How Western Journalists Actually Write About Africa

Abstract

Over the last 20 years, journalism scholars have criticized Western media for their reporting of Africa. Scott recently argued in this journal that this criticism has become taken for granted to the point of becoming a “myth”. This article constitutes the first academic response to Scott and revisits empirically what we think we know best about Western media coverage of Africa. It identifies and assesses three claims about this coverage, namely that it systematically (1) refers to “darkness” and “tribalism”; (2) it presents Africa as a homogenous entity; and (3) that it relies predominantly on Western sources. The corpus includes 282 articles published across eight British and French newspapers (2007–2012). The textual analysis—complemented by interviews with correspondents—finds that the claims that coverage systematically refers to “tribalism” and “darkness”, treats Africa as a country and relies pre-dominantly on Western voices are not empirically supported. Nonetheless, it reveals that processes of conflation are at stake, and that the framing of African voices is impacted by a linguistic bias linked to peculiar perceptions of African political leadership. The article concludes that the critical ethos of postcolonial critique is best served by transparent and nuanced interpretation of textual data.