is it appropriate for NGOs to ‘make news’ by providing audio, photographs and video to increasingly time and resource-poor journalists or does this diminish what news should be? Building a body of empirical evidence about why and how journalists use such multimedia and the consequences of this for journalism, NGO-work and those represented, is the central focus of this thesis. Unlike previous research on news coverage of Africa and journalists’ use of NGO-provided multimedia that tends to focus on the coverage of ‘disasters’ or ‘humanitarian emergencies’, this study analyses journalists’ use of NGO-provided multimedia about Africa during a very different news-making period – what journalists call a ‘quiet news week’. The research involved sixty semi-structured interviews with those whose decisions shaped the production of six media items, which were also subject to qualitative content analysis. These items were about a range of topics and African countries: all of which were published or broadcast in news readily available to British audiences. But why and how journalists used NGO-provided multimedia was shaped most powerfully by the ‘moral economies’ (Sayer 2007) structuring each news outlet. These moral economies were found to have brought about a ‘quiet revolution’: leading to the emergence of a number of heterogeneous, normatively-laden coalitions between NGOs and news outlets, often hidden from the view of audiences. Consequently, journalists’ use of NGO-provided multimedia was found to have limited progressive potential: for it inhibited collective reasoning by preventing critical scrutiny, as well as systematically excluding the political value of ‘voice’ in ways which further marginalised the disadvantaged and powerless (Sen 2010).
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:bl.uk/oai:ethos.bl.uk:656273 |
| Date | January 2015 |
| Creators | Wright, Katherine |
| Publisher | Goldsmiths College (University of London) |
| Source Sets | Ethos UK |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
| Source | http://research.gold.ac.uk/11854/ |
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