Africa's Media Image in the 21st Century

From the "Heart of Darkness" to "Africa Rising"

Mel Bunce, Suzanne Franks, Chris Paterson, Mel Bunce, Suzanne Franks, Chris Paterson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781138962316
• eBook ISBN: 9781317334279
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Africa's Media Image in the 21st Century is the first book in over twenty years to examine the international media's coverage of sub-Saharan Africa. It brings together leading researchers and prominent journalists to explore representation of the continent, and the production of that image, especially by international news media. The book highlights factors that have transformed the global media system, changing whose perspectives are told and the forms of media that empower new voices.

Case studies consider questions such as: how has new media changed whose views are represented? Does Chinese or diaspora media offer alternative perspectives for viewing the continent? How do foreign correspondents interact with their audiences in a social media age? What is the contemporary role of charity groups and PR firms in shaping news content? They also examine how recent high profile events and issues been covered by the international media, from the Ebola crisis, and Boko Haram to debates surrounding the "Africa Rising" narrative and neo-imperialism.

The book makes a substantial contribution by moving the academic discussion beyond the traditional critiques of journalistic stereotyping, Afro-pessimism, and 'darkest Africa' news coverage. It explores the news outlets, international power dynamics, and technologies that shape and reshape the contemporary image of Africa and Africans in journalism and global culture.

Part I

Framing Africa

Chapter 1

The international news coverage of Africa

Beyond the “single story”

Mel Bunce

In 1994, Christopher Hitchens visited sub-Saharan Africa and wrote a grim report about the continent:

[R]un the rule across Africa and see if you can find, anywhere in the entire foresaken continent, anything like a success story. ... The famines, plagues, and epidemics are, from old-style locusts to ultra-modern aids, the most sweeping and devastating. ... Human life is at its nastiest, most brutish, and shortest. (Vanity Fair, December 1994)

Such dramatic and negative reporting on Africa was not unusual for the period. A large body of research has concluded that the international news coverage of sub-Saharan Africa in the 1990s was sporadic, simplistic, racist, and overwhelmingly negative in its subject matter and tone (e.g. Hawk 1992). Academics have described this negative coverage as a form of “Afro-pessimism”, as it suggests that Africa has little or no prospect of positive developments (Schmidt & Garrett 2011: 423; Evans 2011: 400; De B’Béri and Louw 2011). In her popular TED Talk, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie noted the danger of this negative, “single story” of Africa: “The problem with stereotypes is not that they are untrue, but that they are incomplete. They make one story become the only story” (Adichie 2009).

In the early 2010s, however, the international media started to tell new stories about sub-Saharan Africa. Leading outlets like The Economist published cover stories about an economically vibrant “Rising Africa” with burgeoning consumption, investment opportunities, and technological innovation. The new, positive narrative was quickly adopted by international think tanks and diaspora groups; as Michela Wrong (2015) writes, “‘Africa Rising’ has become the obligatory catch phrase applied to the continent. ... It is fashionable, these days, to be upbeat about Africa.”

This seemingly seismic shift in the continent’s meta-narrative has been widely noted and discussed in the media, online fora, and conferences – but it has not been systematically researched. We know there have been a handful of high-profile stories that are distinctive and more positive in tone than historical representations of Africa (see e.g. Nothias 2014). But we do not know if these stories are now commonplace in mainstream day-to-day coverage, or if they remain the exception.

This chapter contributes to our knowledge by presenting the results of a content analysis comparing two large samples of news content, one from the early 1990s and one from the 2010s.¹ The results find that, taken as a whole, news coverage of Africa has become significantly more positive in tone. In addition, there has been a decrease in stories that focus exclusively on humanitarian disaster, and an increase in stories about business and sport. These results suggest that we may finally be moving beyond a reductive and negative “single story” dominating the international news coverage of the continent. It is important to note, however, that these changes have not been made uniformly across the news industry. Representations of Africa in the media are diverse and multifaceted, and it is no longer possible – if it ever was – to speak of “The representation of Africa”. Even within one publication, content can range from texts and images that are reductive and stereotypical through to those that are challenging, self-reflective, and critical.

Methods

This chapter asks whether the day-to-day international news coverage of Africa has moved beyond the Afro-pessimism that dominated reports in the 1990s. Afro-pessimism is an amorphous term, but we can understand it as referring to (at least) two different aspects of news content. First, there are stories that focus exclusively on issues or events that are unambiguously negative: for example, famine, disease, conflict, and poverty (e.g. Moeller 1999). Second, we can think of Afro-pessimism as referring to the tone in which stories are reported, and the negative evaluation of events, issues, and policy in Africa. The methods are developed to explore both of these aspects of news content.

Topic within news agency reports

The international newswires are the most important producers of day-to-day international news coverage on Africa. The “big three” – AFP, AP, and Reuters – are “the basic organizational foundations on which the international system operates”, employing the majority of all foreign correspondents in the world (Williams 2011: 67). These agencies are particularly important in the African context because the vast majority of news outlets in the world do not have foreign correspondents on the continent; they rely heavily on the newswires for the raw content of news they republish (Bunce 2013).

