`Suit, Tie and a Touch of Juju'—The Ideological Construction of Africa: A Critical Discourse Analysis of News on Africa in the British Press

Abstract

This paper examines the ideological construction of Africa through a critical discourse analysis of news on Africa in the British press. Through a comparative analysis of two British papers with opposing ideological positions, it demonstrates that there is a stereotypical, naturalized and dominant discourse on Africa. The analysis illustrates how the features of this discourse combine to produce particular meanings which give rise to a neo-colonial racist representation of Africa and Africans. The role of this discourse in reproducing the racist perceptions of Africa and Africans in Western society and in maintaining Western hegemony is discussed; and the question of this discourse's relationship to other racist discourses in European society is also raised. This paper argues that the entrenched stability of this discourse holds little possibility for challenge or transformation.

Micro-Longitudinal Analysis of Web News Updates

“…Large, mainstream news sites were selected with the expectation that they would show frequent content changes. Moreover, we also expected that the three sites would tend to represent news events in somewhat different ways, given the different cultural and political perspectives of the nations (the US, the UK, and Qatar) in which the sites are produced, and consistent with previous findings of nationalist bias in news reporting [2,6,25,28].…”

“…Despite the fact that it consisted mostly of discussion by U.S. lawmakers with a common point of view, this news story remained active for almost 14 hours, during which period the story was revised, updated, and corrected multiple times. On three occasions (images [4][5][6], the only changes were to the image accompanying the story, without any modification of the textual content (news title, blurb, or image caption). Thus the only new "information" added by those three changes was different views of U.S. President George W. Bush's face.…”

Quotation as a Key to the Investigation of Ideological Manipulation in News Trans-Editing in the Taiwanese Press1

“…It stands to reason that the news organizations' ideologies play a rather significant role in the production of news items. Such significance has been acknowledged by scholars and practitioners of Critical Linguistics and Critical Discourse Analysis, who have proposed some approaches to the analysis of the relationship between ideology and language in news, and have conducted some empirical studies to explain such relationships (see Brookes, 1995;Fairclough, 1995;Fang, 2001;Fowler, 1991, Kress andHodge, 1979;Simpson, 1993;van Dijk, 1991 and1998b). The data examined by them are mainly original news texts rather than translated or trans-edited news texts.…”

A Textual Analysis of the Coverage of SARS and the Image of China --- A Comparative Analysis

“…Some scholars argue that news frames and major topics can be revealed by analyzing headlines, leads, subjects and propositions of news discourse (Brookes, 1995). Such qualitative study of media texts is variously called 'textual analysis' or, more recently, 'discourse analysis' (Jensen, 2002).…”

“…Brookes (1995) argues that non-western civilians are quoted as telling of atrocities and commenting on the actions, and these are usually presented as credible. In this case, the Chinese reporter and the ordinary people under the communist regime were cited to express their opinions on the Chinese government and its politics, and the quotations were both negative about China.…”