The Continued Domination of Western Journalists in Global African News Telling: The Imperatives and Implications

Abstract

ABSTRACT Who reports Africa in the British press? This longitudinal study is aimed at addressing the issue. It applied content analysis methodology, the use of four British national newspapers and a sample duration that spanned between 1992 and 2017. It uncovered that Western journalists consistently dominated the reportage of Africa without any exception throughout the sample period. Apart from Western journalists, other journalists or sources involved in the media coverage—African local journalists, Afro-Western journalists, joint journalists, and news agencies’ African reports were insignificantly used. Also, this study further revealed that the use of news agencies’ African reports had a continuous decline from 1997 to 2017. Therefore, the domination of the British press coverage of Africa over the years by Western journalists results in the portrayal of Africa from an imbalanced single prism of Westernised perspective, thereby resulting in the poor coverage of Africa and the spread of further ignorance of the continent to the global audience, which hampers both tourism and Western business investments to Africa. This study concludes that who reports Africa in the UK press is embedded in neo-colonialism, white hegemony, and inequality.