The research examined the AFP, AP, and Reuters news coverage of eight countries: Nigeria, Ethiopia, Zaire/DRC, Tanzania, Kenya, Uganda, Ghana, and Mozambique. These are chosen as they are the eight most populous countries in sub-Saharan Africa, excluding South Africa and Sudan.² They also represent a range of (1) economy sizes, (2) geographic areas (East, West, South, and Central), and (3) languages (Anglophone, Francophone, Lusophone). Articles about these eight countries were collected on two days per month (the 4th and the 18th) – a total of 24 days – throughout the full calendar years of 1994 and 2013.³ Factiva was searched for stories with a “major mention” of each country on these dates. Stories were excluded if they were fewer than 40 words long, or had more than two other countries listed in the title or first paragraph. This process resulted in a total sample of 892 articles, as seen in Table 1.1.

Each article was coded for its subject, from a list of 13 subjects (see Appendix). If an article addressed two subjects equally, both were coded. This resulted in a total data set of 1,061 subjects – 543 derived from articles published in 1994, and 518 derived from articles published in 2013. A second coder “double coded” a randomly selected 10 per cent of all the newswire articles and had an inter-coder reliability score of 0.9 (Cohen’s kappa).

Tone of newspaper articles

To supplement the analysis of subjects within newswire stories, a second analysis examined the tone of articles in leading international newspapers. While news agencies provide important raw content of news, newspapers continue to play an important role framing news about Africa for audiences (Scott 2009); the headlines they select underline particular aspects of events or a story, and they place this in a wider context and provide analysis. Four newspapers were selected from different corners of the Anglophone world: The Guardian (UK), The New York Times (US), The Globe and Mail (Canada), and The Sydney Morning Herald (Australia). Using the Lexis-Nexis database, these newspapers were searched for all stories containing “Africa” in the headline, in the years 1994 and 2013. Stories were excluded if: (1) they were specifically about South Africa (the goal was to explore the tone of news associated with the more general concept of “Africa”); (2) they listed two or more additional regions in their headline; (3) they comprised letters to the editor; (4) they consisted of obituaries; or (5) their total length was fewer than 40 words. This process resulted in a sample of 426 articles, as seen in Table 1.2. Each article in the sample was then coded for its overall tone, either “negative”, “positive”, or “mixed/neutral”. A second coder “double coded” a randomly selected 10 per cent of the sample, producing an inter-coder reliability score of 0.85 (Cohen’s kappa).

Table 1.1 Newswire articles in sample

Limitation of methods

One limitation of the above methods was the need to reduce the time period and outlets under scrutiny in order to render the sample manageable. Whether the years 1994 and 2013 are representative of a wider “era” of reporting requires further research. However, this research design has tried to mitigate the impact of anomalous events by analysing a large sample spread over a full 12 months; canvassing a range of publications; and looking at coverage of multiple countries within sub-Saharan Africa. In addition, during the analysis of the data, events that received significant or unusual coverage were noted, and are reported in the results.

Results: topics in news agency reporting

Table 1.2 Newspaper articles in sample

Table 1.3 Subject of newswire stories^a

Note

a Subjects with fewer than ten articles are included in “Other”.

Figure 1.1 Newswire articles: subjects with biggest change

There were many substantive changes in the international news coverage of Africa represented by the two samples (Table 1.3 and Figure 1.1). Between the 1994 and 2013 sample, there was a decrease in reporting on many of the subjects traditionally associated with Afro-pessimism – most notably, humanitarian reporting. At the same time, there was a significant increase in economic, business, and financial stories, which have been associated with more positive “Africa Rising” narratives. One subject bucks this trend, however: the reporting of conflict and crime, which increased between the two periods.

Business reporting is generally considered a positive form of news content, as it tends to focus on growth and business opportunities and, in this sense, may provide the “sprouts of hope” that Keane suggests have historically been missing from the international news coverage of Africa (2004: 8). The rise in business reporting was the single biggest change between the two samples. In 1994, approximately one-fifth of subjects in reports were business related (111 of 543), while in 2013, business reporting was a much higher one-third or so of all subjects (189 of 518). It is important to note that this rise in business reporting was not uniform across the news agencies, however. The biggest change – by a very large margin – took place at the Reuters newswire. In fact, the changes in business reporting at this one newswire largely explain the rise in business reporting across the total sample. In 1994, 28.9 per cent of the Reuters output was business related; in 2013, business reporting had grown enormously, and occupied a remarkable 68.4 per cent of all subjects reported by Reuters on these eight countries. The prominence of business reporting was also not consistent across the countries in the sample. In 2013, for example, 20 of the 32 subjects in reports about Tanzania (62.5 per cent) focused on business. In the DRC, however, only four articles focused on business (9.8 per cent of all subjects).

