’Lost Boys ’ and the promised land US newspaper coverage of Sudanese refugees
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This textual analysis of top US newspapers examines coverage of the Sudanese ‘Lost Boys ’ as they were being resettled in the USA after enduring years of civil war and exile. I uncover some of the narrative elements employed in the text that perpetuate US myths such as ‘the rugged individualist ’ and ‘the Promised Land’, even as a complex foreign news story is made palatable to local news consumers. I find that the refugees were presented as coming from a situation beyond understanding, vessels waiting to be filled by US material culture. As human-interest features, the stories provide a human face to far-away tragedy but also are unsuccessful at moving beyond surface explanations of complex international situations. This indicates that an authentic paradigm shift concerning international news coverage has not yet occurred. K E Y W O R D S j international news j ‘Lost Boys ’ j media coverage of Africa j news narratives j Sudan j textual analysis Amazing Grace, how sweet the sound that saved a wretch like me, I once was lost, but now I’m found, was blind but now I see. (US gospel song) ’I don’t want ever to be a man’, Peter said with passion. ‘I want always to be a little boy...’. (Peter and Wendy, by J. M. Barrie) Scholars have long described US media coverage of international news, espe-cially that from poor countries, as problematic (e.g. Masmoudi, 1979; Hawk, 1992; Herman and McChesney, 1997). More recently – and especially since the 2001 destruction of the World Trade Center – much concern also has been leveled at Americans ’ profound ignorance of world affairs during a time of deepening economic and political globalization. Coverage of Africa in particu-lar perhaps has been the least adequate to understanding the complex polit-ical, social and economic realities of the continent. Hawk (1992: 3–14) details how the US media construct and perpetuate images of African countries as
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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 | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| 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".