The Geographic and Thematic Narrowing of Facebook:
Africa in the News
Rae Alexander
MA Thesis, New Media and Digital Culture 2018 - 2019 Supervisor: Prof. dr. Richard Rogers Second Reader: dr. Lonneke van der Velden Student ID: 12109215
Acknowledgement
I would like to express my gratitude to my supervisor, Prof. dr. Richard Rogers, who helped me to shape my ideas into something researchable and offered constructive suggestions throughout the process of researching, writing and editing this thesis. The guidance I received was invaluable and the knowledge and experience gained from this undertaking has been very rewarding. Thank you for pushing me to challenge myself.
Abstract
This investigation examines the current representation of African news in the Western mainstream press as mediated through the blackbox of Facebook. By focussing on the coverage given by The New York Times , Fox News , The Guardian and The Daily Mail, this study looks at Facebook’s inherent algorithmic curation processes and how they mediate results in terms of news themes, countries covered, articles with the highest engagement scores and audience sentiment. Crucial context for this investigation is provided by traditional analyses on this subject; newsroom practices and news values of the past and present; as well as online data collection using Google web search. In comparison to the online data collected via a web search, a significant geographic and thematic narrowing occurred on Facebook due to processes of mediation. This directly affected the diversity of visible news, and journalistic values of objectivity and balance. Mediated processes of audience engagement reduced the number of articles, the amount of countries covered and news themes by enabling high engagement news to dominate this space. Though some strides have been made with regard to a generally more geographically and thematically balanced body of coverage on African news in the web space, this ultimately did not translate to the realm of Facebook. Both the web and Facebook findings, with their contradictory results, amplified by this cycle of mediation, thus encourage a nuanced reading into this complex subject. This cycle of mediation promotes audience participation which ultimately affects analytics, related newsroom practices, journalistic news values and future coverage, further perpetuating this cycle. Keywords: Africa, Media, Representation, Facebook, Mediate, News Values
Table of Contents
Abstract………... 02 1. Introduction……….. 05 2. Literature Review: The study of Africa’s media portrayal ………. 10 2.1 Representation………. 10 2.2 The Language of Framing………... 14 2.3 News Geography………..… 17 2.4 Obstacles to Fair Representation………. 18 2.5 The Impact of Unbalanced News Coverage………..….. 20 2.6 Calls for Transformation………. 22 3. The Mediated Cycle of News Production……….... 24 3.1 Traditional News Values and Newsroom practices…….………... 24 3.2 News in a digital environment: Facebook as Mediator…………...….….... 26 3.3 The impact of analytics on news production………... 29 3.4 Ethical considerations...………..…. 31 3.5 The relevance of changing news values and audience analytics... 33 4. Methodology……….……... 34 4.1 Research Object………..……. 34 4.2 Research Approach………..…… 35 4.3 Data Collection………..….. 36 4.4 Categorisation: The Coding of Textual Data………..……. 40 5. Findings………... 42 5.1 Google Web Search………..…... 42 5.2 Results As Mediated through Facebook………...….... 44 6. Discussion……….……... 50 6.1 News Geography and amount of coverage.………..……... 516.3 Sentiment………..…... 56 7. Limitations………... 58 8. Conclusion………... 60 9. Bibliography……….……… 62
1.
Introduction
While the issue of African representation in the Western media is well tread territory, having received much attention from academic scholars with regard to framing, the consequences of unbalanced reporting and calls for transformation, this topic was once again recently thrust back into the spotlight. In 2018 National Geographic magazine released their “Race Issue” in which they apologised for decades of prejudiced coverage and announced their commitment to improvement in an article titled, For Decades, Our Coverage Was Racist. To Rise Above Our Past, We Must Acknowledge It (Goldberg, 2018). The proliferation of social media has seen Africans attempt to reclaim their own narrative and hold journalists and large international media organisations accountable for their coverage of African news. This was evident in the popularity of the hashtag #SomeoneTellNytimes, which was started in protest of the violent and graphic images published of victims of the Kenyan shootings, which led to a public response issued by The New York Times (Takenaga 2019). In the United Kingdom, David Lammy, a Member of Parliament, caused an uproar when he criticised Comic Relief , a long established charity organisation, for perpetuating harmful tropes. Lammy stated that by sending a British celebrity to Uganda in order to make a donation “appeal film”, it maintained a “distorted image of Africa which perpetuates an old idea from the colonial era” (Comic Relief 2019: MP Lammy speaks out, 2019). It is with these in mind, that I sought to undertake an investigation into the current representation of Africa as portrayed in the Western press. According to Stuart Hall, the media create representations which produce shared meaning and therefore “these representations are constitutive of culture, meaning and knowledge about ourselves and the world around us” (Fürsich 115). Thus, this research project seeks to provide a glimpse into the modern day characterisation of the African continent and its people, as encountered in the American and British mainstream press and to see how this portrayal is filtered and mediated through the complex blackboxed ecosystem of Facebook, the world’s largest social networking site (PressIn order to uncover the current state of this portrayal, the overarching questions driving this study are: How is Africa represented in the Western online press in 2019 and what effect have the mediation processes of Facebook had on this representation? Has the overall portrayal of Africa in 2019 undergone a transformation or remained similar to historical analyses? I contend that this topic is all the more relevant today in light of the transformations in technology, news values and newsroom protocols. While the overwhelmingly pessimistic portrayal observed by several researchers throughout the years has focused on themes of political and financial corruption, disaster, poverty, conflict and has largely presented an undercontexualised picture of Africa and its populations ( Ojo 2002, Ankomah 2008, Franks 2005, Domatob 1994, to name a few). Thus regular interrogation of previous findings is vital because: “The media help to reproduce certain dominant notions of reality. That is particularly apparent in American society, where the news media play a key role in providing information to government officials, policy makers, and the awaiting public” highlighting the economic disadvantages unbalanced news coverage can have on foreign nations (Fair 7). Additionally, since the emergence of Web 2.0 and the proliferation of social networking sites, the media landscape has undergone rapid change, where newspapers and media organisations generally, are now able to amass enormous global audiences. According to the Pew Research Center, 68% of Americans in 2018 accessed their news via social media, with Facebook being the most popular social media site on which to do so ( M atsa and S hearer 2018). Similarly, in the UK, 74% of people were found to access their news online with Facebook also being the preferred location ( Reuters Institute Digital News Report, 2018). It has also now become standard practice for news organisations to share hyperlinks on their social networking sites that link back to articles hosted on their websites as a means to drive more traffic to their websites (Ju et al. 1). Therefore, an updated take on the continent’s media image is not only relevant, but makes a necessary contribution to this field of research by revealing how algorithmic curation and audience engagement shape the news in a modern society and thereby disseminate certain news articles or specific ideas more widely than others.
