Foreign News Coverage in The Ethiopian Print Media
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Date
2007-07
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Addis Ababa University
Abstract
This study explored the issues of the New World Information and Communication Order (NWICO) which were advocated by the Non-Aligned Movement comprised of the Third World countries in Africa, Asia and Latin America. These countries complained about the inequalities and discrepancies in the existing world order particularly in the dominant international communications system. They were particularly concerned with the widening gap in the world wide distribution of means of communications, the imbalance in the global flow of information and the consequent unidirectional flow of information between the First and Third World, and the Western media distorted coverage of the Third World countries (Kleinwachter, 1993:13-14). These concerns the Third World had about the existing information and communication order had been effectively articulated at the various international forums organized by UNESCO in the late 1970s and early 1980s.
Even though the demands of the Third World countries were ultimately diverted to the question of development assistance by the Western world, various researches have been conducted since then on the issues of international news flow and the coverage of the Third World in the Western media. However, there seems to be little research conducted on the coverage of the Third World in the media of the developing world themselves. Therefore, this research was embarked upon to assess the coverage of the developed versus the developing world in the print media is Ethiopia. The researcher selected six local English language newspapers in circulation at the time of the study. These newspapers included the Capital, The Ethiopian Herald, The Daily Monitor, Fortune, The Reporter and The Sub-Saharan Informer. Six editions of each of these newspapers representing six weeks in March and April, 2006 were sampled, and all the foreign news appeared on the front and/or the inner pages of each newspaper were analyzed quantitatively. A qualitative analysis of a purposely selected news items was also made to identify the roles and representations the developed and the developing world had in the foreign news coverage of the six newspapers. In-depth interviews were also conducted with representative editors and editors-in-chief of the five newspapers except that of Fortune.
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The results of the study indicated that the developing world in general and Africa in particular had a wider coverage than the developed world, but the developed world had far more coverage than the developing world outside Africa. When the developing nations were further classified into medium and low categories of development according to the 2006 UN Development Index report, the highly developed nations had far more coverage than either of the developing nations in the two categories. However, the individual newspapers showed significant variations to the extent that the coverage of these parts of the world in some of these newspapers contradicted the generalizations drawn above. These variations appeared to have been explained partly by the objectives of the newspapers, and the influence of the individual editors and editors-in-chief who were involved in the news selection processes. The use of sources in particular was found to be an important factor in determining the newspapers’ coverage of the different parts of the world. Ownership, however, seems to have been loosely related to these variations in the extent and types of coverage given to the different parts of the world by the six newspapers analyzed in the study.
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Foreign News