Coverage of the Third World by the media in the developed Western
nations has been a subject of intense debate among scholars since the 1970s.
Some of the outspoken media critics have pointed to certain imbalances in
Western media reporting on some parts of the world, including African
countries. Such imbalances range from inadequate coverage to emphasis on
crisis news events. Other critics argue, however, that Western news
reporting on African countries, for example, is crisis-oriented because that is
the kind of news those countries offer to the media given the recurrence of
various forms of crises there.
The 1984-85 Ethiopian famine was one such crisis that received extensive
coverage in the Western media. Criticisms of this coverage served to fuel a
growing concern among African and other intellectuals, particularly about
one aspect of Western media reporting: the failure of those media to put into
adequate context African events on which they report. Some critics have
pointed out, for example, that although environmental decline is a major
underlying cause of famine in Africa, it does not receive attention in
Western media coverage of this recurring crisis. This is in spite of the
pioneering role of the latter in the promotion of environmental issues in
the West as a major social and political concern.
From a much broader perspective, however, it appears that the case of
imbalanced reporting on Africa in the Western media is not an isolated one.
A number of studies on news reporting suggests that the criticism of
imbalances in Western news reporting may have more to do with the
nature of Western news values than with a wilful attempt on the part of the
Western media to report on particular countries in those terms. Thus
reporting on African countries by the Western media could be one typical
example in which standard Western news practices come into full play.
Against this background, the present study sought to investigate Western
media coverage of Africa as viewed in terms of the application of Western
news values. First, using qualitative analyses of relevant literature, the study
undertook a contextualisation of crisis events in African countries, with
special reference to famines, by identifying environmental degradation as a
crucial factor in the unfolding of such crises. This included explanations for
the apparent neglect of African environmental issues by Western media.
Discussion on the environment was set in a wider context of a global
environmental crisis. The qualitative analyses also examined the issue of
imbalances, such as the focus on crisis and the lack of context, in Western
media coverage of Africa. This was explored within a theoretical framework
that encapsulates aspects of the political economy of the mass media,
political ideological differences, and culture as some of the theoretical
propositions used by some media researchers to explain imbalances in
international news flow. Second, the study used the quantitative research
technique of content analysis to carry out a longitudinal investigation of
reporting on African countries in general during 1982-87 as well as a case
study of the 1984-85 Ethiopian famine by three Western dailies: The Times of
London, the New York Times, and the Sydney Morning Herald. An IAMCR
(International Association for Mass Communication Research) coding
scheme was adopted for this purpose.
With regard to the qualitative analyses, the study found that even though
environmental decline is a major underlying cause of many of Africa's
ongoing and recurring crises such as famines, it may not receive attention in
Western media reporting on those crises. This appears to be because the
nature of Africa's environmental problems does not meet Western news
value criteria. As regards the content analyses, the study found, in both the
longitudinal and case studies, a dearth of reporting in all three dailies on
African environmental issues and an orientation towards reporting events
as discrete events, with little or no attention to underlying or contextual
information. Crisis and non-crisis events in Africa were found to be,
however, equally reported in most of the sample years studied in two of the
three dailies. The focus of reporting on the Ethiopian famine was found to
be on Western relief activities and on the bizarre or sensational side of the
disaster - aspects of reporting that fit into standard Western news practices.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:ADTP/218751 |
| Date | January 1995 |
| Creators | Ansah, Kofi Boafo Adu, n/a |
| Publisher | University of Canberra. Communication, Media & Tourism |
| Source Sets | Australiasian Digital Theses Program |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Rights | ), Copyright Kofi Boafo Adu Ansah |
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