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 scholarsthat Africa is still negatively represented in the western mainstream media more than 50 yearsafter independence even when hopeful signs and baby steps towards democratisation anddevelopment are obvious in the continent. The study employs both content and discourse analysisapproach. The Times, which used to be one of the leading western newspapers and the Britishnewspaper of record, was selected. Content and discourse analysis were used to evaluate andcategorise the news items published in the sampled year (January to December 2006), todistinguish the emerging themes, identify the sources, and to interpret the language used in thecoverage. The findings show that news stories throughout the coverage of the D.R. Congo firstfree and fair elections in 2006 were written by western journalists and correspondents from TheTimes and associated correspondents, while three other news agencies namely Agence FrancePress (AFP), Associated Press (AP) and Reuters were the main sources for The Timesnewspaper. Recurring themes such as tribal clashes, civil wars, corruption, child exploitation,poverty, refugees, witchcraft, dependency, spreading diseases and mismanagement prevail in thereporting. The findings reveal that the reporting of the Congo in The Times has avowedly beenthrough western eyes, and, as with much journalism, has not offered any real context to thestories.Key Words: Western Media Coverage, The Times Newspaper, African Stereotypes, TheCongo.
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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 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| 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".