Bringing Africa home: reflections on discursive practices of domestication in international news reporting on Africa by Belgian television

Abstract

Previous studies (Joye & Biltereyst 2007; Joye 2010) have shown that Africa largely remains a ‘dark continent’ for Belgian news media in terms of devoted attention, alongside findings that indicate a stereotypical representation. However, there are a few notable exceptions to this persistently dominant way of reporting on Africa, being the news coverage of Congo, Ruanda and Burundi. As former Belgian colonies, they receive more screen time in comparison to other African countries. Taking this as our starting point, the study addresses the issue of how news media can attribute a sense of relevance and proximity to events occurring in Africa by focusing on the journalistic practice of domestication (Clausen 2004). According to Gurevitch, Levy and Roeh (1991), domesticating foreign events makes them comprehensible, appealing and more relevant to domestic audiences. Applying Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) and following a case-based methodology, we investigate how the two main Belgian television stations (the public broadcaster VRT and commercial channel VTM) have domesticated African current affairs in 2013 by explicitly linking them to Belgium. Our empirical focus lies on domesticated news items that echo a particular kind of enforced proximity (cf. the concept of cosmopolitanism as defined by Hannerz (1996) and Tomlinson (1999)) but also hint at Silverstone’s (2007) notion of proper distance which refers to a particular politics of the representation of otherness and our mediated relationship to the (African) other. This paper explores dominant discursive modes of domestication and scrutinizes the potential of the practice to foster feelings of cosmopolitanism and identification that reframe the traditional critiques of Afro-pessimism by also exploring possible reiterations of known discourses of orientalism and global inequality in the discursive practices of news production.