The media organisations specifically under examination for the period 1-31 March 2019, are The New York Times and Fox News , based in the US; and The Guardian and The Daily Mail in the UK. These four media organisations presented especially interesting cases as they were found to be the most left and right leaning mainstream news companies in their particular countries by an annual global study conducted by the Reuters Institute ( Reuters Institute Digital News Report 2018, 44 ). Furthermore, they all command large international audiences with millions of followers on Facebook, despite their differing reputations in relation to trustworthiness and journalistic integrity. To enable an understanding of the ways in which Facebook’s algorithms mediate results in terms of how many articles are visible, which news themes are prevalent, which countries are covered, articles with the highest engagement scores and audience sentiment, it was vital to first provide the necessary context needed for this study. This background was provided by traditional scholarly analyses on this subject; both established and current newsroom practices and news values; as well as online data collection using Google web search. The web search provided results harvested from each media organisation’s website and thus gave us a snapshot into their coverage as intended by the journalists and editors of these news organisations. This data was then coded according to prevalent news themes identified for this study, namely Art and Education; Conflict; Crime; Crisis and Disaster; Diplomacy; Government and Politics; Human Rights; Race; Wildlife; General. Data collection from a Google web search revealed a range of between 48 - 73 articles returned across all four news organisations, with the number of individual African countries represented in this reporting amounting to between 16 - 19. While considerable coverage was afforded to the news themes Art and Education and Diplomacy , the theme found to be most reported on by US media organisations was Crisis and Disaster , related to the tragic Ethiopian Airlines plane crash and the devastating tropical Cyclone Idai in Mozambique. Unlike historical coverage of disasters or environmental crises as noted by scholars in the Literature Review chapter to follow, the nature of this reporting did not portray Africa pessimistically or contribute to damaging
stereotypes. Instead, the coverage was largely empathetic to the victims of the crash, including tributes to the pilot and staff members onboard the flight, while also reporting on-the-ground efforts of the Ethiopian government and airline staff during the aftermath. Reproving reports on this news theme were decidedly directed at US aircraft manufacturer Boeing, which journalists related to a previous crash of the same airplane model just a few months earlier. When turning our attention to Facebook however, a research tool called Netvizz (Rieder 2013) which was specifically built for harvesting and analysing data on this social networking site was used for data collection and revealed an overall decrease of news articles about African news (12 - 54) and as a result, fewer African countries depicted (3 - 15), in comparison to data gathered from the web environment. This finding suggests a geographic and thematic narrowing of news on Facebook, resulting in a loss of diversity of coverage and representation. Interesting too is the finding that in this blackboxed environment, not all crises are treated equally. The tropical cyclone disaster in Mozambique matched fewer established news values than the Ethiopian airplane crash and received much less audience engagement on the social networking site, which further resulted in this crisis having far less visibility. Thus, calling into question, the danger of Facebook’s algorithmic curation process which can work to detract visibility from events that are regarded as newsworthy or in the public interest. It is also notable that Race was the least reported on news category on the web, however through Facebook’s mediation process, it managed to garner more attention and engagement on Facebook increasing the popularity of those few articles, indicating that while journalists are shown here to have moved away from reporting on Africa solely through the lens of race, this is definitely a topic that holds the publics’ attention and circulates more frequently on Facebook. Using this methodology, the key findings presented in this investigation reveal a complex and nuanced portrayal that incorporates contradictory findings between the two online spaces. Due to the length of the study being only one month in 2019, these findings do not represent
generalisable results, however they do provide a snapshot into the nature of Africa’s current media image. Further, no marked or generalisable fundamental similarities or differences were shared between the liberal US and UK press, nor was this true for the conservative press of both countries despite their shared ideological perspectives. Further still, international boundaries did also not necessarily mean shared ideological views. Additionally, traditional news values were found to be every bit as relevant today, however with a few necessary contemporary additions as proposed by Harcup and O’Neill (2017). Thus, the findings depicted in this paper illustrate the strides been made with regard to more balanced coverage of Africa in the web sphere, although the mediated nature of this coverage through Facebook has far reaching consequences that limit or exaggerate representation making some posts increasingly or less visible, which ultimately affects analytics, newsroom practices, journalistic news values and in turn, future coverage, perpetuating a cycle of mediation. The next chapter focuses on the topics of interest that scholars have taken up over the years when examining the representation of Africa and its people in Western publications and seeks to give an overview of the historical reportage in order to contextualise the findings of this study.
2.
Literature Review: The study of Africa’s media portrayal
The portrayal of Africa and Africans in the Western media, through recurring themes and images has long been a subject of scholarly attention. However, the increasing growth of the international audience of news media due to the ubiquity of social networks has made this topic all the more pertinent today. One has to wonder, in what ways do the news media advance or inhibit an optimistic outlook on cultural diversity? The practice of regularly assessing the current status of representation in modern news media is vital, because according to Branson and Stafford (in Mahadeo and McKinney, 15 ) : The media give us ways of imagining particular identities and groups which can have material effects on how people experience the world, and how they get understood, or legislated for or perhaps beaten up in the street by others…this is partly because the mass media have the power to represent, over and over, some identities, some imaginings, and to exclude others, and thereby make them seem unfamiliar or even threatening. This chapter aims to provide a broad and sweeping overview of the history of news coverage afforded to Africa and Africans in the Western media thus far, highlighting the recurring themes and issues that media scholars have taken up as points of contention and critically examined in their writing, namely: Representation; The Language of Framing; News Geography; Obstacles to Fair Representation; Impact on Policy and Calls for Transformation. 2.1 Representation Cultural theorist, Stuart Hall, states that “representation is an essential part of the process by which meaning is produced and exchanged between members of a culture. It does involve the use of language, of signs and images which stand for or represent things” (1). In order to understand the way in which Africa and Africans have been portrayed on the world stage, it is crucial to deconstruct the information production processes of the media.The history of the representation of the African continent and its’ people is, according to Fair, “inextricably linked to five hundred years of Western capitalist expansion” (6), with controversies around media images and depictions flaring up since the mid 1970s (Cohen, in Mahadeo and McKinney, 2007). As such, the media “in the identities and understandings they so powerfully circulate” do offer characterisations of Africa, which over time have worked to reinforce to audiences a narrative of African underachievement (Branson and Stafford in Mahadeo and McKinney, 16). Indeed, the adverse and pervasive themes of disaster, conflict and hopelessness unearthed by scholars ( Ojo 2002, Ankomah 2008, Franks 2005, Domatob 1994, Fair 1993, Brookes 1995, Mahadeo and McKinney 2007, Schaeder and Endless 1998, Chaudhary 2009) through news article analyses tend to reveal significant amounts of overlap and a trend in the way Africa was, to a large extent, reported on. To mention a few such examples here, in her examination of African media coverage, particularly related to Liberia and South Africa, Fair focused her examination of the predominance of reporting on war, famine and poverty, as seen through the lens of race. Brookes analysed the headlines in the Daily Telegraph and The Guardian in 1990, and identified the common themes of coverage as: Civil War, Civil Conflict, Aid, Human Rights, Politics, Crime, Disaster, Living Conditions, Individual Behaviour, Sport and Wildlife , further stating that their regularity seemingly “establishes them as legitimate areas on which to report in conjunction with Africa” (Brookes 465). In order to shed more light into the widespread categories he discovered, Domatob in his study of Time and Newsweek magazines for the period 1989-1991, additionally specified sub-themes, which included: Politics and Government (state, government, political parties); Trade and Diplomacy (war, diplomacy, foreign relations, defence, trade, economy, transport, agribusiness labour, wages, natural resources); Arts and Education (education, arts, culture, religion, philosophy); Crisis and Disasters (crimes, public/moral problems eg. alcohol/ divorce/ drugs/ race relations/ corruption, accidents, disasters, famines, droughts, health calamities) and General (sport, animals, children, people in general) (24) . Furthermore, in a content audit of the The New York Times and The Washington Post conducted
