| Previous studies of African news coverage tend to look at very specific events or spectacles. Looking to take a more holistic view of media coverage of Africa and understanding the prominent agenda setting role the New York Times plays in international reporting, this study evaluates the New York Times' coverage of Africa at four moments in history -- 1982, 1992, 2002, and 2012 -- to assess the types of stories covered, if and how this coverage changed over time, and the language used to convey prominent themes. This study looks to understand if the stereotypes born in the age of the Enlightenment, used to justify both colonialism and slavery, and naturalized over time hold true when looking at a more holistic sample of news coverage versus the spectacles previously studied. Through the lens of postcolonial theory and armed with the toolkit of Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA), this study works to start to deconstruct the stories told about Africa in order to challenge problematic representations and begin to work through the implications of this imagining of Africa. To do this, the analysis is broken into two parts. The first is a high-level overview of the coverage included in the full sample of 2,187 articles, including general observations from each one-year analysis period. The second goes deeper, looking closely at the coverage that emerged as most prominent, showing a tale of two very different moments in history -- one, Apartheid in 1982 and 1992, and, two, the intertwined issues of Militant Islam and Terrorism in 2002 and 2012 culminating in a case study of the Benghazi coverage. This study shows that the news coverage of Africa is as nuanced as the stories being told, despite the fact that the reporting is often as challenging as the previous literature explains. It also illustrates the importance of evaluating news events in the larger context of the news landscape, with a firm understanding of the structure and institution of media. Without this context, without this grounding, it is easy to essentialize our analyses just as much as the coverage can essentialize Africa and African issues. |