Sports reporting is also associated with more positive depictions of Africa, as it tends to depict African countries competing on a global stage on equal terms as other countries, and draws attention to “normal” everyday pursuits, far removed from humanitarian crises (Chari & Namo 2014). Sports constituted 2.9 per cent of the subjects (16 articles) in 1994 and this figure rose to 8.3 per cent (43 articles) of the total sample in 2013. As with the rise in business reporting, much of this is explained by the increase in reporting at one outlet: AFP published 9 sports articles in 1994 and 31 in 2013 (see Table 1.5).

Between the two news samples, there was also a very large drop in coverage of the topic most commonly associated with “dark Africa” and Afro-pessimism discourses: humanitarian reporting. In 1994, humanitarian stories accounted for 17.3 per cent of all subjects. In 2013, this figure was only 1.9 per cent. A large number of the humanitarian articles in 1994 came from Zaire, where journalists reported on the refugee crisis that followed the Rwandan genocide. An additional four stories about Tanzania focused on refugees from the Rwandan genocide. But even putting aside the coverage related to the Rwandan genocide (which can be considered an extreme and anomalous event), there were 33 stories on humanitarian issues in 1994, compared with only 10 in 2013. The 1994 humanitarian stories included articles on drought, famine, and disease – and they came from seven of the eight countries. The ten humanitarian stories in 2013, by contrast, addressed a much more limited range of crises: eight of the ten articles were about refugees and the remaining two were about flooding in Mozambique. There were no news articles in the 2013 sample of 439 articles that focused on famine, drought, or disease.

Between the 1994 and 2013 samples, there was also a decline in reporting on domestic politics: it was the subject of 136 stories in 1994, and only 57 in 2013. Domestic political reporting is not obviously or necessarily associated with either positive or negative issues. However, it is worth noting that the reason for this decline was primarily a decrease in reports on corruption, oppression, strikes, and protests that would likely be considered “negative” by most readers (Table 1.4). General politics (policy announcements, cabinet reshuffles, and so on) remained relatively stable between the two periods, as did reporting on elections.

One difference in the subjects covered in 1994 and 2013 does not fit the observation that the topics within African news coverage have become more positive: there was an increase in reports on both conflict and crime. In 1994, there were 63 reports on conflict, primarily in Mozambique and Nigeria. In 2013, there were 97 reports, incl...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Communication and Society
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Figures
• Tables
• Contributors
• Foreword
• Introduction A new Africa's Media Image?
• Part I Framing Africa
• Chapter 1 The international news coverage of Africa Beyond the “single story”
• Chapter 2 Media perspectives In defence of Western journalists in Africa1
• Chapter 3 Reporting and writing Africa in a world of unequal encounters
• Chapter 4 Media perspectives How does Africa get reported? A letter of concern to 60 Minutes
• Chapter 5 How not to write about writing about Africa
• Chapter 6 Bringing Africa home Reflections on discursive practices of domestication in international news reporting on Africa by Belgian television
• Chapter 7 The image of Africa from the perspectives of the African diasporic press in the UK
• Part II The image makers
• Chapter 8 Mediating the distant Other for the distant audience How do Western correspondents in East and Southern Africa perceive their audience?
• Chapter 9 Media perspectives Television reporting of Africa: 30 years on
• Chapter 10 Foreign correspondents in sub-Saharan Africa Their socio-demographics and professional culture
• Chapter 11 Media perspectives Reflecting on my father's legacy in reporting Africa
• Chapter 12 Media perspectives We're missing the story: The media's retreat from foreign reporting1
• Chapter 13 Instagram as a potential platform for alternative Visual Culture in South Africa
• Chapter 14 Media perspectives Social media and new narratives: Kenyans tweet back1
• Chapter 15 A “New Ghana” in “Rising Africa”?
• Part III Development and humanitarian stories
• Chapter 16 Media perspectives Is Africa's development story still stuck on aid?
• Chapter 17 AIDS in Africa and the British media Shifting images of a pandemic
• Chapter 18 Media perspectives A means to an end? Creating a market for humanitarian news from Africa
• Chapter 19 It was a “simple”, “positive” story of African self-help (manufactured for a Kenyan NGO by advertising multinationals)
• Chapter 20 Media perspectives Africa for Norway: challenging stereotypes using humour
• Chapter 21 Bloggers, celebrities, and economists News coverage of the Millennium Villages Project
• Part IV Politics in the representation of Africa
• Chapter 22 Africa through Chinese eyes: new frames or the same old lens? African news in English from China Central Television, compared with the BBC
• Chapter 23 Media perspectives New media and African engagement with the global public sphere1
• Chapter 24 Shifting power relations, shifting images
• Chapter 25 Communicating violence The media strategies of Boko Haram
• Chapter 26 Perceptions of Chinese media's Africa coverage1
• Chapter 27 New imperialisms, old stereotypes
• Chapter 28 Nollywood news African screen media at the intersections of the global and the local
• Index