focuses on the African world (the Caribbean, Latin America and other parts of the African diaspora) , their observations included that there were “no reports on regional economic or political cooperation in Africa. There was no in-depth look at any of the African political economies. The private sector was totally ignored, while all articles related to development were centered on the public sector” ( Ojo 8 ). Their examination of the reporting was categorised into themes of AIDS, Conflict, Development and Other, with the bulk of the reporting relating to conflict ( 9 ). This persistent narrative is problematic and under contextualised as Mahadeo and McKinney additionally note a marked lack of depictions of community action in reporting, despite it being well documented that African cultures tend to be distinctly community focused and generally ascribe to a collectivist ethos (18). This pessimistic representation speaks to notions of what is considered newsworthy in Western publications, often defined as interest, proximity, prominence, conflict, novelty, human-interest, and timeliness; and with particular regard to the US media’s international news selection, the further importance of “threats to the United States and world peace, anticipated reader interest and US involvement” is further underscored, as revealed by interviews with 279 American newspaper editors (Chaudhary 30). It is this news selection process and information production that reinforces and perpetuates bias in representations (Mahadeo and McKinney, 2007). The predominant media narrative and resulting classification systems only serve to reiterate existing power imbalances whereby “the group doing the classifying exerts its authority through the naming of characteristics upon which other groups are divided” (Fair 11). The effect of this nature of news coverage has influenced and reinforced a view of the African as ‘Other’. Fair (1993) further states: “The news media participate in this process of naturalizing and objectifying race through their construction of ‘Africa’; What is ‘known’ about Africa is
created, filtered, and reproduced through dominant (ideological) conceptions of ‘we’ and ‘they,’ ‘Self’ and ‘Other’” (18). While representation is theorised as both a continuous construction of identities in a particular culture, it can also serve as a stereotyping force (Grossberg et al. in Avraham and First, 483 ), which is a classification system that works to regulate and maintain the social and symbolic order in favour of the dominant group by normalising specific worldviews (483). However, it is noteworthy that there has in recent years been a growing awareness of a reported shift in this representation of Africa, tending towards more balanced and less crisis-oriented news coverage (Chaudhary 28). In the recently published book, titled Africa’s Media Image in the 21st Century , Bunce et. al observe the rise of media agencies, Xinhua based in Beijing and Al Jazeera in Doha, which have offered alternative perspectives on African events to counterbalance Western media viewpoints (5). In fact, Al Jazeera have the slogan “The Opinion and The Other Opinion”, thus clearly expressing their goal of providing diversity of news and giving a voice to those often marginalised by the mainstream press. The participatory and engagement driven nature of social networks has also enabled African audiences to have a hand in shaping their own representation to some degree. This was seen in the prominence of the hashtag #SomeonetellCNN in 2012 in protest of how CNN reported an attempted terrorist attack in Kenya, which led to an official apology by the television news network and a withdrawal of the article (Bunce et. al 5) and likewise with the previously mentioned hashtag #SomeonetellNYtimes which was started to challenge the decision of The New York Times to publish graphic images of the Kenyan shootings in 2019, in which the faces and lifeless bodies of the victims were clearly visible, which also prompted an official response from the newspaper (Takenaga, 2019). Thus, due to technological developments and changes in social consciousness, the need for regular examination and further empirical work in this field remains ever present.
2.2 The Language of Framing To understand framing necessitates a rethinking of the role of journalists as not just information gatherers, selectors or gatekeepers, but rather as producers of culture. E rving Goffman , to whom the concept of ‘frame analysis’ is widely attributed to, defined it as “the principles of organization which govern events – at least social ones – and our subjective involvement in them” ( Linström and Marais 23) . Robert Entman who later built frame analysis into a methodology, described framing as “the process of culling a few elements of perceived reality and assembling a narrative that highlights the connections among them to promote a particular interpretat ion” ( 24) . Thus, when media workers carefully and consistently select the same elements to include, dramatising certain aspects and downplaying others, while altogether excluding others, they actively create representations of political issues, public controversies and even whole groups of people “that could ultimately benefit a particular interest” ( Nelson et. al. 568). Frame analysis and the examination of textual elements including headlines, metaphors, wording and choice of participants, is therefore particularly crucial where a discourse is completely naturalised because “the more naturalised a discourse becomes, the more it loses its visible ideological character and becomes common sense” (Gramsci in Brookes, 464). These language devices will be considered below in order to deconstruct the “stereotypical, naturalised and dominant discourse on Africa” (Brookes 461). According to sociologist, Robert Nisbet, “metaphor is one of the most ancient ways of knowing which rests upon emotion, imagination, and creativity rather than upon observation and measurement” (Jarosz 106). In her essay, Constructing the Dark Continent: Metaphor as a geographical representation of Africa, Jarosz traces the very first use of the term ‘the dark continent’ as a description of Africa to the late nineteenth century, to a writer and traveller named Henry M. Stanley. It wasn’t long before this term became widely adopted across disciplines and found its way into the writings of missionaries, travellers, poets and authors, each time being
used to emphasize Africa being ‘dark and impenetrable’. The binaries of stagnation and development were implicit in the regular reiteration of contrasting ‘Dark Continent’/ ‘Western Enlightenment’ metaphors, highlighting Science, Capitalism, and Christianity, “the hallmarks of the colonizing power” as signs of developmental progress (102). Focusing on the British press in June 1990, specifically on the Daily Telegraph and The Guardian – two seemingly ideologically opposing publications, Brookes observes the continued portrayal of Africa as parasitic and a “drain on Western resources”, violence is often likened to floods and disease insinuating a “spreading, contagious, unstoppable flood/tide” with politicians being constructed as “trapped animals holding onto power, desperate but parasitic beggars” (474). Significant too is the representation of Western military as the protectors of Westerners in Africa, however the details of their other military functions in Africa are obscured or omitted. Interestingly, these two news organisations, despite their opposing ideological views, offered very similar media constructions of Africa (471). The persistence of these metaphors “flattens places and people, denies the actualities and specificities of social and economic processes which transform the continent, and obscures a nuanced examination of the forces of cultural and economic imperialism unfolding within Africa in their relation to Europe and America” ( Jarosz 105), therefore the effect of this imposed classification is a perpetuation of social inequalities (Fair 18). Brookes further observed the specific manner in which media workers constructed news article headlines with regard to coverage of African events or people. A study of headlines is valuable when taking into consideration that they act as brief synopses and highlight what the producer of the text thinks is significant and is typically the first thing audiences see. In line with the dominant metaphors already mentioned, headlines expectedly so too were found by a large number of authors to typically centre around themes of civil conflict, aid, human rights, politics, crime and disaster.
