The coverage of Africa in Ghanaian newspapers: The dominant Western voice in the continent’s coverage

Abstract

A growing literature has emerged that is contesting the validity of Africa’s negative Western media representation as a myth and empirically non-existent. This article examines how four national newspapers in Ghana reported the continent. About 13,228 corpus belonging to these top four national newspapers, over a period of 2 years, were quantitatively examined for sources utilised. Based on a 2-week constructed sampling technique, 180 articles reporting Africa were further analysed for the subjects and tone of the coverage, and the dominant themes of representation. The ethnographic content analysis revealed that the coverage of the continent in these newspapers is dominated by themes of war, crime, killings, crises, terrorism and omission of progress. The African story was mostly narrated through the subject of politics and with a predominantly negative tone. I argue that the continent’s negative proxy self-coverage confirms the evasive spread of Afro-pessimism considering that Western global news organisations accounted for over 80 per cent of the reportage as sources.

Who set the narrative? Assessing the influence of Chinese global media on news coverage of COVID-19 in 30 African countries

“…This is seen in the amount of word-by-word text reuse, in the number of times that foreign media sources are referenced too, and, most importantly, in the lack of adoption of Chinese narratives on COVID-19 by African media. The findings presented here provide quantitative empirical support to qualitative data compiled by Wasserman (2016) and Wasserman and Madrid-Morales (2018), and with evidence collected in Ghana (Serwornoo, 2019a(Serwornoo, , 2019b. While these previous studies have focused on a single country, this article offers evidence from a larger number of countries.…”

“…For example, Madrid-Morales (2018) has presented evidence that Kenyan print journalists often use content from the Xinhua news agency, particularly feature stories. An uptick in the use of content from Xinhua has also been seen on Ghanaian (Serwornoo, 2019b) and Malawian (Nyirongo, 2020) media. This is partly explained because of content exchanges and syndication agreements that the news agency has signed with partner African organizations.…”

Deconstructing dominant English language discourses in the Ghanaian curriculum : reimagining a curriculum centered on Ghanaian languages and literacies

“…Discourse is all around us even if we are unaware of where that discourse originated and how much it influences our ways of interacting with the world (Fairclough, 2013). A recent examination of the coverage of Africa in Ghanaian newspapers a period of 2 years, for example, revealed Ghanaian news outlets sourced news of other African countries from European or American media houses (Serwornoo, 2019). As a result, Serwornoo (2019) found that in Ghanaian newspapers news of other African countries frequently covered themes such as war, crimes, violence including murders, crises, terrorism, and underdevelopment.…”

“…A recent examination of the coverage of Africa in Ghanaian newspapers a period of 2 years, for example, revealed Ghanaian news outlets sourced news of other African countries from European or American media houses (Serwornoo, 2019). As a result, Serwornoo (2019) found that in Ghanaian newspapers news of other African countries frequently covered themes such as war, crimes, violence including murders, crises, terrorism, and underdevelopment. Because most news about Africa in Ghanaian newspapers came from Western news sources, who highlighted mainly negative themes, the discourse about other African countries in the local media is largely negative.…”

“…Because most news about Africa in Ghanaian newspapers came from Western news sources, who highlighted mainly negative themes, the discourse about other African countries in the local media is largely negative. Serwornoo (2019) suggests that if Ghanaian newspapers visited online local news platforms in these African countries, the discourse would be more positive because local media sources would highlight both the positive and negative and not just the latter.…”