The coverage of Africa in Ghanaian newspapers: The dominant Western voice in the continent’s coverage

Abstract

A growing literature has emerged that is contesting the validity of Africa’s negative Western media representation as a myth and empirically non-existent. This article examines how four national newspapers in Ghana reported the continent. About 13,228 corpus belonging to these top four national newspapers, over a period of 2 years, were quantitatively examined for sources utilised. Based on a 2-week constructed sampling technique, 180 articles reporting Africa were further analysed for the subjects and tone of the coverage, and the dominant themes of representation. The ethnographic content analysis revealed that the coverage of the continent in these newspapers is dominated by themes of war, crime, killings, crises, terrorism and omission of progress. The African story was mostly narrated through the subject of politics and with a predominantly negative tone. I argue that the continent’s negative proxy self-coverage confirms the evasive spread of Afro-pessimism considering that Western global news organisations accounted for over 80 per cent of the reportage as sources.