The position assigned to actors within the headline is also of interest, and in this case participants were found to be: the state; political leaders; the military (state and guerrilla); and civilians. Brookes further identified the use of middle clauses which enabled African agency to be obscured, thereby framing Americans and Britons to be agents of their own actions and only represented as ‘affected parties’ when they are being assisted by other Western agents (475). This is in stark contrast to the portrayal of Africans as victims and receivers of Western aid. When coverage involves peace talks and negotiations, “the agency of African participants is generally backgrounded by attenuation or omission” (476). The careful choice of wording, or the intentional substitution of terms, so too has interesting ideological effects and normalising consequences, serving an agenda-setting function by shaping the way audiences process these events. Honing in on the coverage of Africa in 1990, Brookes was able to identify several such cases, the most telling being the substitution of the word ‘loans’ for ‘aid,’ “which obscures the exploitative nature of this phenomenon by couching usury in terms of help” and thereby perpetuating the stereotype of the “West’s role in Africa as leader, mediator, bringer of peace and democracy and giver of aid” (473). Mahadeo and McKinney also highlight the rise in popularity of the term ‘debt forgiveness’ used in discussions of ‘Developing World’ debt, stating, “‘Forgiveness’ in our view is a patronising term, which masks the complicity of the mainly, Western banks in lending monies for dubious projects and on unrealistic terms” (16). Finally, the prevalence of discrediting language and quotations also contribute to the framing of news articles. These verbal processes are undertaken in order to invalidate or endorse statements made by either Western or African participants and signals the media producer’s intent. Examples include the use of words such as: ‘say’, ‘deny’, ‘claim’, ‘alleged’ and ‘accuse,’ which were found to be used exclusively in conjunction with the statements made by Africans, casting doubt on their honesty and reliability, while it was discovered that discrediting language was not used in reports detailing the statements of Westerners (Brookes 481).
Quotations serve the same invalidating function, whereby agreement of a statement is left without quotation marks, placing the responsibility for accuracy with the producer. In this particular study, it was revealed that quotations were regularly used when statements were made by Africans, which had the effect of creating distance between the producer and the statement, instead leaving the responsibility for accuracy with the African participant (481). 2.3 News Geography Despite studies reporting low and decreasing coverage given to Africa in the international press (Franks 129), a study conducted by Schraeder and Endless on the New York Times from 1955-1995, discovered that despite the amount of coverage, southern Africa consistently dominated coverage of Africa, followed very closely by north Africa as a result of their locations near key zones during World War II and the Cold War, namely the Mediterranean and Red Sea, and the Cape of Good Hope (31). They further noted how affinity played a large role in that South Africa often was the most widely reported on African country. This is illustrated by Brookes’ research finding in 1990 that if Britain has economic or neo-colonial ties with a specific country, that country’s news was most probable to feature more frequently in British reporting, which was the case for South African news. With regards to the US media, the substantial amount of coverage given to South Africa can also be attributed to the apartheid regime and the resulting racial conflict. This is something American audiences might have identified with, drawing similarities with their own civil rights movement (Schraeder and Endless 31). Interestingly, Golan investigated how ‘deviance’, ‘relevance’, ‘cultural affinity’ and ‘location’ may be used to predict future coverage and discovered that with regard to the US, trade and gross domestic product were however, the two crucial key predictors of coverage of African nations (44). Highlighting the agenda-setting function of the media, with the end of apartheid, specific interest in South Africa and reporting of race dramatically decreased in 1995. Reports of ethnicity increased to 48% due to the Rwandan genocide and an additional 48% of African coverage
focused on religion associated with the spread of “radical” Islamic revivalism (Schraeder and Endless 33). Concerns for corporate profit are also a factor in determining the amount of coverage one country or a region gets over another, if at all, as Kliesch discovered: News from Africa does not sell the media product as the cost of reporting from African countries outweighs the need and benefit to cover Africa. In fact, in a 1991 census of 3,260 foreign correspondents, one researcher found that only 5 percent of these journalists were assigned to Africa, which is only a slight increase from 3 percent in 1975 (Fair 8). More recently however, Bunce et. al have observed the emerging multiplicity of viewpoints and diversity in content creation as a result of citizen journalism and the uptake of social networking sites. Not only is content now being created in Africa and exported to Western nations, but the diaspora is also actively contributing by producing their own content (Mabweazara in Bunce et. al 6), thus affecting the traditional patterns of news geography. 2.4 Obstacles to Fair Representation While the main global centres of news production and dissemination are found in the Western world, with news agencies such as Reuters and Agence France-Presse operating since the 19th century (Milan 25), the reason this essentialising representational coverage of Africa has been found to prevail can be attributed to a complex interplay between agenda-setting practices, ideology, physical circumstances, infrastructure and on-the-job routines of news reporters. As Fürsich stated, “The representation of Others has been tied up in long established signifying practices that are slow to change because of systemic media constraints” (127). On an ideological level, one proposed reason for this portrayal may be to serve an agenda-setting function in order “to justify past, present and future political and economic policies and actions with regard to African countries. Governments have to justify, to their own people, actions that would normally be regarded by them as undemocratic and even immoral in a Western context”
(Brookes 488). Van Dijk theorises that the more economic and sociopolitical circumstances challenge the ‘in-group’ ideology of superiority, the greater the need for self-determination to preserve this ideology, which in turn, serves to maintain this false notion of superiority and uniqueness that is “a powerfully unifying element in British culture” (Downing in Brookes 487). These representations thus work to enable the West to form a collective ‘Self’, and negate a collective ‘Other’ (Fair 16). The often precarious physical circumstances journalists encountered when reporting on African events while on location, also acted as obstacles to balanced representation. These often included troublesome travel conditions, laws of censorship, unsatisfactory or inadequate communications equipment and fearful sources who might be hesitant to speak out publicly. International media outlets also had to contend with high costs to keep news correspondents stationed in Africa (Fitzgerald 1989; Brice 1992; Meisler 1992, in Fair 1993). Institutional practices also affect what Mahadeo and McKinney call the “ratings game,” which describes this competitive industry and the drive for increasingly high profits, but ultimately often results in under contextualised news in order to accommodate for rapid and regular conveyance and to keep their Western audiences engaged for longer and regular periods (19). This point is further reiterated by compromised news gathering techniques employed in order to sustain corporate profits. These include Pack Journalism , the practice of journalists from different and even competing media organisations to share notes, corroborate and validate each other’s work; Crisis Orientation , the perceived newsworthiness of environmental and humanitarian crises and disasters; Parachute Journalism , the method put into practice by some reporters of very briefly arriving in an area to cover a particular story they have little or no prior experience of, without staying long enough to investigate the nuances or context adequately often due to tight deadlines and limited budgets; and Capital City Reportage , which is implemented when an area becomes physically inaccessible or too unsafe and as a way to circumvent this, government press releases from the capital city and elite news sources are instead used. These methods were
