The Coverage of Africa in the Mainstream Western Media – Examining the Times Coverage of the D.R. Congo’s First Free Elections
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper seeks to investigate the on-going complaints from both African and western scholars that Africa is still negatively represented in the western mainstream media more than 50 years after independence even when hopeful signs and baby steps towards democratisation and development are obvious in the continent. The study employs both content and discourse analysis approach. The Times, which used to be one of the leading western newspapers and the British newspaper of record, was selected. Content and discourse analysis were used to evaluate and categorise the news items published in the sampled year (January to December 2006), to distinguish the emerging themes, identify the sources, and to interpret the language used in the coverage. The findings show that news stories throughout the coverage of the D.R. Congo first free and fair elections in 2006 were written by western journalists and correspondents from The Times and associated correspondents, while three other news agencies namely Agence France Press (AFP), Associated Press (AP) and Reuters were the main sources for The Times newspaper. Recurring themes such as tribal clashes, civil wars, corruption, child exploitation, poverty, refugees, witchcraft, dependency, spreading diseases and mismanagement prevail in the reporting. The findings reveal that the reporting of the Congo in The Times has avowedly been through western eyes, and, as with much journalism, has not offered any real context to the stories. Key Words: Western Media Coverage, The Times Newspaper, African Stereotypes, The Congo.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.010 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".