thus relied upon in order to create a body of continuous and standardised reporting to maintain a regular audience and steady profits (Fair 9). In recent years, it has been noted that a change in newsroom practices has occurred which has resulted in the major newswires ( Agence France-Presse, The Associated Press and Reuters ) reducing costs considerably by relying instead on local journalists who are either based or born in the particular African region being reported on, allowing for greater access, nuance and depth of understanding when writing or broadcasting on local events. This has also resulted in an alleviation of several logistical impediments previously experienced. Local reporters would then report to regional bureaus where staff include both residents of the area and international media workers (Boyd-Barrett and Rantanen in Bunce et. al 4). It may be said that “while ideological production is not the explicit goal or intention of news organizations, it is a consequence of journalistic practices, routines, and conventions. By choosing certain events, emphasizing certain ‘facts’ and giving stories a certain tone, the news media structure and define reality” (Hall 1975; Tuchman 1978; Gitlin 1980; Hackett 1984; and Thompson 1990, in Fair 13) for its audiences. 2.5 The Impact of Unbalanced News Coverage Discursive strategies of the Western media that rely on essentialising cultural groups have far reaching effects and serve an agenda-setting function that has the power to shape and define foreign policy towards the African continent ( Fair 1993, Bunce et. al 2017) . Wiley, in his research about a 1989 project undertaken by Michigan State University which studied the perceptions, attitudes, and behaviours of government policy-makers and Africanist scholars, and the relationship between the two; noted an unwillingness of policy makers to seek knowledge from and engage with academic scholars (39). This has resulted in the “generally gloomy tone of the U.S. media coverage of Africa [which] reinforces powerful stereotypes about Africa within government and in the broader society and creates a negative context for all considerations of Africa policy” (45).
Thus, lesser known success stories about development rarely come to the fore in this environment. This is significant because according to established news values, what is deemed newsworthy may gain the attention of presidents, high level members of congress and policy-makers “historically prone to neglect the African continent” (Schraeder and Endless, 29). Michael Clough, a U.S. foreign policy expert who served as a senior policy advisor on Africa for the presidential campaigns of both Bill Clinton and Al Gore, plainly stated that the regular and increasingly negative reporting on Africa has had a multitude of consequences and: has discouraged U.S. businesses from investing in the continent; it has hampered American efforts to build support for development assistance (as opposed to humanitarian relief); it has discouraged black Americans from identifying closely with the continent; it has discouraged academics and other professionals from embarking on careers focused on Africa; and it has discouraged ambitious mainstream U.S. politicians from making the continent their issue. In short, it has marginalized Africa (Domatob 28). This pessimistic coverage has also led to policy-makers and audiences generally feeling “less sympathy than aversion” and instead developed a weariness with Africa (Wiley 40). While the consequences of negative publicity can be detrimental, a lack of coverage so too can have harmful consequences as reportage sends a message to audiences signalling what to care about. An example of this lack of reporting was seen in the way international media organisations treated the famines of Ethiopia and Somalia. As noted by Fair, these humanitarian crises were ignored by the foreign press until conditions got so devastating, that international news agencies could no longer justify turning a blind eye. Once these emergency situations were identified as newsworthy, “the pack arrived, hungry for news of starvation” (Fair 9). Domatob, in his study of American magazines, Time and Newsweek over the years 1989-1991, noted that a combined total of 85 stories were about Africa. On further investigation, more than 75 percent of the total coverage was about South Africa, followed closely by a handful of stories about the continent in general and trailing far behind in third place was Kenya, which left 50
countries without any news coverage at all. Alarming still, is that Domatob’s research further reveals that 30 out of 47 articles in Newsweek and 27 out of 38 in Time , were centred around white people and their activities. Despite being a minority in Africa, it seemed matters that affected white people were considered significantly more newsworthy to international audiences, resulting in a large amount of events that did not match these criteria, being left unreported. Thus, scholars have stressed the necessity of the media to also cover stories of African achievement including successful food production programs, democratic transitions and the rural development efforts of African NGOs, to name a few, in order to balance news coverage and curtail the adverse effects (Wiley 46). 2.6 Calls for Transformation While numerous scholars have contributed to the vast body of work detailing the apparent problematic representation of Africa, and more generally, the developing world as a whole, their findings have opened the door to new ways of thinking about the media and ideas for forging a new way forward. A key milestone in this conversation was the New World Information and Communication Order (NWICO) of the late 1970s and early 1980s. This UNESCO panel was tasked with the formulation of a set of recommendations to make global media representation less prejudiced. A key figure in creating the resulting report titled Many Voices, One World , was Mustapha Masmoudi , the Information Minister of Tunisia. While this report championed “more balanced North–South information flow[s] and a democratic use of communication satellites” among other things, its findings were eventually endorsed by the 1980 UN General Assembly, but it’s success was short lived (Milan 27). Building on Development Journalism is Hemant Shah’s model of Emancipatory Journalism for media workers in developing countries, this model places more emphasis on the part journalists play within social movements by directly stating “neutrality does not apply when universal
values – such as peace, democracy, human rights, (gender and racial) equality, (social) progress, and national liberation – are at stake” (Carpentier 153). Shah proposes a theoretical model that asks journalists to act locally to contribute to humanistic values (Fürsich 121). Fürsich, in her essay Media and the Representation of Others , provides an in-depth proposal on how to action transformation, stating that “issues of representation do not reside just within media content but must be connected to all aspects of media practices – from more systemic issues such as the conditions of production and regulation, to the work routines of media workers and audience integration” (127). She further highlights the critical role of journalism and media education to upset the norms of current practices by reaching students when they are “not yet socialised into established professional strategies” (Fürsich 121). Increased media literacy for audiences is also pivotal and “should be about helping people to become sophisticated citizens rather than sophisticated consumers’’ (Lewis and Jhally in Fürsich, 126) and on a larger scale, has the potential to incite grassroots movements into lobbying efforts and policy influence. While this chapter has traced the issues scholars have highlighted and sought to address in their critical analyses, it further emphasizes the need for ongoing research to be conducted with regularity in response to the technological innovations, changes in patterns of communication and consumption, and increased awareness and sensitivity on matters of representation. The next chapter considers the influential role of Facebook as a mediator of information and how a modern-day fixation with audience analytics, further influences news production processes.
3.
The Mediated Cycle of News Production
In his text, On Technical Mediation , Bruno Latour draws a distinction between intermediaries and mediators, illustrating that intermediaries are neutral vessels for conveyance while mediators actively disrupt and transform (5). He states, “no unmediated action is possible once we enter the realm of engineers and craftsmen” (1). Further, in their article, Critical Questions for Big Data , boyd and Crawford specifically call attention to this mediation process by highlighting the impact on development, change and society it could potentially have, by drawing on Kranzberg who states:Technology is neither good nor bad; nor is it neutral… technology’s interaction with the social ecology is such that technical developments frequently have environmental, social, and human consequences that go far beyond the immediate purposes of the technical devices and practices themselves (in boyd and Crawford 662). The previous chapter focuses on the predominant ways in which scholars have researched and written about Africa’s media image in the Western press by dissecting coverage in terms of language, geography, impact, obstacles and transformation; however the news values that underpin such coverage was only briefly hinted at. While newsworthiness is widely regarded as one of the most elusive concepts in journalistic practice, some even describe it as being a “gut feeling” (Schultz 190), this chapter seeks to identify the traditional news values that have come to be popularly accepted amongst media professionals and to trace if/how these news values have been affected by Web 2.0 generally and Facebook in particular. Thus, highlighting the mediation of news in two ways, by both human intervention and algorithmic curation. 3.1 Traditional News Values and Newsroom practices In 1965, Galtung and Ruge famously published their landmark essay, The Structure of Foreign News , in which they sought to answer the question, ‘How do events become news?’. Their analysis outlined twelve factors that in their observation, seemed to recur in foreign media coverage.
They identified: Frequency (“time-span needed for the event to unfold itself and acquire meaning”); Threshold (the greater the intensity, the more coverage – “there is a threshold the event will have to pass before it will be recorded at all”); Unambiguity (“the less ambiguity, the more the event will be noticed”); Meaningfulness (a combination of cultural proximity and relevance); Consonance (news selector may predict/want something to happen, thus forming a mental ‘pre-image’ of an event, which makes it easier to report on when/if it happens); Unexpectedness (the “unexpected or rare within the meaningful and the consonant”); Continuity (once something has previously been reported on and been defined as ‘news’, it will continue to be so because it is familiar, easier to interpret and to justify the attention it was given in the first place); Composition (related to the overall composition or balance of a newspaper); Reference to Elite Nations ; Reference to Elite People ; Reference to Persons (when an “event can be seen in personal terms, as due to the action of specific individuals”); and Reference to something negative (‘negative’ news is unambiguous, unexpected, and generally occur over a shorter period of time than positive news) (Galtung and Ruge 65-71). The last four mentioned news values were identified by the authors as being “culture-bound” and pertain specifically to the “north western corner of the world” (68). This idea of cultural specificity with regards to the establishment of news values is reiterated by Shoemaker et al., stating “ studies suggest that [while] journalists may at least partially share conceptions of what is newsworthy, there are also some cultural differences in newsworthiness” (782). In their article What is News? Galtung and Ruge Revisited , Harcup and O’Neill trace the main scholastic criticisms to their predecessor’s approach, namely that it was based on three international crises and is only focused on events, the lack of mention of the impact of photographs, McQuail states that “it appears to assume that there is a given reality ‘out there’”, while Vasterman underscores the notion that “journalists do not report news, they produce news”, Hartley instead points to the fact that while the twelve principles put forth by Galtung and Ruge, came from their study of news reports, there is “little clue as to why the story was deemed newsworthy in the first place” (Harcup and O’Neill 264-265).
Shoemaker et al., in contrast, focusing particularly on international coverage by the US media ( The New York Times , ABC, CBS and NBC ) paid specific attention to the role of deviance as constituting newsworthiness. Their paper furthered the idea that widely accepted news values can be broken down into three distinct theoretical dimensions, namely ‘deviance ’ , ‘social significance’ and the interaction between the two, which is able to predict a news item’s prominence in US media coverage (794). Deviant news that had high economic or political significance were presented most prominently to audiences. Over the years, media practitioners have also added to Galtung and Ruge’s original list of news values, categories such as: Entertainment, Drama, Sex, Scandal, Crime and Humour (Harcup and O’Neill 266), however despite the contributions of critics and various later scholars attempting to rename, replace or add extra themes, Galtung and Ruge’s 1965 essay has been heralded as “the most influential explanation of news values” even 30 years after its publication (McQuail in Harcup and O’Neill 264), and has thus played a key role in the way media practitioners construct and mediate news to audiences. 3.2 News in a digital environment: Facebook as Mediator From 2012, however, the dissemination of newspaper content through social networking sites became a routine occurrence (Ju et al. 1), prompting a host of transformations in the organisation of newsrooms and long established news practices. The traditional notions of newsworthiness aforementioned were challenged as news consumption became increasingly datafied and consumer engagement metrics became readily viewable in most modern newsrooms. While the audience has always been a consideration to media practitioners, this relationship used to be conceived of in a restrictive and distant manner. Audience feedback used to come in the form of letters to the editors and phone calls to the newspaper; and an ombudsman whose duty it was to respond to complaints, would also champion journalistic ethics and professionalism ( Ferrer-Conill and Tandoc 437). However, it was also common practice that “ journalists used to ignore, if not reject, feedback from the audience” altogether (Beam 1995; Gans 1979;
“journalists still relied on their supervisors, peers, relatives, and personal preferences for their news judgment” (Beam, 1995; Sumpter, 2000 cited in Tandoc 2014, 563 ). This happened for several reasons, one of which was to hold in place the journalistic ideal of autonomy and to avoid audience feedback influencing the standard and quality of news output ( 563) . In our modern media environment, however, the perception of instability related to job layoffs has been the impetus for the institutionalisation of media workers actively monitoring and using analytics (567). It is now commonplace for newspapers to share hyperlinks on their social networking sites that link back to articles hosted on their websites, as a means to drive traffic to their newspaper site (Ju et al. 1). Focussing particularly on Facebook as a mediator and disseminator of news, when this social networking site announced on their official blog that they had reached a staggering one billion monthly active users in 2012 , it is with good reason that it was noted that “this arguably makes it one of the biggest media organizations in the history of humankind, contested only by Google’s collection of services in terms of daily worldwide audience size and engagement” (Rieder 2013, 1). Since then, as of March 2019, this figure has more than doubled to 2.38 billion monthly active users. An annual study conducted by the Pew Research Center concluded that roughly 68% of American adults consumed news via social media in 2018, despite expressing concerns about accuracy; and 43% cite Facebook as the preferred channel in which to do so ( M atsa and S hearer 2018). The Reuters Institute have similarly found that in the UK, the amount of people accessing news online (74%) has surpassed those who get their news from television (66%), with the most popular social media site for news also being Facebook ( Reuters Institute Digital News Report, 2018). This therefore underscores the necessity to critically examine Facebook as an influential mediator of news. In a 2016 investigation into Facebook’s built-in algorithmic processes, new media
researchers attempted to gain more insight into the intricately structured black box of Facebook by examining a database of all its publicly available patents, the Facebook Graph Application Programming Interface (API) and the structure and targeting methods available to potential advertisers, in order to better understand the mediation processes inherit in Facebook’s functioning (Share Lab 2016). While the general public do not have access to the inner workings of Facebook to dissect the way in which these complex algorithms have been programmed to function, what is evident is that they were deliberately engineered to reward status-seeking behaviour (Marwick 93), to promote engagement and to encourage users to spend longer periods on the site, in order to generate profits derived from advertising (Rieder 2015, 3). Bucher highlights the fact that Facebook newsfeeds are by default set to “Top Stories” (although the option to select “Most Recent” is available too) which shows users the aggregated content that is judged by Facebook’s EdgeRank algorithm to be the “most interesting” (1167). In order to be ranked as most interesting, the algorithm favours: Affinity, which refers to “the amount and nature of the interaction between two users”; Weight , which assigns a value to each interaction because “some types of interactions are considered more important than others” – for example, a ‘comment’ might have more influence than a ‘like’; and lastly, Time Decay , which emphasises “recency or freshness” of interaction on a particular object (1167). Bucher elaborates further, stating, “Facebook deploys an automated and predetermined selection mechanism to establish relevancy (here conceptualized as most interesting), ultimately demarcating the field of visibility for that media space” (1167). This then underscores the way in which Facebook’s algorithm decides what is made visible or invisible to users, based on the combination of the user’s engagement and the technical affordances of the algorithm. Additionally, Facebook has also been found to be modelled on “anticipated or future oriented assumptions about valuable and profitable interactions that are ultimately geared towards commercial and monetary purposes” (1169).
These insights into Facebook’s mediated eco-system and its algorithmic curation process illustrates the way in which news articles are affected by numerous variables as they are filtered through this intricate system, which speaks to the complex interdependencies between news consumers and algorithms that affect system behaviour. 3.3 The Impact of Analytics on News Production As news consumption has expanded into digital arenas, and scholarly observation and analyses have aimed to get a glimpse of the inner-workings of Facebook’s algorithms, this has then also had consequences for news production. Therefore, with this new dynamic set in place, a delicate balancing act has been initiated where journalists are constantly evaluating the quality of their work against audiences and potential revenue (Tandoc 2014, 570). Indeed, even with incomplete knowledge of this online mediation process due to lack of access and transparency, it has inspired experimentation and attempts to “train the system through investigating what patterns of input will produce the desired output” (Rader and Gray 181). Further, studies have revealed that every time a user logs onto Facebook, there are approximately 1,500 posts to potentially see and on a daily basis an average of 300 posts get prioritised (Backstrom cited in Rader and Gray 174), thus making the competition for visibility fierce. In response to this shifting journalistic environment, new audience-oriented job titles including Engagement Editor, Audience Editor and Social Media Editor—have cropped up within news editorial teams, filled by employees whose main function is to anticipate audience interests and match news content to their preferences, “further symbolizing the institutionalization and normalization of audience-oriented approaches” ( Ferrer-Conill and Tandoc 441) . Strikingly, while Tandoc (2014) notes the prevalence of paid analytics programs such as Omniture , Chartbeat and Visual Revenue in major US newsrooms he encountered, when interviewing media practitioners they all emphasised the importance of news values or journalistic ethics, yet in his personal observations in these newsrooms, he states that he never heard them calling on these news values when selecting stories to upload, instead they preferred
drawing on metrics to help them make content-related decisions (570). Therefore a “modification of norms” appears to be occurring in response to an influx of new technologies and “News judgment now includes acute awareness of what stories did well in the past based on traffic. Headlines are now being tested in terms of which version attracts more clicks” (572). Shoemaker et al. describe gatekeeping as “the process of selecting, writing, editing, positioning, scheduling, repeating, and otherwise massaging information to become news” and it is this process that has been directly affected by the quantifying and commodifying of audience participation (73). According to Tandoc, these newsroom changes can be traced along five distinct areas: Access/Observation , stories that received considerable traffic based on web analytics would get updates, follow-ups and tend to be assigned more frequently; Selection/Filtering , when numbers start decreasing, web editors update their homepages by relocating or adding stories based on high web metrics; Processing/Editing , using the predictive function on web analytic software to gauge which headlines, photos, videos, and graphics are more likely to attract more engagement; Distribution, “ Lists of most popular stories, based on automatically generated audience metrics”, channelling social media to drive web traffic and; Interpretation, where the audience’s preference is now become understood by the stories that attract the most engagement which has, as a result become synonymous for a job well done (2014, 567-569). With the emergence of social media, changing newsroom practices and shifting benchmarks for good work, it is then inevitable that the news values and notions of newsworthiness proposed by Galtung and Ruge would need some updating. In order to provide a contemporary set of news values, Harcup and O’Neill have once again revised their earlier update and from their analyses of online news, have established the following key elements that appear to be identifiable within published news stories: Exclusivity; Bad news; Conflict; Surprise; Audio-visuals (striking photographs, video, audio and/or infographics) ; Shareability (likely to generate sharing and comments) ; Entertainment (sex, showbusiness, sport, lighter human interest, animals, or humour) ; Drama; Follow-up (about subjects already in the news) ; The Power Elite; Relevance
(groups or nations perceived to be influential with, or culturally/historically familiar to the audience) ; Magnitude (large numbers of people involved or in potential impact) ; News organisation’s agenda (news that fits the organisation’s own agenda, either ideologically, commercially or forming part of a particular campaign); Celebrity; and Good News ( 1482) . Ironically, despite this overhaul of newsrooms and a strong emphasis being placed on journalists to produce content that elicits high engagement and web traffic, most newspapers are “still offering content online for free, but the volume of online advertising revenue, while growing, has not made up for the loss on the print side” and in fact the extent to which social media drive web traffic and advertising revenue has left some scholars underwhelmed (Ju et al. 3) although this may be attributable to “the hope that digital revenue will, in the immediate future, be able to sustain journalism” (Tandoc 2014, 570). 3.4 Ethical considerations These dramatic transitions in the media landscape with regard to news values and newsroom practices has seen a departure from a traditional model favouring journalistic monopoly over news dissemination, to a more audience-centred, engagement driven one, and has sparked much debate amongst scholars who warn of the long term consequences and ethical considerations it poses. Concerns have focused on the inevitable creation of ‘echo chambers’ whereby users are only exposed to content that they already agree with and to people who are like-minded (Bakshy 1130). The proliferation of ‘filter bubbles’ in which an individual’s previous online behaviour is tracked and recorded has also been a point of contention because of its lack of providing multiple viewpoints and attitude changing information (1130). Interestingly, when Galtung and Ruge put forth their paper in 1965 on predominant news values inherent in their news analyses, they also proposed three hypotheses, which seem to warn about the effect of echo chambers even before the proliferation of social media. The first was that, “The more events satisfy the criteria mentioned, the more likely that they will be registered as news” which speaks to the continued selection of news items after they have been established as
newsworthy or found to attract large numbers of engagement. The second is “once a news item has been selected, what makes it newsworthy according to the factors will be accentuated” which leads to this news element being emphasised and it’s importance being distorted. And finally, they warn that both these processes of selection and distortion happen continuously from the event, to the reader and at all steps of news construction in-between ( Harcup and O'Neill 2001, 264) creating only familiar news which does not critically challenge the reader. As a result of the precarious nature of the media industry and its apparent lack of stability, relying too heavily on audience analytics is also problematic and calls into question journalistic principles when these metrics start becoming markers of success, which in turn has “important ramifications, as treating such metrics as goals rather than means to achieve journalistic ideals becomes a big risk” for journalistic quality and integrity ( Ferrer-Conill and Tandoc , 447). Other scholars have underscored journalism’s communicative role stating that, “The kind of press needed by a democracy, then, is one that helps to ‘cultivate social spaces for public dialogue’” and should aim to create “morally literate persons” (Croteau and Hoynes cited in Tandoc and Thomas, 245). They warn against the potential of web analytics to “lock journalism into a race toward the lowest common denominator, ghettoizing citizens into bundles based on narrow preferences and predilections rather than drawing them into a community” (247). A further concern is the apparent romanticising of audiences. Tandoc and Thomas call for a clear distinction to be made between what is of public interest and what the public is interested in, further stating: “Choice may dress in the garb of empowerment but it is of no utility to democracy whatsoever if the net result is a more uninformed (or misinformed) and unengaged polity and a fragmented community” (248). Moreover, Deuze acknowledges that while journalists have in the past invoked their professional autonomy as a means of allaying criticism and upholding their monopoly over news production and dissemination, editorial autonomy and professionalism is crucial to “re-center journalism and
3.5 The Relevance of Changing News Values and Audience Analytics to this Study This chapter aims to illustrate the cycle of news mediation where news production was traditionally mediated by human editors before distribution, however since the emergence of social networking sites and a newfound emphasis on eliciting engagement, news now undergoes mediation once more when it passes through Facebook (relevant to this study) and again when news practitioners monitor analytics to select future news stories. This focus on engagement and audience analytics, has in turn affected news values, and the news that gets constructed. Thus, contemporary news undergoes a combination of human and technical mediation processes. For this particular study, we will be observing the articles from The New York Times , Fox News , The Guardian and The Daily Mail that received the highest engagement scores in terms of likes , reactions , comments and shares according to specific themes of coverage, as facilitated through Facebook’s mediation mechanisms because “in every moment algorithms are deciding which information will appear in our infosphere, how many and which of your friends will see your posts, what kind of content will become part of your reality and what will be censored or deleted (ShareLab 2016).” The explorative sub-questions starting this investigation are: Which kinds of news articles related to Africa appear on each media organisation’s website, and are the same visible on their Facebook pages? Which countries received the highest amounts of news coverage in both online locations? Which media themes, according to the categories identified for this particular study, are most prevalent and how do they differ on websites in comparison to Facebook? How do these results compare across media organisations and to historical media reports as mentioned in the preceding literature review? And what can be learnt from the articles that received the highest engagement scores on Facebook?
4.
Methodology
In order to gain an understanding of how Africa and Africans are currently being portrayed in the American and British international news media as mediated through the social networking site, Facebook, this study looks at two ideologically opposed media outlets in both regions, namely the New York Times and Fox News in the US; and The Guardian and The Daily Mail in the UK. To critically evaluate the nature and scope of this representation on Facebook and to provide the necessary context, data was also collected from the news tab of Google. The method and research steps taken are discussed in greater detail below. 4.1 Research Object The decision to focus on these particular geographical locations is grounded in the fact that the authors in the preceding Literature Review chapter largely concentrate on the US and the UK too, and thus doing the same enables a historical juxtaposition. According to page traffic figures for January 2019, all four were among the 15 most popular news websites in the US (Top 15, 2019). These four media organisations also presented interesting cases as they were found to be the most left and right leaning mainstream news organisations in their specific countries by an annual global study conducted by the Reuters Institute ( Reuters Institute Digital News Report 44 ). Interestingly, they all command large international audiences despite their differing reputations in relation to trustworthiness and journalistic integrity. Besides being widely regarded as taking a liberal stance, The New York Times was chosen because since its inception in 1851 it has won 125 Pulitzer Prizes, more than any othernewspaper (Victor 2018) and as a result is widely respected within the media industry , having
developed a national and worldwide “reputation for thoroughness,” it is also widely regarded as the newspaper of record (Scholarly vs. Popular Sources, 2019). The New York Times currently has over 16 million ( 16,729,414) Facebook followers.
